published: "short-term missions: evangelizing americans"

I haven't shared much about my trip to Mexico over Spring Break because I knew this article would come out eventually. I wrote a piece for Quaker Life that talks about my experience, and especially my son's experience and what it meant to me. Here's the first part of the article, and after that you have to go visit the Quaker Life site:

I went on a short-term mission trip to Mexico with my six-year-old son and about 90 other Friends from Oregon over Spring Break. I’m not always a fan of short-term mission trips, because sometimes it seems to be a lot of expense just so Americans going on the trip can have a chance to travel somewhere and feel good about themselves. However, I feel pretty good about this one. Several meetings in our area have collaborated for over 30 years to form a team fittingly called, Equipo (which means “team” in Spanish) that travels to San Luis, Mexico, to build houses every other year.

Within the last 10-12 years, Equipo created the motto, “Short-term missions with a long-term impact,” and we developed a sister-church relationship with Nueva Esperanza, a Baptist church in San Luis. Each year we pitch our tents on their “compound,” taking up most of the space they generally use for a soccer field. We worship together on...

Read more

I was the main photographer for the trip, so here's a slideshow of a bunch of pictures from the trip, most of them mine.