On a hot summer day in Brownsville, Texas, the Hernandez family home overflowed. Children filled every bit of open space—outdoor areas, the living room, dining room and hallways—as youth from California and Texas guided them in Spanish and English.
For the Texas youth, the scene was familiar. Their church, Iglesia Menonita Rey de Gloria (King of Glory Mennonite Church), hosts the day care every summer for undocumented workers who can’t afford day care. For the Californians—a Youth Venture group from the Peace and Justice Academy in Pasadena—it was a new and eye-opening adventure.
The experience began when a Mennonite Mission Network recruiter, Jill Schmidt, walked into the Peace and Justice Academy, a Mennonite Education Agency-affiliated school of about 25 students, hoping to find a student or two to join a Youth Venture team. Instead, she ended up initiating what both Mission Network and the Academy hope will be an ongoing relationship.
Youth Venture is a Mennonite Mission Network service program that invites high school students to spend two weeks serving and learning in a different context or country, at the invitation of their hosts. Teams are usually made up of individuals from around the United States. But Randy Christopher, the school’s principal and social studies teacher, had a different idea.
“I thought: ‘We need to put together a school group to go out and serve,’” Christopher said. “That would both provide service and build our school culture and community.”
The Peace and Justice Academy prides itself on being active and working for social justice, especially in their home community. Christopher said that while they’ve done a good job at focusing on empathy for marginalized people and asking questions about justice, they hadn’t yet engaged in service.
So the school put together a team of five students for a Youth Venture team. Meanwhile, in Brownsville, Iglesia Menonita Rey de Gloria had requested a team to help them carry out their annual summer day care. And so the kids from the Peace and Justice Academy, along with Christopher, found themselves in a van headed east in mid-June.
Arloa Bontrager, Youth Venture’s director, was thrilled to make the match.
“When I visited Brownsville last fall, I got a real sense of their passion for welcoming the stranger into their midst, and for their desire to share their love of their community with a Youth Venture team,” she said.
After arriving in Brownsville, the team got to work. They were welcomed with open arms by the people of Rey de Gloria and began assisting at the day care: working with kids on craft projects, playing chess, and practicing their Spanish. They also led Bible studies for the kids together with people from their host church.
“Our ministry is geared toward working with the poor, mostly undocumented persons,” said Lupe Aguilar, the pastor at Rey de Gloria. “We have a free summer day care every year and we try to host as many kids belonging to undocumented families as possible, simply because they can’t afford day care.”
The church chose to serve from within the local community, rather than from the church building, so the day care is housed in the four-bedroom home of the Hernandez family, one of the families from the congregation.
The Hernandez home was also where the Youth Venture team slept. In the interest of hospitality and providing beds for the team, the two youngest Hernandez children moved into their parents’ bedroom, another son went to stay with his grandparents, while another slept in the living room in a sleeping bag.
“This was the sort of sacrifice we saw from the community to make us comfortable,” Christopher said. “It wasn’t obvious at any given moment who was serving whom.”
Pastor Lupe said that hospitality and a strong sense of family are two things his community has to offer those who come to serve with them.
“They get to learn about our Hispanic culture,” he said. “They see the way we act toward our parents and kids, our foods, our hospitality. And some Mennonite kids don’t even know there is a Hispanic Mennonite Church, or that we do worship in a different way.”
And, Aguilar added, the kids from Rey de Gloria also learned something from their visitors.
“Our kids saw how these other Christian kids were also willing to bend over backward to be friendly,” he said. “We saw so much similarity, even though we come from different cultures. By the end, our kids were saying, ‘They’re just like us—but with blue eyes, of course!’”
In addition to connecting with the community, Christopher, because he’s a social studies teacher, took advantage of some on-the-ground teaching opportunities. After studying the Mexican-American War during the school year, students on the Youth Venture team got to visit Palo Alto, one of the war’s early battlefields.
They also tackled some immigration questions with a visit to the border fence that separates Texas and Mexico. (Brownsville is a border town.)
“Even though we’re from southern California, we’d never gone to the border,” said Christopher. “We’d engaged questions around immigration, but on our way from Pasadena to Brownsville, we got stopped three times by the Border Patrol.”
Christopher explains that experience, complete with armed officials and drug-sniffing dogs, led to discussions about what it would mean to be an undocumented worker and to have to avoid authorities.
“The local Hispanic community took us in like we were family,” said Ethan Christopher, one of the students from the Academy, “so it was intimidating to stand by the wall put up to keep other Hispanic people out of the country— – like they were somehow dangerous or inferior.”
Isabella Gomez, a young woman who lives in Brownsville and served last summer with Youth Venture in Los Angeles, was glad to have a Youth Venture team come to her town. In 2011, she’d done some work at the Peace and Justice Academy during her Youth Venture term, and she took it upon herself to invite the Brownsville team to her house, and then, even though she doesn’t attend Rey de Gloria, came to work with them at the day care.
Christopher says a similar thing happened when his team returned to Los Angeles.
“A week after we got back, the L.A. Youth Venture team came to paint at the Academy,” he said, “so our team all came out and helped them. We all wore our Youth Venture shirts and there was a real feeling of sister- and brotherhood.”
Upon their return to Los Angeles, the team was already talking about whether they should go back next year. Christopher hopes that as the school grows, the number of Youth Venture teams they send out each summer can also grow.
He also believes that this experience is a model for other Mennonite schools.
“Why shouldn’t every Mennonite Education Agency school send out summer teams with a Mennonite service program?” he asked.
After a positive experience of welcoming the Youth Venture team and sharing their beliefs and culture, Pastor Aguilar says the young people from his church were also asking questions about how they could serve in other places.
“Our kids are hoping to do something similar in the future,” he said. “They were saying, ‘We need to get out of here; we need to go to other congregations.’”
###
For immediate release.
Mennonite Mission Network, the mission agency of Mennonite Church USA, leads, mobilizes and equips the church to participate in holistic witness to Jesus Christ in a broken world. Media may contact Andrew Clouse at andrewc@mmnworld.net, 574-523-3024 or 866-866-2872, ext. 23024.
