It was another full day in Del Rio/Acuna. After rolling out of our dorm beds, we had breakfast, devotion, and took communion. Heading across the border, we split up to finish up the projects at yesterday’s sites. My van went to finish a house for the Silva family. The metal roofing went very quick, and by the lunch break we had completed all the work for the day. Early on I could see that there was not enough work for everybody. I observed one of the Mexican men starting to demo an outside toilet (there will be a new one inside the house), and I started helping him. I discovered that he knew some English. I knew enough Spanish so that between the two of us, we could communicate. One of the other POWER guys came over to help us, and in short order, we had removed the concrete floor around the toilet & the toilet, hauling them away with a wheel barrow. David (I discovered later in the day that he was a pastor) started digging down to the pipe that drained the toilet. I asked him if they had any palas (shovels). He said someone was going to get them. Rather than wait, we used our claw hammers as shovels to expose the pipe, pulled the old pipe out, and had enough time to connect the pipe from the new house to the existing downstream pipe. I actually got to use my pipe knowledge on a POWER trip. I never thought that I would see that day. I even used my torpedo level to check the slope on the pipe.
On to of that, we had enough time to visit with a local lady and her young child who came by to see what we were doing. And, Josh Muse was able to lead her to the Lord! After lunch at the dance hall converted into a church, I jumped into a van heading back to Faith Mission, where a group of us spent the afternoon putting together packages of short Bible stories. There were over 100 of them, stapled together in small pads. The packages will be delivered to various missionaries along the border. They are very popular, according to Dave Johnson; maybe even more so than the Bibles.
We gathered for one last time in the Faith Missions cafeteria, where Tim Ehlers, the new leader there, spoke to us about his faith journey back from Appalthia. Several of our brothers, who had early flight times tomorrow, shared their highlights of the week. We are truly brothers in Christ, having impacts on each other more than we realize!
I looked up our roster for the week. There are 71 of us, from 10 states plus Mexico. For all three weeks, there will be a total of 192 men, from 19 states, Canada & Mexico. We are making a difference for the kingdom here along the Rio Grande Valley area!
We made it safely through the rain to San Antonio, arriving at the Travel Lodge at 11 pm. ‘That will be all’ for today (although Marty and his van crews still have a couple of hours of work to do, and maybe an early morning pancake run).