You probably have a favorite “road trip” story. Americans travel by car a lot, and stuff always seems to happen – often the stuff of stories.
Of course, not all those trips takes place in the USA. Remind me sometime to tell you about the all-night trip through the mountains in Latin America in a cab with no seat belts and a door that kept popping open.
But right now I want to tell you about a road trip in Mexico. A road trip that’s probably unlike any that you have ever taken.
Katie Moore, who went on the trip, jokingly summed it up with, “On the road again … I don’t ever wanna be on the road again.”
Katie and her co-workers are just beginning work among the Nahuatl people of Mexico, and this was her first visit to their village.
“For the first part of the trip we headed down to the coast on the windiest roads I have ever experienced,” she wrote.
Trucks, moving laboriously through the curves, used their blinkers to signal to the cars behind them that it was safe to pass. At least, that was the hope of the drivers of cars like the one Katie was in. They climbed 3,000 feet, then descended 9,000 feet to sea level.
After a few days at the coast, it was time to head up into the mountains where the Nahuatl people live. They climbed 5,000 feet on a relatively good road, and then reached the turnoff for the Nahuatl village. It wasn’t exactly a highway. Katie described it as a cattle trail. And it was muddy from recent rains.
“We reached impassible clay-filled spots where we slid down [the trail] we had just tried to get up,” Katie wrote. “We got out of the vehicle and played in the mud, filling the road with rocks and twigs, attempting to create something for the tires to grip to. After many futile attempts, we journeyed two hours back to the nearest town.”
They stayed in town for a few days to let the trail dry out, and then went back, “bumping and jarring our way up the mountain trail.” Their vehicle slipped and slid on the narrow route, and there were no guard rails, but Katie’s team made it safely.
And it took only seven hours to travel those final 60 miles. That’s better than 8.5 miles per hour. Just barely better, but still better.
As arduous as the trip to the village was, the missionary team’s journey is just beginning. Throughout their stay, the missionaries worked to build relationships, and to try to understand more of the culture and language of the people.
Some of that is fairly straightforward. Quinantitanes is “good morning.
And some is just baffling. One of the team members showed an elderly Nahuatl woman a photo from a previous visit, and the woman said, “Hey, I think that’s my grandson. I recognize the mule.”
“What adventures in figuring out the culture lie ahead of us!” Katie wrote.
Pray for the missionary team on the long road to planting a church among the Nahuatl people.