It all started one night over a couple of beers. We were sitting on the beds in a cheap hotel in Rio Bravo, Mexico, talking about how poorly organized the project to be of service to the people of the Mexican colonia on the side of the railroad tracks had been. 

After driving 5 1/2 hours from Austin, and crossing into Mexico, and getting a room at this hotel, we had been taken at 7am the next morning to a restaurant, the Santa Fe Restaurant, by the titular head of the project. There, we sat at a table and looked at the menu. They offered spaghetti for the breakfast platter. Spaghetti, it is not just for breakfast any more! My stomach clenched. 
“Um, I will have toast and a glass of orange juice, please.” The waitress looked at me like I had just spoken in a foreign language, which I had. I reached into my mind, trying to remember my two years of high school Spanish, from 25 years ago.

 
My buddy Rob cleared his throat and said, “Pan tostada con jugo de naranja. Yo mismo.” 

I gaped at him. “You speak Spanish?”

“Not so you would notice,” he replied.

The waitress bustled off, and I looked around us. We were seated at a large round table, at which sat the titular head of the project, and Rob and myself, and 3 fat Mexican guys in barber shirts. They were all speaking in Spanish, which I didn’t understand. The waitress came back shortly with our food. I dawdled while eating it, and even though I stretched it out to about 45 minutes, Jim, the titular head of the project, and the Mexican men were still gabbing a mile a minute, in Spanish. I wondered what I was doing there.

I had been just happily living my life in Austin, fixing people’s houses, and working as a volunteer coxswain with the Austin Rowing Club, when the annual Returned Peace Corps Volunteers meeting came along, which I had reluctantly attended. I am not big on organized group things, but Jim, the president, had asked me to be there. The members were talking about The Mexico Project that they did twice a year, where they took volunteers down to Mexico, and did projects to help the people of the community. They talked about how they had burnt out all of their carpenters, and had no one with the knowledge to take their place, which, it turned out, was the reason that I had been invited. They wanted me to replace the ex-carpenters. I resisted, but they ganged up on me. pressuring me until I, again reluctantly, agreed to go with them on the next project, coming up in a couple weeks.

That was how I found myself, pretty bored, sitting in the restaurant, listening to a language that I did not understand.

A couple of hours later, I found myself at a dilapidated primary school, with a pile of 3″ pvc pipes, and some cans of primer and glue. The school was abandoned because it was the weekend. The project was for me, with a couple other volunteers help, to dig a trench from the school restroom to the septic tank out in the field beside it, and run the drainage pipes, so that they could hook up the restroom, and close down the smelly falling down latrines that were doing the job until now. I wasn’t sure how my skills as a carpenter figured into this, but I was here, so I set to work. We got the pipes run and hooked up in about 4 hours. It was mid afternoon, and we were done, but there was no way to get back to the hotel, and I was not even sure where it was from here. The project director had dropped us there, and said they would be back at some point.

As we sat in the hot shade at the side of the school, I wished I had brought a bottle of water. I was pretty thirsty. Finally a pickup truck arrived, and Jim took us back to the hotel.

The next day, the project was to put tarpaper on the roof of a house in the colonia, which was near the school. We had a ladder, some rolls of tarpaper, and some nails, and two hammers. As we got to work, the whole family came out, and sat in chairs, in the shade, and watched us. As we got the project completed, I had been getting madder and madder. The family were having a great time watching us improve their house, but not a one lifted a finger to help with the work. Nobody in my group spoke Spanish, so we couldn’t encourage them to give us a hand. It was hot on the roof, and I was sweating up a storm.

In Peace Corps, one of the first things they teach you is that if you have a project to do, you always work with the people who are going to benefit from it, and teach them how to maintain it, so that after you are gone, the people are better able to keep it working. That was obviously not the case here, and that was why I had gotten mad.

Later, back at the hotel, I had voiced my unhappiness to Jim, and the rest of the people, and all that I got from that was, “Well, Sam, if you are that unhappy, put your money where your mouth is, and do something about it.” I threw my hands up in resignation, and went to my hotel room, steaming. Tomorrow we were heading back to Austin, and I would be happy to wash my hands of this train wreck of a project.

A little while later, Rob came by with a 6 pack of Carta Blanca beer, and we sat there commiserating with each other, and enjoying the semi cool taste of Mexico’s finest. Rob was not even a returned peace corps volunteer. He had come because his wife was an RPCV, and had brought him with her on the project. I didn’t know him very well, but found him to be a nice guy, and we had made the beginnings of a friendship while I had repaired some windows on his house, a month or so before the project.

“This whole thing sucked,” I said, “and I would rather poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick, than come down here again.”

“Yes, it was not very well planned, I agree,” Rob said. “But what they said was true. Bitching won’t help anything. We should do something about it.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like this,” Rob said leaning forward. “We should take over this project, and organize it. You have talked about the projects that you had in Swaziland while in the Peace Corps. You have good organizational skills, and are a good carpenter. We should ask the group if we can take over the project. I can set up a non-profit status, a 501-C3 certificate, and we can raise money, and do the projects on our own terms.”

“You think we can do that?” I asked, surprised.

“Here, have another beer, and let’s talk about it.” Rob smiled. He looked undaunted.

And that was how I got involved with what we eventually named Amigos de las Escuelas. I felt that fixing the roof on some random family’s house was not a good use for what we brought to the table. We should work with schools, because that would help a much larger audience, and education is always a good thing to put effort into. 

Rob started the 501-C3, and got a large donation from the oil company that he was writing software for. He assembled a Board of Directors, of which I was a passive member. My job was to go and set up projects for the volunteers, and buy the materials, and when the volunteers arrived, to run the projects and teach people how to do whatever we set up. Amazingly, it worked pretty well.

 
I went back down to Rio Bravo on my own a month later, and walked around looking up the “importantes”, whose permission we needed to make it work. Even though my Spanish was, at the time, marginal, I am never afraid to talk to the big cheeses, and I had visited with the mayor of the city, got his blessings for what we wanted to do, and had met with various teachers and headmasters, trying to find out what the schools needs were, and how we could fit into that. I used my best smile, and left potential friendships in my wake as I walked around the small Mexican town.

I often think about the idea of white privilege. I can not help the color of my skin, and so I mostly don’t notice it, or that of others. We are all God’s children, no matter what our outside looks like. But those three days of walking around Rio Bravo, I used it in the most positive way that I could. Rio Bravo was not a tourist town. At the time, there was no border crossing near it, and white skin was not very common, and drew attention to me. I just walked into the Municipio, where the mayor was, and introduced myself in a humble manner to the receptionist, and asked for a quick meeting with him. And only had to wait for half an hour to be ushered into his office. I introduced myself, told him I was with Amigos de las Escuelas, and what I was there to do. He was very interested, and we had a good conversation, at the end of which he gave me his blessing, and told me that if his office could help, a su servicio. 

Ditto with the schools. I got in my truck and started driving around the nearby colonias, and when I would find a school, I stopped and found the office, and asked to speak with the headmaster. Sometimes he would not be there, and the office person would call a teacher to talk with me. The teachers were the best. They always knew what the schools immediate needs were, unlike the headmasters, who always were looking for a feather in their cap. I am not a political guy, I don’t do cap feathers. It reminded me of my past sales jobs. I had a great product that I was selling… free improvements to their school. Who would be unwilling to entertain the idea? I gave and received a lot of smiles those 3 days.

It had not been that hard to take the project over. The RPCV’s who had been running them were all burnt out, and lacked somebody to take charge. I called Jim the “titular project director” because he was only trying to run the projects so that they would not come to an end. When Rob and I broached the idea, they were really happy to turn it over to us. They even made donations to help with moving forward. At the time, I really had no idea how big the cake was that I had just taken a small bite out of. Or how large a part of my life it would occupy for the next 15 years.

Two people of good heart, can work out almost anything. That goes for marriage, as well as bidness.  

Doing things above my skill set seems to be the way that I learn best. 

The longest journey begins with the first step.