Acuna

This portrait is drawn from a photo taken on the airport shuttle at Pittsburgh International Airport in 1998, just before my 13th birthday. I was with a church group on our way to Acuña, Mexico, to do mission work. It was the first of two trips I made there, and both still stick with me and shape how I move through the world to this day.

As calloused as my experiences made me in a lot of ways, I've always had a heart for helping people, especially the less fortunate and the overlooked. I always felt connected to their experience, because in a lot of ways it mirrored my own.

When I went to Mexico in 1998 at 12, I didn't really know what I was getting into. For starters, I had to raise $500 just to make the trip. That covered airfare, a weeklong stay, and all our meals. It didn't cover spending money. In 1998, $500 for a low-income family in Section 8 housing might as well have been a million dollars.

The church made donation slips we could use to ask people to support the trip. I took those papers EVERYWHERE. My mom passed them out at her job. I took them to school. At church, a lot of us kids were competing for donations from the same adults. In a way it was fun, but it also seemed impossible. I called family on my father's side and asked them to donate. Every little bit counted. We'd scrape up $5 here, $10 there. Any day my mom came home with a commitment from a coworker felt like a victory. It came down to the wire, but I raised all $500.

I'd never been out of the country, and I wasn't sure what a mission trip involved. I just figured it was a way to get out of my neighborhood and the chaos around me. It was so much more than that.

It definitely wasn't a luxury experience. We stayed at a church in Del Rio, Texas, a small town right on the US/Mexico border. I don't remember the church's name, but it was kind of a campus. Besides the chapel, there was a cafeteria where they cooked all our meals and several dorms with bunk beds.

I remember those bunk beds for all the wrong reasons. I slept on a top bunk, and one night I rolled too far and fell off, face first. My homie Jonathan still teases me that the fall is why my nose is so wide.

I also remember the landscape and the insects that deep in Texas. That trip was the first time I saw a bat in real life, and flying cockroaches. I was taking pictures of them and didn't realize that was illegal. I must not have seen the border patrol agent trying to get my attention. By the time I did, one of my friends pointed out that he had his rifle pointed at me. I only had to learn that lesson once.

The trip itself was a lot of work. We spent our days in a warehouse on the church campus, a huge facility with no air conditioning in the height of a Texas summer. We bagged up clothes, toys, canned food, cornmeal, and boxes of produce for the Mexican families who crossed the border for support.

One of my most lasting memories involves mangos. There was a large fridge for the produce that needed cooling, and most of it was filled with boxes of mangos. Before the families arrived, our job was to sort through the boxes, pull out the rotten mangos that had turned black from the heat, and repack the ones that hadn't spoiled yet. It was more than 20 years before I ate a mango again.

On the days we weren't in the warehouse, we went into Acuña to talk with people all over town. The place that stuck with me most was the "Cardboard Village," an informal, impoverished settlement on the west side of the city. It was row after row of small cardboard houses with dirt floors, built from discarded boxes and wooden shipping pallets from a nearby factory. Sewage often ran through the streets. So much that I ruined every pair of socks I brought, just walking through that area.

But it wasn't the living conditions that hit me most. It was the people. So many of the people I met there had absolutely nothing, but they were some of the happiest people I've ever met. They were so welcoming and excited to share their space with us. I went on that trip thinking I knew poverty. It completely changed my understanding of what "poor" actually is.