I got pretty good at planning and running the projects for Amigos de Las Escuelas as the years went by. And became sort of famous in the colonia where my buddy Salvador lived, and famous among certain circles in the city at large, in particular, the Mayor’s office. I never let my poor Spanish hold me back. I found ways to say the things that I needed to say, and even occasionally found someone who spoke English, to help me with the hard parts. I smiled and joked around a lot, and let people think of me what they would.
I am not a very good memorizer, but even so, without actually studying Spanish, I was using it all the time in Mexico, and my abilities got better each time I ran a project in Rio Bravo. There came a day about 6 years into running the projects, and I was driving back to Austin, exhausted after a particularly grueling project, and as I drove through the Rio Grande valley after I crossed the border, I was stunned to realize that I was seeing the world around me in Spanish. I was, without realizing it, thinking in Spanish. It was a revelation, I don’t know how it happened, but there it was. My Spanish got a lot better and faster after that. It was one of the most empowering things that came to pass in my adult life. All of a sudden, I could just flip a switch in my brain, and think in Spanish while I was talking in Spanish, and flip it back when I needed to talk in English. These days I don’t even think about it, I just do it.
From my early experiences, as time went by, when I talked to the people about a project at their school, I made it sort of mandatory that the people whose kids went to the school, should come and help. It was for them anyway that we did the work, and they should be able to take ownership of what we built by being a part of it. The projects got a lot more fun after that. There was actually a tremendous cultural interchange between the volunteers and the local folks. It didn’t matter how much you could speak of the other’s language when you were working together towards the same goal.
I always went down to Mexico between projects, to visit my friends that I had made, and to find new things that I could put volunteers to doing. I knew a lot of teachers and headmasters, and had gone through several different Mayors. We worked a lot in the little primary school in the colonia where Salvador lived, building classrooms, and building a cement block wall around the campus. And building some cement block bathrooms with flush toilets. I learned that I could build a 12′ by 24′ plywood classroom, with doors and windows that I got cheap from the Habitat for Humanity Re Store in Austin, with a tin roof, a concrete floor, and get it painted, in two days. Volunteers are amazing.
I found projects all over town. On one project we built a large building by the Health Clinic that they would use for classes for pregnant women, and for community health, and could hold mass vaccinations for the schoolkids. On another project We built the coolest playground for a school, with swings and a slide, and various climbing things, all built from scratch. On one project, I got a lot of volunteers from the Austin Rowing Club, where I was still working as an occasional coxswain. That was fun because they all knew each other, and it was a harmonious experience that was different from the various and random volunteers that the other projects had had. On another project there were 3 teenage girls who came to work from the community, and I taught them how to measure, chalkline a cutline, and use my battery powered little circular saw to cut plywood sheets to the sizes that we needed. We were building two classrooms at a school that time, and the girls were kept busy sawing most of the day. They were so proud of themselves for using the saw, and being a part of something like that. They traded off so each one had the chance to use the saw, while the other two put in unneeded instructions. Another time there were 4 teenage girls from Austin who went to school together, and I taught them how to make roof trusses, by stacking the new one on the old one as a pattern, and cutting the pieces, and nailing it together, producing the 24 trusses that we needed for two classrooms. They too, were proud of themselves, as was I proud of them. Another time I had found a Community Health Clinic that was looking run down, and we painted the whole building outside, fixed broken parts, and built a playscape for the kids whose moms were being treated there, and fenced in the playground. I had 30 volunteers that time, and I was kept hopping, bringing the things that we needed and teaching people how to paint, and dig holes, and build the playscape. There was always a great sense of camaraderie.
The volunteers always needed to be fed, and on one project, I enlisted 3 women from the community to make Tamales, a very laborious process, and found that 5 of the volunteers wanted to learn how to make them, and together they happily cranked out enough delicious Tamales for everybody to eat their fill for dinner, and some to take home with them. The women had no English, and the volunteers had minimal Spanish, but they laughed and cooked most of the day, and had a great time.
Word got around, and a teacher from an Episcopal High School in Houston brought a couple of his students down to Rio Bravo to participate in a project. He really liked it. Episcopal students have to do some volunteer work in some capacity to be able to graduate, and the teacher called me afterwards, and I set up a special project just for them in December for two years running. A couple of the kids became regulars, and showed up for every project. I had 6 or 10 0f those from Austin, who I would always see on Thursday nights every project.
I always carried a clipboard, where I jotted notes of things that were needed, and ideas for future projects. It became part of my persona, so much so that I came out of my hotel room one night to find a laughing group of volunteers in the courtyard that were making fun of me, one-upping each other by carrying a clipboard, with a rolled up paper like a cigarette in their mouth, and barking crazy orders in my voice. It was all in good fun.
One night about 8 years into running the projects, I again found myself in my hotel room, with my buddy and President of Amigos de Las Escuelas, Rob, drinking some Carta Blanca. He looked at me with a fiendish grin, and said, “I have a new idea for building a community center in the colonia.”
“Oh yes?” I inquired, “Just where do you think we could build such a thing? We don’t own any property there.”
“Well, I was in a cantina this afternoon with Oscar (a guy who owned an internet cafe in downtown, and had helped us with internet issues), drinking some tequila, and he introduced me to a guy who owns a trucking company. He also owns that abandoned lot next to the kindergarten, that has that little gray weatherbeaten house in the middle of it. After hearing my tales of what Amigos has been doing for the last 7 years, he volunteered to let us have the lot, in perpetuity, for as long as we want to use it. Free. We could put our office there. And when we are done with it, he will take it back.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.
“Holy shit, Rob. Are you kidding me?” I was flabbergasted. “Are you sure? I would not want to build something, only to get kicked out at the owners whim. Can you get a piece of paper supporting this, so we have some standing?”
He tossed a piece of paper down on my bed, and I opened it and read the permission to do just what he had said.
“You are such a great idea man, buddy. I can’t imagine how you pulled this off.” It was signed by the man himself. We laughed and toasted ourselves.
“Well,” Rob laughed, “We drank a lot of tequila this afternoon, and one thing led to another, and there we are. Let’s go look at our property, huh?”
We did. It was a lot that was about 35 feet wide, by 70 feet long, just like most of the lots in the colonia around us. Right next to the kindergarten and the primary school, a perfect location.
It became the next project, in the fall. I took the 10 volunteers that showed up that November Thanksgiving weekend, and we cleaned all the junk off the lot, cut the weeds, and cleaned out the weatherbeaten but still strong little house. Then we could see the potential that was possible.
That night, in the hotel Rob and I sat and talked about what to do with our lot. The little house was right in the middle of the lot, and that would restrict what we could do there, so the next morning, I screwed some 2×4’s at waist height around the inside walls, and got Rob and the ten volunteers and Salvador inside, and we picked up the whole house, and using little baby steps, shuffled it over to the edge of the property, and more towards the front of the lot, and set it down there, and I leveled it with cement blocks at the corners. The next project, in the spring, we poured a cement floor in the little house, fixed the glass in the windows, and painted it pink on the outside and white on the inside.
I always got a lot of donations of clothes and things, from my clients and friends in Austin, because I was always talking about the projects, which I had been taking down to Mexico in my truck whenever I went down there. I had been trying to have local moms divide up the clothes by size, and make gift bags for families in the colonia that were in the most need of them. That was only partly successful because of a cultural dynamic in the poor colonia culture that was ubiquitous. It was called “invidio”. That sort of means envy, but it is much deeper than that. Those who did not get any gift bags of clothes, envied those who did. Even those who had decently employed members of the household, and didn’t really need donated clothing, envied the gift receivers. They would badmouth those who were the receivers, and treat them poorly. And the women separating the clothes were always arguing about taking some of the nicest clothes for themselves. It was an icky situation, and I wanted to do something about it.
That became the first use of the little pink house, a used clothing store, where we put ridiculously low prices on the clothes, and sold them to whoever walked in with a couple pesos. I built a dividing wall in the little pink house, and put the clothing store in the front, and built the back room into a kitchen, where we could cook meals for the volunteers, and later, for the functions that we held there. I put a propane tank chained to the outside wall, for the stove. Rob talked the city into coming out and running an electric meter so we could have lighting in the store and kitchen, and run the donated fridge, and microwave.
About that time, Julia, Rob’s wife, had become pregnant. Two projects ago she was very pregnant, and got a lot of attention from the women of the community. The next project, she had arrived with her couple month old baby, who had bright red hair, and the baby never got set down for the whole weekend. The women were totally enamored of this tiny red headed child, and clamored to hold her and carry her around.
This project the baby was 6 months older, and starting to move around on her own. Everybody loved her. Her name was Katie.
We held a community meeting with the moms and dads who lived in the colonia, whose kids went to the kindergarten and primary school there. In the meeting, we announced what we were trying to do there, building a community center, and asked for their input, as well as a name for the future community center. By a unanimous vote, the women decided to call the community center Casa de Katie.
We painted that on the front of the little pink house, in flowing blue script. Casa de Katie, Rio Bravo, Tamaulipas.
After that, though I found other projects to do around town, I always had at least one crew of volunteers working on the Casa, helping it grow.
From a small idea, a whole thing can grow to be something big. 
God bless the idea people. They are what give us a framework from within which we can grow.