Tim Peterson's Blog

Last time I posted from the letter I sent out to request support for the Mexico trip. Things have been moving along:

• We have our final team members: Harry, Oswaldo, Jessica, Kim, and I.
• We’ve purchased our plane tickets, from Buffalo through Chicago to Morelia. The flight back from Mexico is 4 hours in the middle of the night — hopefully we can sleep through it.
• One of Kim’s relatives offered to let us park for free in Buffalo rather than paying $8 per day at the airport.
• Kim got her new passport, and Jessica and I rediscovered our lost passports. Now we can actually enter the country.
• Yesterday we got our Hepatitis A shots from a doctor who also serves IV’s Guyana missions trip. As it turns out, he knows the Caldwells from long ago and has been to Mexico a number of times.
• So far we have about 20% of the money we’ll need. (You can help!)

Interesting fact: We’re flying through four distinct time zone names. We’re leaving on Eastern Standard Time, and staying in Chicago and Mexico under Central Standard. Then in the US daylight savings time kicks in right around the time we’re taking off from Mexico, though they change at a different date within Mexico, so the time won’t change on the ground. While we’re over the Gulf of Mexico, it’s anybody’s guess what time it really is. When we land in Chicago it’ll be Central Daylight Time, and then we hop one more hour to Eastern Daylight. So, we’re gaining one hour on the way to Mexico, and losing two hours on the way home.

We’re leaving in four weeks!

As you may know, I’ve been involved in InterVarsity at RIT for quite a while. Every spring break IV sends out groups of students to do various missions service projects, to places such as New Orleans, New York, and Guyana (South America). For the past four years I’ve gone on the Habitat for Humanity trips, which take a dozen or so students to the Buffalo area to help with construction on homes for low-income families. I always look forward to it, and we have fun doing drywall, painting, flooring, cabinetry, and so on. This year, however, I’m doing something different.

Being a computer geek, you’ll often find me hanging around my favorite spots on the internet, including a Christian chat room I frequent. Through that connection I’ve been in contact with a missionary family in central Mexico, where they build kids camps and train counselors to run them. They have had several teams visit from the US to help them with construction of the camp, a task which includes work on their concrete dome buildings. You can see more information about the Caldwells at their web site: www.campsinternational.org

Through InterVarsity, I am leading a group of six RIT students to visit Mexico over spring break to help out. While many groups that visit them do construction work, we’re going to use our brains rather than our brawn, to take advantage of the technical nature of many of RIT’s specialties. On the team we have people whose skills span the entire range from web design to computer programming to computer hardware. We will be improving their web site both technically and design-wise, creating informational materials, preparing a counselor training manual, and designing solar power and internet installations.

Our plan is to fly out from Buffalo on Saturday, February 28 to Morelia, Mexico, and then drive over to where they live. They have an apartment we’ll be staying in, and we’ll do our computer work there as well. We’ll also visit the actual camp site, called Los Domos, so we can see the context for our work. We’ll return home on Sunday, March 8th, which is the day before spring quarter starts at RIT.

We could use prayer for this expedition (not to mention some money, too). If you want any more information, just ask me. Currently we just bought plane tickets and are working on getting vaccinations and such. I’ll see if I can manage to post about our progress once in a while.