My Trip to Mexico

My trip was EXTREMELY boring. Well not the whole thing but the ride there and the ride back. The first day we set out the bus ride was 23 hours long and we only stopped for food and bathroom breaks along with refilling the gas tank. In that 23 hours we only got to El Paso, Texas and we stayed at a church there. The church was pretty nice but what I liked was the huge mountain about 100 yrds away from the church. Me and about 8 other people decided that we wanted to climb the moutain and so we did. It was extremely exhausting and i had to stop and catch my breath about 5 times. There were also some parts that we had to climb where we couldn't just walk up it, we had to climb and sometimes we had to climb parts that were straight up and down, which I thought was AWESOME. I love rock climbing. I think it's the most fun I ever have when I rock climb. Well finally we got to the top and it was the most amazing view you can think of and you definitely had that feeling of accomplishment. After getting down from the moutain I was so tired that I just passed out on a pew in the chapel. In the morning we left the church and went on the road again and went to the Texas-Mexico border. We just passed right through and went to a church in Juarez, Mexico where we stayed for about 4 days. During those 4 days we built a house and originally the building of the house was supposed to take 4 days but we worked really hard and really fast and it only took us 3 days which is extremely fast for having 22 people. We built the house for a Mexican family in what would be considered the ghetto of that town. All of the materials came from an organization called Casas por Cristo and they also gave us a guy named Josh that would help us and tell us exactly how to build the house. Casas por Cristo builds about 700 houses a year for the homeless people in Mexico and they really provide a good service to the people who need it in Mexico. After we got done building the house I played soccer with about 10 other people that lived in the area, mostly younger kids. I had this great sense of accomplishment after we got done with the house and I felt like I did something, like i really helped this family out. I could see the tears in their eyes afterward when we were dedicating the house to the family. I really felt good for myself and it made the whole trip worth it. We then left Mexico but we got stopped and they searched the trailer that we were pulling behind us, just to make sure we weren't smuggling any Mexicans into the country. We also all had to show them our passports, just to make sure we were legal citizens of the United States. On the way back to Iowa we stopped at a really cool and interesting place called Carlsbad Caverns. It was really cool seeing all the rock formations and getting to basically hike 80 stories underground. There were many places where it looked like the light shown down through the caverns and I thought that it was real sunlight but when I asked a man working down there he told me that there is no sunlight whatsoever but the lights that they put in down there gave it the effect of sunlight shining in. I guess it makes sense because we were 80 stories underground. When we got back to Iowa there was a bunch of people waiting for us (about 30 or 40) and they all welcomed us back home.