VOLUNTEERS COMPLETE CHURCH IN ZARAGOZA,
MEXICO
Eighteen months ago it was just a desolate, garbage-strewn
triangle of land in Zaragoza, Mexico, a community on the eastern
edge of Cuidad Juarez. On Friday, October 16, members of the Adult
Servant Team from St. Matthew Lutheran Church, Barrington, attached
a cross to the peak of a 30 by 60-foot building which will be the
first church home for Santisima Trinidad congregation, Holy Trinity
Lutheran Church.
On the previous Sunday the servant team had joined
with the members of Santisima Trinidad to celebrate the installation
of the congregation's first pastor, the Rev. Jose Hernandez. Pastor
Hernandez will be serving here as well as a second congregation
in Zaragoza, San Marcos. The San Marcos congregation presently meets
in a carport-like structure in another and poorer section of Zaragoza.
This was the sixth servant team which St. Matthew
has sent to Mexico in the past 38 months. In August, 1997, an Adult/Youth
Servant Team had helped to complete the cyclone fence which surrounds
the church property and had dug the trenches for underground utilities.
A year ago, an adult team from St. Matthew started the cinder block
walls for this church. Other servant teams from Indiana and Louisiana
completed the walls and constructed the building's roof. Last August,
a adult/youth team from St. Matthew used the building shell as a
site for a Vacation Bible School program to reach the children of
the neighborhood around Santisima Trinitdad.
This year's adult team set the windows and doors,
closed in the gables, and framed and sided the open end of the building.
The church building is now fully-enclosed and has a beautiful, pleated,
royal blue drape behind its altar. Electrical wiring, plumbing,
and internal partitions remain to be done by other servant teams.
The composition of this year's twenty-one person
Adult Servant team was unique. In addition to members from St. Matthew,
it also included three people from St. Peter Lutheran Church, Arlington
Heights, and three from St. Paul Lutheran Church, Mt. Prospect.
Also unique was the fact that the team worked on four different
projects.
In addition to the construction work at Santisima
Trinidad, six members of the team re-shingled the roof of a 100-year-old,
150-foot-long barracks building at the compound of Ysleta Lutheran
Mission in El Paso, Texas. This building has housed a day care center
and mission offices. The compound serves as the base of operations
for work in the Juarez area. Team members are beginning to believe
that "Barrington" in Spanish means "come fix our
roof." This is the third roofing project the St. Matthew teams
have tackled in the last four years.
With the help of several local ladies, the team
completed forty-two quilts. The importance of the quilts was emphasized
to the team as they learned that last winter twenty-seven children
in Anapra, a shantytown on the western edge of Juarez, had frozen
to death. Those shacks provide very little protection against the
winter's cold.
Three team members, a doctor, nurse, and their
translator, staffed the medical clinic at Anapra. The clinic is
part of the Lutheran mission in that community. They saw approximately
160 patients. Cases ranged from earaches and scarlet fever to seizures
and a dehydrated baby. Most of the supplies used in the clinic are
donated by American companies and churches. When Wilkinson Pharmacy
of Barrington closed in August, nearly $7,000 of their inventory
was shipped to El Paso by St. Matthew congregation for use at the
Anapra clinic.
On Friday, October 16, the entire servant team
gathered at Santisima Trinidad to place the six-foot cross at the
peak of the church's roof. Together the team joined in singing the
hymn, "Lift High thee Cross," the verses in English and
the chorus in Spanish. Pastor Hernandez and the Rev. Gerald Schalk,
co-leader of the servant team, led the group in prayer and pronounced
God's blessing on the work which hand been completed.
That evening, Linda Lloyd, a member of the
team, lovingly chided the men on the team as she reminded them that
"these big, tough guys" stood there at Santisima Trinidad
with tears running down their cheeks as that cross was raised heavenward.
What do you expect? How often in life to you get to help build a
church with your own hands?
