Thank you for supporting me in my missions trip to Mexico with a team from RIT’s InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. We praise God for our safe travel to and from Mexico, a good, productive week of work there, and the fun experiences we had sightseeing. Thanks to your prayers, we were able to raise enough money to cover our expenses and donate a good amount to the Caldwells’ ministry.

David Caldwell founded Camps International to facilitate planting kids camps in various countries and staffing them with nationals to carry on the ministry. They currently have one such ministry called RYCCA (pronounced ree-kuh) located in central Mexico, though there are possibilities in the work for starting camps elsewhere in the world. In Mexico they are building a prototype camp, where they can experiment with how to build camps as well as how to run them effectively. This experience will then be used to jump-start other camps in the future.

The camp in Mexico is located near Morelia and is named Los Domos, owing to the dome-shaped construction style they’ve adopted. David and Karen Caldwell and three of their children currently live on-site in several concrete domes that they’ve built over the past several years. They are currently in the process of building cabins for the campers in the form of steel geodesic domes with a white plastic covering. Inside they plan to build bunks that are suspended from the steel structure with cables. Completing these domes will allow them to begin hosting regular camp events.

I first got to know the Caldwells on the internet about four years ago through a web site about the Christian radio drama Adventures in Odyssey, through which I met their daughter Cherith. I met David Caldwell in person two years later, who encouraged me to bring a team down to help them out. As a result, in 2009 I gathered a group of four other RIT students who I knew through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and we traveled to Mexico to put our technical skills to work. In that week of spring break we designed new web and print materials, improved their web site and computers, and planned some camp activities.

This year I rounded up a new group to continue the work. I returned for a second year, as did Harry, a mechanical engineering student. New this year were Mike, an electrical engineering grad student, and Tyler, an information technology sophomore. The fifth member of our team was Kyle, another computer expert who in fact is not an RIT student but instead knows both Cherith and I through the internet and wanted to help out.

Our trip started out with an unexpected adventure, when our Friday morning flight from Buffalo to Newark was canceled due to a snowstorm. Once we managed to contact the airline, we learned that our options were either to wait until the next open flight on Tuesday or to fly out of Cleveland on Saturday. We chose the latter option, and later that day spent 6 snowy hours making the nominally 4-hour drive. After staying overnight in a hotel, it was smooth flying to Houston and then to Morelia, Mexico.

While the camp is located out in the middle of nowhere and lacks standard power and communication, the Caldwells have an apartment in the town of Acuitzio del Canje, where they lived before the camp was habitable. This is where we did most of our work, because there we can plug in our laptops and get Internet access (albeit slowly compared to home). Using the money we raised, we had purchased a laptop and some networking equipment and brought it with us to donate to the ministry. Tyler, Kyle, and I were the computer experts, so one of our projects was to run cables through the apartment to improve their computer network.

With that done, we moved on to a bigger project, in which we attempted to get internet access at the camp. This would allow the Caldwells to have more direct communication with the outside world, so they wouldn’t have to drive 45 minutes to the apartment to exchange e-mails. A friend of theirs lives two miles away and gets internet access from Morelia via a microwave antenna on a tower. Our goal was to install another antenna on that tower that would connect to a tower David built at the camp.

After scouting the tower site on our first visit, David, Tyler, and I returned with all the equipment we needed to set up the connection. I was chosen to climb the tower, since I’m not afraid of heights (and I’m already pretty tall). I got my harness on and then climbed the 100 feet to the top, where I clipped myself onto the tower so I could work with both hands. David and Tyler sent up the radio box and the antenna with ropes, and I set to work bolting them to the tower and hooking everything up. I found that working on top of a tower is more difficult than it would be on the ground, due to the limited space and the need to attach everything to the tower somehow, even the nuts, bolts, and tools I used. Two and a half hours later I completed the job and climbed down with a mild sunburn (but not before taking a 360 degree panoramic picture of the view from the top).

The next day we went to the camp to set up the other end of the connection. David had already built a 40-foot tower using the same steel tubes as the geodesic dome, but it needed to be taller for the signal to clear the terrain, so we took the tower down, attached another section, and raised it back up. I climbed up and attached the radio and antenna that were the counterpart to what I installed on the other tower. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get the radio signal to reach from one tower to the other, so we had to leave without seeing the task completed. However, a month later one of David’s friends was able to make some adjustments which allowed the radio to work. The Caldwells now have internet access at the camp, which will allow them to conduct business and keep in touch more easily.

The internet tower was the biggest of our projects, but we also accomplished several other tasks. Harry and Mike worked on curriculum for use during camps, creating materials such as daily devotions to help the kids understand the Bible. Kyle worked on creating software that makes it easier to keep track of ministry supporters and keep everyone up to date on the happenings in Mexico.

On our last day in Mexico, we drove out to Pátzcuaro, a nearby town popular with tourists. There were numerous vendors of hand-made trinkets, clothing, and many other items, as well as a large open food market. For lunch we had real Mexican tacos, followed by ice cream in many different flavors. It was a good way to end our time in Mexico.

We all enjoyed our visit to Mexico, and David was very appreciative of all the things we accomplished. I’m graduating from RIT this year, but I hope to return to Mexico again, quite possibly next year with another group from RIT. In the meantime, I intend to post more stories and pictures from Mexico on this blog.

If you are interested in hearing more about what the Caldwells are doing, you can go to their web site, campsinternational.org. Thank you again for your support in this endeavor.

Tim Peterson

Note the shape of the bottle: It’s a bit thinner and taller than the 20oz bottles common in the US. On our drive to the airport Saturday night, we stopped at a gas station in order to get coffee to keep David awake and all of us alive, and I got some 7 Up for myself. It tasted slightly different from what I remember from the States, though I don’t know when I last had any actual 7 Up. I finished it in the Morelia airport while waiting at the gate, after the baggage-searcher said I should drink it before boarding the flight (not that it would really matter). I tossed the empty bottle in my backpack as a souvenir. (I had considered swiping the Spanish Coke can from the flight in, to complement the Swedish one my dad brought home from a business trip.) When I got home and unpacked, I found something curious.

The bottle was now squished, having done nothing but taken two airplane flights with me back to Rochester. The top has been on tight ever since Mexico, and I still haven’t opened it even now, perhaps in case I ever need a sample of Mexican air (not to mention a nice example of physics in action). I pondered why this might have happened for a few minutes, and then asked my dad what he thought. He asked one question, and I suddenly realized what was going on. I wonder, how many of my readers are astute enough to figure it out? (I have no doubt that my physics and engineering friends at RIT will have no trouble with this.)

Thank you for supporting me in my missions trip to Mexico, with Jess, Harry, Kim, and Ozzy from RIT InterVarsity. We praise God for our safe travel to and from Mexico, a good, productive week of work there, and the fun experiences we had sightseeing. Thanks to your prayers, we were able to raise enough money to cover our expenses and donate the remainder to the Caldwells’ ministry.

David Caldwell founded the Camps International organization to facilitate planting kids camps in various countries and staffing them with nationals to carry on the ministry. Their main focus presently is on the Mexican division called RYCCA, though there are possibilities for starting camps elsewhere in the world. In Mexico they are essentially building a prototype camp, where they can experiment with both how to build camps as well as how to run them effectively. This knowledge will then be used to jump-start other camps in the future. One of their major construction projects has been building a house for them to live in on the land, in the form of several concrete domes. The vision is for camp cabins to eventually be built in the same style.

We arrived late Saturday night, so our first activity in Mexico was to attend a church service in Morelia the following morning. It wasn’t too different from a contemporary church service in the US, apart from being louder and all in Spanish. In the afternoon and evening we visited the Caldwells’ land near Loma Caliente, where they are building their camp. David took us on a tour of the camp and explained their goals, both so we could get a sense of what we were working toward and so we could videotape David for use in a promotional video.

While the camp is located out in the middle of nowhere and lacks power and communication, the Caldwells have an apartment in the town of Acuitzio del Canje. This is where we did all of our work, since there we can plug in our laptops and get Internet access (albeit slowly compared to RIT). One of the first results of our time in Mexico was a new logo for Camps International. Kim, Ozzy, and Jess were our design team, and they went from brainstorming to a final logo in a record time of one day.

In the next few days, the design team branched out and created more materials based on that logo. Ozzy designed and implemented a new Camps International web site and began copying over the information from the old site. Kim and Jess created letterhead, envelopes, and business cards for both CI, the English part of the ministry, and RYCCA, the Spanish component. Jess also came up with ideas for a promotional video, which will hopefully come to fruition in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, our lone engineer Harry was at work designing and building things. One project he worked on was designing a structure to keep solar panels pointed toward the sun. He also researched solar water heater designs and how to mount a tank of water on the roof of the domes. His biggest project, however, was experimenting with plans for building a small camp stove by cutting off the bottoms of two aluminum cans, making small holes, and fitting them together with fuel inside. The idea is to have the campers build these stoves based on directions Harry wrote, and cook a small meal on them.

While all of this was going on, I was the resident computer expert. My first task was to improve their Internet connection, by configuring the equipment they had to receive the wireless signal and give them a better connection. I also sorted through decades of old computer equipment to determine what to throw away, including troubleshooting old printers. A lot of my time was spent doing technical support for the Caldwells and the rest of the team. I upgraded and configured Linux computers, helped Ozzy get the web site working, and did many other miscellaneous things. Computers seem to fear me, and my mere presence nearby seems to make problems disappear — we called this my aura.

We worked straight through Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, taking the occasional break to eat Mexican food cooked by David’s daughter Cherith (with help from Ozzy and the others). On Tuesday we spent the morning getting a tour of Acuitzio from Moises, the local theater teacher. Ozzy hails from El Salvador and is fluent in Spanish, so he was our interpreter for most of our interactions with the Mexicans. Moi played us a video of the town from the 1960s, and then showed us around two old churches and the plaza in the center of town before taking us to lunch at a local restaurant.

Over lunch we listened as David talked to Moi and tried to help him see the problems with his living-for-the-present mentality, which included drinking several beers while we were there. This is not an unusual attitude in Mexico, which is one of the problems the Caldwells hope to address with their camp ministry. Please pray that Moises would come to see that life does have meaning and that he shouldn’t squander it.

During our short time in Mexico we saw God bring two more opportunities to light. First, David got a call from a man who has his eye on some land in the Dominican Republic he’d like to buy for camping purposes. This could be the next location for Camps International to start a camp. Second, we got a visit one afternoon from a local official, important enough to have a police escort. He wanted to know if David could use his American connections to obtain an ambulance or fire truck for the town of Acuitzio, because their current emergency vehicle is somewhat lacking. I did a little searching and found that a used ambulance could be had for as little as $6000. We’ll have to wait and see what God does with these new connections.

We did some sightseeing Thursday evening, out in the touristy areas of Patzcuaro. We visited the first university in the area, which is now a museum. Our designers appreciated the printing shop they had there, which included old-fashioned lithography where artists would draw on flat stones in order to print onto paper. We also visited a former convent, which now contains a number of small souvenir shops that we patronized. We closed out the evening with a visit to an ice cream shop, which featured such flavors as queso (cheese) and tequila.

Our final fun activity was a drive and a hike to the top of a mountain Friday evening, featuring a large rocky cliff and a great view. This is a place they want to bring the kids from camp to go rappelling. We didn’t have the equipment to try it for ourselves, but we took a lot of pictures for ourselves and for the camp. The sun was dropping behind a mountain as we hiked back down, giving us a nice view of the sunset.

We spent Saturday finishing up our various projects, though we each had plenty more we could do if only we had the time. We left the web site ready for David to continue working on adding and organizing the information, though we haven’t made the new version public yet. Around 10 PM David drove us to the airport, and we flew overnight, bounced through Chicago, and returned to Rochester around 3 PM Sunday. (I slept for 15 hours the next night to make up for my inability to sleep on airplanes.)

We all enjoyed our visit to Mexico, and David was very appreciative of all the things we accomplished. Upon reflection, we realized that each of us had an important part to play, and without any one of us the team would have suffered. God clearly chose each of us to be there, because before this experience none of us five were close friends with each other. I was even told by our InterVarsity staff worker, “This is the most unlikely group I’ve ever seen.” Regardless, we all worked together well.

I’m graduating from RIT this year, but I hope to return to Mexico again, perhaps next spring. In the meantime, I intend to post more stories and pictures from Mexico here on my blog.

Thank you again for your support.
Tim Peterson

The only remaining issue is money. I still need to raise another $300 to reach the goal of $900, and the team overall is about 50% supported. We need the money by this Tuesday, February 24th, to allow adequate time for processing before we take off. Please pray that God would provide the funds for all of us.

We’re excited to get going, and the Caldwells are excited to have us. Watch this space for more exciting news during and after the trip.

• 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!

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.

I wouldn’t have bothered with the preceding paragraph if it weren’t for the fact that it has a bearing on the following events. Slippey’s car was one of the first to leave RIT, since we were all assembled and ready. For as-of-yet unclear reasons, we stopped at Wal-Mart to get some water guns and water balloons. Once we got on our way and were cruising down the highway, Slippey explained the plan. It turned out that Arricka’s birthday was that day, so they wanted to celebrate it in some way. In particular, it seems Arricka is a prankster. I haven’t seen any of her exploits firsthand, but I’ve heard tell of saran-wrapped doors and apartments full of traffic cones and caution tape.

In retribution for all this, the plan was to ambush her by the side of a road with water guns and water balloons. Slippey and Matt were the ringleaders, and they had chosen a spot on Google Maps that was identifiable by the road names. We take route 3 through the Adirondack State Park from Watertown to the Saranac Village camp, near Tupper Lake. At some point route 56 goes north from 3, and there’s a short road called Sevey that makes a little triangle in the corner of those roads. All the cars that were in on the game were to meet up at Sevey, out of sight of the main road, and prepare to ambush Arricka.

Arricka was initially placed in Slippey’s car because he was involved in planning the shenanigans. When she changed cars, Allison had to be inducted into the plot. The idea was that Allison would stage a breakdown at the ambush site, through running out of gas or something of that sort. They would all get out of the car, and then the rest of us would attack. It fell to us to acquire the armaments, so that we did at the start of the trip. We stopped at a campsite near Cranberry Lake to look for a spigot to fill the balloons. When the park ranger at the entrance asked what we wanted, Slippey paused a moment, trying to find a plausible explanation, but then just told him the truth, that we were trying to ambush some friends. He simply pointed at the appropriate water source, and we started filling. We made about 50 balloons before deciding we’d had enough frozen fingers for the day.

We had to carry the bags of balloons on our laps the rest of the way. We reached the ambush site and parked on the side road, and three other cars pulled up soon after, making a total of something like 12 people. We inspected the site, and decided that the best way to do it was to have Dave’s car parked by the side of the road, flashers on, as if he had broken down. There was brush on each side of the road to hide behind, so Allison would stop the car, everyone would get out to look at the car, and all the water balloons would break loose.

We arrived around 6, but given Allison’s late start we weren’t expecting them until around 7. In the meantime, we explored an old excavator that was just down the road. It hadn’t been used in a while, and dated from the 70’s. (Some of the others insisted on calling it a crane, much to my chagrin.) We climbed all over it and opened the hatches and took pictures. Around 7 we headed back to set up.

I like keeping records, so I decided I was going to try recording video of the whole thing. Conveniently, there was a board nailed between two trees on the opposite side of the road from Dave’s car, so I was able to perch the camera right there and see the whole thing. Matt, Slippey, and I manned that side of the road, while the rest hid on the other side. We waited almost half an hour for our quarry to arrive. Dave stood in front of his car, ready to open his hood when he saw Allison’s car on the approach. Several people tried to stop and help, so he had to wave them off. Dave randomly started dancing around in front of the car, and decided that people wouldn’t bother stopping for a dancing person, since everything must be all right. That became our signal. We couldn’t see down the road, but we could see Dave, so whenever he thought an approaching car might be Allison, he reached for the hood, and we all took cover. Whenever he started dancing, we knew it was safe to stand up.

Matt had texted Allison with the revised plan: Look for Dave’s car broken down after 56. (He had to hold the phone above his head to send it, since this area had little cell coverage.) Unfortunately, before that she thought it was 58, not 56, and drove up and down that area a few times, on the pretense of looking for cheap gas. When they eventually arrived, they ended up driving right past us. “I think that was them,” Dave cried out. “Did they just drive by?!” Troy was standing up at the time, and he was sure Sara had looked right at him, possibly spoiling the plan if it weren’t that she already knew. But they did recognize Dave, and turned around.

I was recording video continuously, but deleting it every few minutes when they hadn’t shown up. This is where my video picks up. (Watch it on Facebook, or download it.) Allison and company came back the other way, and parked in the side road. Dave yelled to them as they ran over, and opened his hood. “I can’t believe you just drove by!” “You girls are engineers, you should be able to figure out what’s wrong.” Arricka went up to Dave, asking what happened, while Allison hung back and carefully ushered the other two girls to the other side of the car for safety. Then Dave made his move. “By the way, Arricka,” he said, pulling out his water gun. “Happy birthday!” He squirted her in the face, and dozens of water balloons came flying from both sides, splattering all around. She was momentarily blinded by Dave’s water gun, so she didn’t even see them coming.

The balloons kept flying for another minute, and then everyone gathered around the car. Arricka loved it. The exchanging of stories was punctuated every so often by the puncturing of the remaining water balloons, some of them on Matt. Some older people in a nice car stopped and asked if we needed any help. Slippey later took the common-sense angle on why they needn’t have bothered stopping: There were 16 of us all gathered around one car — there’s no way we all came from in there!

Everyone stood around talking for five minutes, and then the decision was made to head out and get dinner in Tupper Lake. We looked for a diner, but ended up at McDonalds and a sub place, where we all ate our food and a cake Arricka brought. We finally arrived at Basileia around 8, a bit wetter and later than normal, but for a good reason.

After juggling class is when the juggling club meets, so I stayed after for a while some weeks. This fall I was no longer in the class, but I joined the club for real. The club is rather small and informal, so the first meeting of the year involved questions like, “Okay, who wants to be president?” Eric ended up with the title, and has done a fine job at it. I volunteered to help update the web site to the standards of the new millennium, though I haven’t actually had time to do it yet.

Last week, around came the 31st annual juggle-in. Jeff Peden, juggling instructor and de facto leader of the juggling club, is also the coordinator of the juggle-in. As a club member, I helped with a bunch of the setup and such. The big thing I did was to run the music for the show from my computer. Jeff’s son Wes did a fine job of that last year, but he’s off becoming a better juggler in Sweden now, so I offered to take on the job. I like computers and audio and behind the scenes stuff, so it was perfect. I collected music from all the performers beforehand and assembled it into a playlist, so all I had to do was click on each one as they performed. After the show it came to my attention that FOX was going to have a story about us on the news at 10, so I got online and had my brother set up my TV-recording MythTV computer to catch it. I later poked around the web sites for the other stations and picked up some more videos, which I collected and posted online. There’s a lot more I could say about the juggle-in, but it was generally excellent.

Then last night the club was invited to come to the Up ‘Til Dawn fundraiser and juggle, to entertain and teach interested people how to do the same. It’s supposed to go until 5 am, but we were invited to be there midnight to 1 am. Ben, Eric, Katie, Zach, Kassie, Jeff, Rachel (his daughter), and I showed up around 11:45, and some of us stayed until 3 am. We did a lot of juggling, and taught a bunch of people how to juggle, ride a unicycle, or balance on a rolling globe. I managed to do the latter while juggling 3 balls for the first time (I’d just balanced a number of times before), and took a shot at the unicycle.

Juggling is fun. I’ve finally found a physical activity that I enjoy. It requires thought and dexterity, but it doesn’t involve running around with a bunch of people and getting tired. It’s a solo activity, which appeals to me, but it can also be done with others, whether passing or just hanging around. I hope we have more opportunities to just juggle with people like last night.