CityView Magazine

10 | September/October 2017 M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S F FOR TWO DECADES, I listened with only one ear when a church member would talk about mission trips to Reynosa, Mexico. A crowd would go down there by way of McAllen, Texas, and be gone for a week. Honestly, I did not miss them. To my perception, they were gone for a Sunday or two in October. I was sure that their endeavor was noble, but it did not impact my life. is year First Presbyterian Church added a second excursion during summer vacation. Teenagers were encouraged to go. I happen to own three of those, and the two younger ones signed up immediately. Credit me—if you will—for possessing the protective instinct of not wanting my most precious cargo to travel without me to the barrios of Mexico. Truth be told, I was ashamed they went at their first opportunity when I had so oen said no. So, I said yes too. When I did, I discovered that my wife had already signed up with the boys. I stood on the unfinished roof of a freshly erected cinder block rectangle, looking down on about 20 Mexicans and 20 Presbyterians. A gas-powered cement mixer drowned out most verbal communication. Of what was audible, the questions came in English. e responses were in Spanish. For the most part, neither side understood the other. Answers were generally conveyed by a crude form of sign language. At the edge of the roof stood a broad, smiling, 30-something Mexican woman named Santa. I discovered quickly that she was tougher and stronger than I was. Below her was a scaffolding with two levels of platforms. e strategy was that six or eight people shoveled rock, sand, water, and cement mix into five- gallon buckets. Ten to 12 people hauled and dumped them into the deafening mixer. A foreman gauged the consistency, eventually dumping it onto a framed reservoir on the edge of the street. en four to six people rotated and scooped three gallons of wet concrete into buckets and passed them up to first level of the scaffold. Level one passed to level two and level two passed to Santa. She dumped every bucket, most of them into wheelbarrows. When a wheelbarrow was full, say 80 to 100 pounds or so, one of us wheelbarrow boys dumped it at the farthest point. Once dumped, we circled back to Santa for a repeat. If she received full buckets before the return of the wheelbarrows, she dumped it in the empty corners around her feet to keep things flowing. Santa passed the buckets down the other side of the scaffold and the process started all over again. José's Boots BY BILL MCFADYEN

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