One of the things I like most about my life these days is being obedient to God and listening to His callings for me to serve others. In November of this year, my wife and I joined 14 other members of 4 churches from the Northern Virginia area to support a missionary with a vision to serve children at risk in Santiago, Chile. Jim Mazurek and his wife have been in Chile since 2000 and working to build a children’s center that would serve local children without stable families. In 2006 they purchased a large plot of land between two city streets and began designing an ambitious, 3 phased project to build a church, an education center and a parking facility under an athletic field.
On this trip, there were 16 of us, which is an ideal sized team to accomplish the planned tasks in the 4 days of construction programmed for our visit. We were the 17th team to contribute to this construction and our 3 project areas were:
- Plastering the main office areas
- Installing a drop ceiling in the main auditorium
- Finishing the drywall and painting the new quarters for the caretaker’s family to watch over the compound during the remaining years of construction.
We stayed at a local hotel in downtown Santiago and commuted by church bus to the mission site in the suburb of Miami. We would start our days at 0615 in a devotional session where we would pray and give thanks to God and ask for His blessings for our work each day. Then a great breakfast at the hotel and departure to the construction site, an hour away.
Because I had drywall experience with my brother, John in the 1970s, I was asked to lead the drywall finishing team in the caretaker’s apartment. It was a very modest, 5 room space with a kitchen/living area, a bedroom and laundry area and two small bathrooms. The living space had already been framed and the sheetrock had been installed by the team prior to us. Our purpose was to tape the seams between the drywall panels, apply joint compound, commonly called mud, smooth out and sand until the joints between the boards were no longer visible, then apply the primer coats of paint.
My drywall sub-team consisted of my wife, who had experience with me finishing our basement, a couple of members of my church with very limited experience, and a delightful woman with no drywall experience at all, but a veteran of many mission trips in the past, including a prior mission to Santiago. Our first day together consisted of my presenting “Drywall 101” training and demonstrations on the techniques of taping, mudding and painting new drywall.
The team started the mudding and taping enthusiastically, but it soon became apparent that too much mud was being applied. And during the first afternoon, it became clear to everyone that the more mud we put on the walls, the longer the sanding process to remove the excess. We repeated the mudding/sanding process with three coats of increasingly thin coats of mud until all the joints were smooth and ready for painting. As it turned out, we finished at the end of day 4 after a final afternoon of nonstop rolling and final clean-up. The following pictures tell the story of our 4 days of work in Santiago, with a bonus day of relaxation and sightseeing in Valparaiso on Chile’s Pacific Coast prior to our flight home. Valparaiso is the second largest city in Chile and one of the South Pacific’s most important seaports. It was a great day to recover from the prior 4 days of hard work.
On our last day, we all agreed that we would be back at the next opportunity to serve.
Spiritual vs physical construction.
Physical construction aside, a greater value from mission trips is derived from spiritual growth. It’s often said among missionaries that the teams coming from the US expect to bless the local teams with resources and construction labor. But in reality, the US teams leave with greater spiritual growth and are blessed by the spiritual construction that occurs on their own hearts. So it was with our visit to Santiago.
The Christian fellowship between us was powerful during the entire week. Strangers from 4 churches came together, worked together, grew together and were blessed together as we contributed to the children’s ministry in Maipu, a suburb of Santiago. Especially on Thursday as we completed our work, the presence of God was strong during our worship, prayers and the taking of Communion.
Another feature of this missions’ trip was the experience of attending small group Bible study on our second evening there. It was a special experience to spend the evening with our host Christians from Santiago, listen to their approach to Bible study and pray with them for the needs of their congregation and for the Children’s Ministry Center that we were building together. It was a special time for all of us and the spiritual bonds that were created that night will stay with us.
Finally, here are two links that you can access if you have more interest in this topic.
1). A 4-minute video of pictures and clips of the 4 days of work and the final day of sightseeing
2). 15 minute “Facebook Live” video of the who, what, where and why of The Santiago Children’s Mission, and the need to support them.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10217899416381212&id=1357903305