Mexico Mission Trip Reflections, Part Two

I ended my last blog entry with the question, "How would your faith be different if you grew up in Oaxaca (rather than Los Angeles)?" To provide context, Dave Miller (the head of Adventures in Life Ministries), asked the mission team this question after our four day youth camp with kids from the outskirts of Oaxaca.

This is significant because the state of Oaxaca is the second poorest state in Mexico. The kids were from the Mazotec tribes who are among the poorest in the state... so literally the poorest of the poor. To help provide a picture of the population we were dealing with; some of the kids, who were amongst the most active during free time... playing soccer, running around, etc... wore the same outfit for four days. Many of the kids also got carsick and threw up on their way to & home from the camp. The roads to their homes were somewhat windy, but Chable (the pastor who directed the camp) said the kids got sick from the windy roads but because the kids were unaccustomed to sitting in actual cars!

One the first day, I had the chance to talk with some of the older kids. This gives further context to the question I'll touch on in a sec. Only one of the teenagers (out of twenty) had ever left the state of Oaxaca... and she had gone to the Yucatan. None of them had passports, so its probable that none of them will ever leave Mexico in their lifetimes. Only one of them had ever eaten any non-Mexican food, and that was a pastor's son who had worked at a Chinese restaurant in the city. At the same time, this kid, whom we thought of as one mof the fortunate ones, also wanted to be a doctor but had to give up his dream because he couldn't afford to go to medical school outside of the city.

With that background, you can see how poignant Dave's question was. How different would one's faith be growing up in Oaxaca rather than Los Angeles, or anywhere in the United States?

• My first observation: American Christianity wouldn't work in Oaxaca. I think about what is popular here in the States, with finding your "best life now" or even the emphasis so many churches place on achieving spiritual greatness/ fulfillment in our spiritual journeys... I have the sneaking suspicion that that type of faith just wouldn't resonate.
• With that being said, maybe we who go on mission trips needs to re-orient our missions experiences away from "providing all the answers" to allowing the native populations to imagine and define their own spirituality. It saddened me that most of the Christian bookstores we visited during our time in Mexico only sold Spanish translations of American Christian books. That is all fine and good, but without an indigenous spirituality that is rooted in the people's lives and experiences, that speaks to what the people go through, and just simply asking them to adopt a foreign spirituality, are we not just continuing to perpetuate an American Christian hegemony while preventing the spread of an authentic Christianity that would allow God to speak to people's lives in their contexts?

So how would my faith be different? The only way I could conceive of an answer would be with the understanding that I would need to discard my preconceptions of what spirituality is: the longing to be significant, the need to be important, etc. that we are taught each Sunday here in the states and replace that with who knows what?!

I don't know... but a characteristic of an Oaxacan spirituality would undoubtedly be survival, a theology of "making it through the day" rather than being a Christian superstar.

To wrap up this entry, I have a visual illustration. In my last entry, I described a horse led train ride to the cenotes (underground cave pools). There's no way they would have been permissible in the states (animal cruelty along with violation a myriad of safety laws)... but in Mexico, it was just dang fun and it worked! The ride was much better than having to walk the several miles separating the cenotes from each other and the parking lot. So something that might not work in the States is totally fine and works in Mexico. Maybe that's what's needed in imagining an indigenous Christianity for Oaxaca.... hrmm... so until my next entry, I leave you with some pictures!