The stars at night are big and bright...
...deep in the heart of the Sierra Madre, where I spent a few days this past week visiting the remotest of YLM's mission churches, Iglesia Luterana Nueva Esperanza in Sicachique, Chihuahua, Mexico. Read at your own risk--I'll warn you now this is going to be a long one, but I'm going to make it more of a photojournal than anything.
Who: me, Chris, short-term volunteer Jeff Boone, and our chauffer, Jim Kunkle a YLM supporter from Albuquerque. Pastor Tovar and a teenaged boy who was born in the area but has lived in the city practically all his life joined us in Chihuahua City.
What: Sicachique (or Sikachique or Sikachike)!
Where: Not even Google knows! Around 10 hrs. total drive time from El Paso, the last 36 km. of which is on an extremely bumpy, dusty, unpaved road; elevation ~ 8,000 ft.
When: departed ELP last Sunday afternoon and returned Thursday afternoon, with an overnight in Chihuahua City on each end for a total of 2 nights in the mountains
Why: to familiarize ourselves with the area, meet the townspeople, bring supplies, and assess the needs
Smoke from one of several forest fires we spotted along the way.
This is what Jim's truck looked like about halfway through the 36 km. unpaved road on the way in; I thought it looked like snow.
Scenery en route. Note that we have left desert scrub vegetation behind and are surrounded by nothing but pine forests. It's a sudden change, as in I was reading and within about 2 pages the landscape shifted entirely.
Animals on the road--completely commonplace.
We have arrived in the heart of "town." The following photos depict most of the structures that are there. This first one is the church, Nueva Esperanza. It's been whitewashed when compared with the last photos I had seen of it. There are services once every 2 weeks, except for 3 months in the summer. The reasoning for such a schedule is that the pastor, Rev. Kari Haagen, runs a boardinghouse near San Juanito (larger town a couple of hours away) and can only make it to Sicachique every so often. He also helps run a similar program in Sicachique--more details to come--by coordinating and compensating the staff and stocking the kitchen. He and his wife are Norwegian but have been serving in the area for close to 30 years now; they spend the summers in their home at Seattle.
The building was all locked up, but I snapped the following shots through broken/missing windows...
I don't know if you can tell or not, but there were posters in this room illustrating primary colors and lunar eclipses.
The boardinghouse/mess hall.
Planned addition to the building, which should get underway very shortly. All the materials are there, but the holdup is water for mixing concrete...aka there is none (more on that later on).
The comisaria--kind of like a community clinic--open a few days each month.
Me atop a fish hatchery that is currently not being used. There is a rabbit hutch in town with a similar fate. Both were built by servant events, but no long-term plan was in place to provide funding for food, so eventually all the fish and rabbits were eaten by the people.
This pipe brings water down from the closest mountaintop (the same one where you have to go for cell phone service), when there is any to flow down. It is then stored in reserve tanks for people to use as they have need. Two of the private residences in town have some semblance of plumbing, at least in the kitchen, but other than that the community is entirely dependent on rainwater. The story on electricity is that there is none apart from solar panels. Several of the buildings were wired with ceiling fixtures, which I'm told would stay lit for about 3 hours after dark.
One of only a handful of private residences in town. This one belongs to Antonio, a lively widower who serves as the sheriff.
A mama cat and her 5 kittens lived in his yard, along with a Chihuahua that always thought I wanted to rub its belly when I was trying to play with the cats.
Antonio's brother Gustavo's house, which he shares with his wife Rosario and their daughter Josefina.
Gustavo, Rosario, and Josefina. We quickly learned that their house was the best place to eat in town. I have decided that my favorite Mexican food is homemade flour tortillas, especially when they're still warm. Josefina kept us supplied with as many as we could eat, made on a wood-burning stove no less. The corn variety, made from homegrown corn ground by hand, were also plentiful. Speaking of tortillas, Josefina and Rosario made us breakfast on the morning we left. As we were finishing, Rosario began a conversation with us that went something like this:
R: Should I make you some burritos to take with you on the road?
Us: No, thanks, we've got lots of stops to make that include lunch plans.
R: OK, I'll make you some burritos!
Typical Mexican grandmother figure! One other comment I want to make about this photo is that Josefina is about 41 yrs. old. I'm not trying to be rude--rather to illustrate a point--but she looks like she could be far older. Pastor Tovar has a daughter-in-law around the same age, and in comparing the two, it's obvious that life is just plain hard in Sicachique.
Farming (corn and/or cattle) is one of two main forms of livelihood in Sicachique, with the other being logging. Cattle and horses seemingly roamed freely through the streets. In that sense it kind of reminded me of Gimmelwald, Switzerland, a tiny town I visited in the Swiss Alps with more cows than people!
Good morning Sicachique!
I mentioned farming--the people use corn husks to feed their cattle, storing them high in the pines so that they can ration them for daily consumption.
The morning of our only full day in town we went on a short walk to a nearby "ranchito" (cluster of 1-2 homes usually owned by relatives, "homestead" is the best translation I can think of) in Sicachique. Here is a view of the main part of town from a hill we climbed.
Jim, Jeff, Juana, and I. Juana illustrates typical Tarahumaran women's dress. School uniforms for girls look like this too; I happen to think they are absolutely beautiful.
Gustavo's cornfields...this is what most everyone's looked like. It's definitely not going to be knee-high by the 4th of July. Please join me in praying for rain, for the sake of the water supply mentioned above as well as for the sake of the corn harvest.
I enjoyed the solitude and disconnectedness of Sicachique, but to be completely honest I was a little bored after being there less than 24 hours. Our only real tasks for the day were to carry this metal beam from one roundhouse to another and to fix a door, which took a combined total of maybe 30 minutes.
I amused myself during part of the afternoon by sitting on the balcony reading and watching 2 horses. This one figured out how to reach a pile of cornhusks by sticking its head through the fence, and stayed there like that for seemingly hours on end.
This one was a little slower on the uptake. I'm not much of a horse person, but I felt bad for it so I snatched it some husks. Later on, it came up alongside the lighter colored one to share the pile, but after a short time the lighter colored one snorted and stormed off down the path.
The day went a little faster after we came into contact with some kids. Three siblings and I started a game of volleyball in Antonio's yard with a donated playground ball we had brought with us, which quickly morphed into a full-on basketball game with 8ish players per team. I'm not much of a basketball player, but there were a couple of girls who ran circles around Jeff and Chris. I was struck by their love of basketball since the Mexico I know is all about futbol (soccer). After the game we gave out candy! Normally we encourage more nutritious handouts, but Pastor Tovar had told us that the lack of glucose in these children's diets could cause liver problems. I'm not sure if that's made up or not...
Happy kid pictures are easy to come by in Juarez, but these children were much warier of cameras. Even when Jeff offered them his camera to take pictures instead of posing for them, they weren't interested. They did love looking at themselves afterward though, and were amazed at how fast the images appeared.
Not sure how, but this kid scored big time during the candy distribution. He was emptying his pockets as I snapped this shot, and look where his hand is AGAIN!
The distributions continued back in Antonio's yard, with hygiene kits, medications, bags of fabric scraps, and flip-flops.
Antonio and I. Gotta love his gigantic hat; he walked into the room the first time he met all of us wearing it!
Who: me, Chris, short-term volunteer Jeff Boone, and our chauffer, Jim Kunkle a YLM supporter from Albuquerque. Pastor Tovar and a teenaged boy who was born in the area but has lived in the city practically all his life joined us in Chihuahua City.
What: Sicachique (or Sikachique or Sikachike)!
Where: Not even Google knows! Around 10 hrs. total drive time from El Paso, the last 36 km. of which is on an extremely bumpy, dusty, unpaved road; elevation ~ 8,000 ft.
When: departed ELP last Sunday afternoon and returned Thursday afternoon, with an overnight in Chihuahua City on each end for a total of 2 nights in the mountains
Why: to familiarize ourselves with the area, meet the townspeople, bring supplies, and assess the needs
Smoke from one of several forest fires we spotted along the way.
This is what Jim's truck looked like about halfway through the 36 km. unpaved road on the way in; I thought it looked like snow.
Scenery en route. Note that we have left desert scrub vegetation behind and are surrounded by nothing but pine forests. It's a sudden change, as in I was reading and within about 2 pages the landscape shifted entirely.
Animals on the road--completely commonplace.
We have arrived in the heart of "town." The following photos depict most of the structures that are there. This first one is the church, Nueva Esperanza. It's been whitewashed when compared with the last photos I had seen of it. There are services once every 2 weeks, except for 3 months in the summer. The reasoning for such a schedule is that the pastor, Rev. Kari Haagen, runs a boardinghouse near San Juanito (larger town a couple of hours away) and can only make it to Sicachique every so often. He also helps run a similar program in Sicachique--more details to come--by coordinating and compensating the staff and stocking the kitchen. He and his wife are Norwegian but have been serving in the area for close to 30 years now; they spend the summers in their home at Seattle.
A disused clinic where we slept. The 2nd floor was one large room outfitted with 2 beds, so Chris slept on one of them, while Jeff and I took the balcony--he on the other mattress, I in a sleeping bag on top of a stack of blankets. It wasn't chilly until the wee hours of the morning, and I LOVED falling asleep looking at the stars. One night Jim (a retired astronomy professor) gave us a brief stargazing lesson. I even saw a shooting star!
The school in Sicachique, notable because it is bilingual: Tarahumara (language of the local Indian tribe) and Spanish. It boasts grades K-6th (and thus free, as all education in Mexico is through 6th grade) and is run by a staff of 3. Total attendance is 40-50, and only about 20 of the students commute (on foot) daily. The rest are housed in a boarding house during the week and go home to their families on weekends. The furthest commute for any given child is about 2 hours. School was still in session when we were there, but there were no classes because of teacher meetings. The kids returned to their studies on Thursday. Graduation festivities, which were touted to be quite the community event, will take place July 6-8.
The school in Sicachique, notable because it is bilingual: Tarahumara (language of the local Indian tribe) and Spanish. It boasts grades K-6th (and thus free, as all education in Mexico is through 6th grade) and is run by a staff of 3. Total attendance is 40-50, and only about 20 of the students commute (on foot) daily. The rest are housed in a boarding house during the week and go home to their families on weekends. The furthest commute for any given child is about 2 hours. School was still in session when we were there, but there were no classes because of teacher meetings. The kids returned to their studies on Thursday. Graduation festivities, which were touted to be quite the community event, will take place July 6-8.
The building was all locked up, but I snapped the following shots through broken/missing windows...
I don't know if you can tell or not, but there were posters in this room illustrating primary colors and lunar eclipses.
The boardinghouse/mess hall.
Planned addition to the building, which should get underway very shortly. All the materials are there, but the holdup is water for mixing concrete...aka there is none (more on that later on).
The comisaria--kind of like a community clinic--open a few days each month.
Me atop a fish hatchery that is currently not being used. There is a rabbit hutch in town with a similar fate. Both were built by servant events, but no long-term plan was in place to provide funding for food, so eventually all the fish and rabbits were eaten by the people.
This pipe brings water down from the closest mountaintop (the same one where you have to go for cell phone service), when there is any to flow down. It is then stored in reserve tanks for people to use as they have need. Two of the private residences in town have some semblance of plumbing, at least in the kitchen, but other than that the community is entirely dependent on rainwater. The story on electricity is that there is none apart from solar panels. Several of the buildings were wired with ceiling fixtures, which I'm told would stay lit for about 3 hours after dark.
One of only a handful of private residences in town. This one belongs to Antonio, a lively widower who serves as the sheriff.
A mama cat and her 5 kittens lived in his yard, along with a Chihuahua that always thought I wanted to rub its belly when I was trying to play with the cats.
Antonio's brother Gustavo's house, which he shares with his wife Rosario and their daughter Josefina.
Gustavo, Rosario, and Josefina. We quickly learned that their house was the best place to eat in town. I have decided that my favorite Mexican food is homemade flour tortillas, especially when they're still warm. Josefina kept us supplied with as many as we could eat, made on a wood-burning stove no less. The corn variety, made from homegrown corn ground by hand, were also plentiful. Speaking of tortillas, Josefina and Rosario made us breakfast on the morning we left. As we were finishing, Rosario began a conversation with us that went something like this:R: Should I make you some burritos to take with you on the road?
Us: No, thanks, we've got lots of stops to make that include lunch plans.
R: OK, I'll make you some burritos!
Typical Mexican grandmother figure! One other comment I want to make about this photo is that Josefina is about 41 yrs. old. I'm not trying to be rude--rather to illustrate a point--but she looks like she could be far older. Pastor Tovar has a daughter-in-law around the same age, and in comparing the two, it's obvious that life is just plain hard in Sicachique.
Farming (corn and/or cattle) is one of two main forms of livelihood in Sicachique, with the other being logging. Cattle and horses seemingly roamed freely through the streets. In that sense it kind of reminded me of Gimmelwald, Switzerland, a tiny town I visited in the Swiss Alps with more cows than people!
Good morning Sicachique!
I mentioned farming--the people use corn husks to feed their cattle, storing them high in the pines so that they can ration them for daily consumption.
The morning of our only full day in town we went on a short walk to a nearby "ranchito" (cluster of 1-2 homes usually owned by relatives, "homestead" is the best translation I can think of) in Sicachique. Here is a view of the main part of town from a hill we climbed.
Jim, Jeff, Juana, and I. Juana illustrates typical Tarahumaran women's dress. School uniforms for girls look like this too; I happen to think they are absolutely beautiful.
Gustavo's cornfields...this is what most everyone's looked like. It's definitely not going to be knee-high by the 4th of July. Please join me in praying for rain, for the sake of the water supply mentioned above as well as for the sake of the corn harvest.
I enjoyed the solitude and disconnectedness of Sicachique, but to be completely honest I was a little bored after being there less than 24 hours. Our only real tasks for the day were to carry this metal beam from one roundhouse to another and to fix a door, which took a combined total of maybe 30 minutes.
I amused myself during part of the afternoon by sitting on the balcony reading and watching 2 horses. This one figured out how to reach a pile of cornhusks by sticking its head through the fence, and stayed there like that for seemingly hours on end.
This one was a little slower on the uptake. I'm not much of a horse person, but I felt bad for it so I snatched it some husks. Later on, it came up alongside the lighter colored one to share the pile, but after a short time the lighter colored one snorted and stormed off down the path.
The day went a little faster after we came into contact with some kids. Three siblings and I started a game of volleyball in Antonio's yard with a donated playground ball we had brought with us, which quickly morphed into a full-on basketball game with 8ish players per team. I'm not much of a basketball player, but there were a couple of girls who ran circles around Jeff and Chris. I was struck by their love of basketball since the Mexico I know is all about futbol (soccer). After the game we gave out candy! Normally we encourage more nutritious handouts, but Pastor Tovar had told us that the lack of glucose in these children's diets could cause liver problems. I'm not sure if that's made up or not...
Happy kid pictures are easy to come by in Juarez, but these children were much warier of cameras. Even when Jeff offered them his camera to take pictures instead of posing for them, they weren't interested. They did love looking at themselves afterward though, and were amazed at how fast the images appeared.
Not sure how, but this kid scored big time during the candy distribution. He was emptying his pockets as I snapped this shot, and look where his hand is AGAIN!
The distributions continued back in Antonio's yard, with hygiene kits, medications, bags of fabric scraps, and flip-flops.
Antonio and I. Gotta love his gigantic hat; he walked into the room the first time he met all of us wearing it!Our excursion accomplished precisely what it set out to accomplish. I feel like I know the people of Sicachique and understand a little bit of their situation, although my city-girl self could never empathize with them completely. Most of them were born in Sicachique or a similar village, have never left, and probably never will. Everything about their lives is there, in what I would normally call Godforsaken nowhere, but God has definitely not forsaken them. Their hospitality was a reflection of their love for the Lord, and they verbally communicated to us their trust in Him and His ability to send rain from His heavenly storehouses. I won't forget them for a long time, especially as together Chris and I will try anew to drum up financial and material support.
Here are some of the immediate needs we recognized:
1. playground equipment (~$200 if purchased from the Mennonites who have settled along the route up to Sicachique)
2. basketballs
3. food (especially canned meats--sardines, tuna, chicken)
4. medications (especially anti-diarrheals, Acetaminophen, and pre-natal vitamins)
Here are some of the immediate needs we recognized:
1. playground equipment (~$200 if purchased from the Mennonites who have settled along the route up to Sicachique)
2. basketballs
3. food (especially canned meats--sardines, tuna, chicken)
4. medications (especially anti-diarrheals, Acetaminophen, and pre-natal vitamins)
You made it to the bottom! I told you it'd be long, but hopefully you found it compelling and are perhaps even motivated to prayerfully consider how you can help these beautiful people. Have a safe and blessed Independence Day, and stay tuned for some photos of a 1 1/2 hr. detour we took on the way back to Chihuahua City!
Until next time, blessings!
Until next time, blessings!
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