Superman

As I travel now, I think of all the homes we've stayed in over an entire hemisphere. It's been an incredible experience of hospitality. When Robert and I went to Mexico for the first time, we explored many Indian towns and villages. Missionaries explained that Indian communities are self-governing, so if you live there, you abide by their rules. Some of them protect their cultural identity by keeping outsiders from moving in, so you have to get permission from the town president to live among them. Some prohibit the preaching of what they consider foreign religions. So we knew that moving into a Mixtec village was not going to be a straight forward affair. To meet Mixtecs, we spent months visiting the migrant labor camps where they worked in Sinaloa (in northern Mexico), and there we developed friendships among one particular group.   Our friends were new believers, barely a year old in following Jesus. They invited us to come live with them in southern Mexico, so after the migrant season was over, we followed them south to their home village.

We took public transport, a one ton stake truck (this is Robert’s definition—for the longest time I was thinking of “steak truck,” and I still haven’t seen any stakes anywhere) and five hours later stepped down from the truck onto the road next to a village where our Mixtec friends lived. Fortunately for us, one of the believing families lived right on the road, and as soon as they saw us (hard to miss, these white folk, possibly the first gringos to visit the village), they hurried down the mountainside to welcome us. Of course there was no way to tell them we were coming, and I doubt they took our assurances of a visit seriously in Sinaloa. So there we were, a couple of gringos, carrying backpacks, needing a place to stay. If this had been the village up the road, we would have spent the night in the square, without food or lodging. And the village was 7000 feet up in the air, so cold. I was wearing a skirt and open shoes, so I remember that. There were nothing but people’s own adobe homes and wooden kitchens in the village, so nowhere for strangers to eat or sleep. The truck driver who had brought us would spend the night on the side of the road in his cab and head out at 4 am, eating breakfast in some other town with more amenities.

Lydia (not her real name) was our hostess. She opened up the door of her home and set us up there. We lived with the whole family, mom, three kids and two grandchildren, in one room, and we cooked on an open fire on an adobe platform in the corner and ate around the fire. Our furniture consisted of bamboo stick beds (ours was behind the front door) and a few child-sized chairs.  There was no bathroom until Robert dug a hole in the ground, covered it with a wobbly board, and built up cardboard walls around that. We were newly married, so this arrangement was…interesting…but for Lydia, it was a natural act of hospitality. As fellow believers, we were her family. Lydia’s job each day was to make the family tortillas, weave cloth on a backloom, and bring in firewood. We did what we could to help out, but we weren’t much use.

Robert’s closest friend in this village was Alberto, (not his real name) father of seven, farmer, seller of dried fish, and shoes, and clothes, and whatever else he could think of. Eventually Robert taught him carpentry, and he sold doors, and windows, and beds, and tables, and chairs, but he never had much. Yet when we no longer lived in the village, and Robert returned for a visit, there was never any question that Robert would stay with Alberto. At night everyone would share the one family room, and the two men would talk in the dark, and Alberto would ask endless questions: “Brother, is it true people have walked on the moon? Is it really made of cheese? Does Superman exist? Star trek? Do we come from monkeys? Is there a hole in a place called Russia that reaches all the way to hell, so that if you lower a microphone, you can hear the screams?” Alberto had watched TV, and seen strange things, and who do you trust to ask about what is real and what is not? Alberto's endless curiosity was inspiring.

Alberto’s brother, Ronaldo, was one of the two martyrs of the Mixtec church. He was shot while shepherding out in the fields one day. Shot for his faith in Jesus. He probably couldn’t read. I don’t know. I know that he wouldn’t have gotten right any fine points of theology. He knew one thing: Jesus loved him as a Mixtec, had forgiven him his past life and given him a new one, and would welcome him home one day as part of God’s family. And that is about all Ronaldo would have known when he died. Alberto and the rest of the Mixtec believers never knew if one of them would be the next martyr. They stayed indoors after dark and warned us to do the same. But Alberto never wavered. He taught himself to read the Bible, as best he could in a language he didn’t own, and he led the church. We learned a lot about faith from him. And we were honored to be his family and share his home. He fulfilled that promise of Jesus that when you leave home and family behind, he gives you new homes, new families.