Crunch

by Rick Bundschuh

  Bethany and the team remained silent as they took it all in: the shacks, rough block homes, and half-completed houses that pushed up to the fence line. Litter, mangy stray dogs, and a dirty confusion of colors, smells, and noises assaulted them.

  And yet, just a few miles away unimaginable wealth, beauty, order, and cleanliness sparkled in the hazy afternoon light.

  “Do you ever wonder why?” Maggie asked suddenly. “Why you were born on that side instead of this side? Was it a gift? A mere accident or roll of the cosmic dice? A test…or something else?”

  Bethany felt a strange uncomfortable sensation come over her, like she had been eating food in front of someone who was starving. The team’s silence spoke volumes, and she knew that they, like her, were searching their souls for answers to Maggie’s questions.

  Maggie walked around to face them, a gentle smile on her face. “Now that I’ve given you some tough stuff to think about, I feel I should take you for some genuine Tijuana tacos for dinner!”

  “Yeah!” Dano called out from the back of the crowd. Kai elbowed him, and the team laughed a relieved kind of laugh.

  “Are they safe to eat?” Monica asked warily.

  “No worries,” Maggie laughed. “Groups from our dormitory eat there all of the time.”

  “No magic punch?” Dano asked innocently.

  “Magic punch?” Maggie and Sarah asked at the same time.

  “Yeah,” Dano grinned. “You drink it and then disappear into the bathrooms—like magic!”

  Everyone groaned.

  “You’re so gross,” Malia laughed.

  “But entertaining,” Kai added with a grin.

  Miguel pulled the taxi up to the taco stand. The taco stand was crowded with the kids from the two vans. Many were filthy and covered with paint, mud, and cement. A number were talking excitedly about their day.

  “You should have seen Matt try to pound a board in place!” One of the guys laughed. “He got one hit for every five swings of the hammer…until finally they put him on paint duty!”

  “I didn’t bring my glasses,” Matt pleaded to no avail as his friends continued to laugh.

  Behind the counter, several workers cooked strips of beef on a charcoal barbecue. They chopped the cooked beef with lightning speed into small morsels that were scooped into a taco shell loaded with guacamole, onions, and a dash of make-you-sweat hot sauce.

  The small tacos were cheap and delicious. Some of the guys had already plowed through half a dozen and were aiming at making it a full dozen. “Bethany! You have got to try one of these—they’re awesome!” Holly exclaimed before she took another huge bite of her taco.

  “How do I do this?” Bethany asked Maggie.

  “You order however many tacos you want as well as a soft drink or water, and enjoy—you don’t pay until you are finished.”

  “Aren’t they afraid that someone in a group this large will rip them off?”

  “No, they know that this group is with us at the dorm,” Maggie smiled. “They trust the word of Christians.”

  “Wow, that’s cool!”

  “That’s how it should be,” Maggie shrugged.

  “Our word should be worth something,” Sarah added.

  Monica glanced over at Bethany with a shared look that said she’d overheard the conversation and remembered Bethany saying the same thing back at the dorm.

  The worker behind the counter handed Bethany a plate with several tacos on it, and she hurriedly sank her teeth into one.

  “Ohhh…these are sooooo good!”

  Holly grinned. “Told you so!”

  “That was a great video of you surfing,” Maggie said. “Was that all in one day?”

  “Different days and different places,” Bethany said, taking another bite of her taco. “Some of it is contest footage.”

  “Did you win the contest?”

  “Some of them I win and some I don’t,” Bethany said.

  “You missed it by an inch on the last one,” Holly interjected.

  “Yeah, it was one of those days that I couldn’t seem to catch any waves,” Bethany admitted. “But it worked out okay in the end. I wouldn’t have been able to come here if I had won.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, there’s a big contest in Orange County right now that I would normally be seeded in.”

  “Seeded?”

  “Get an instant spot in the finals,” Monica supplied.

  Bethany nodded. “But because I came in fifth place in my last contest, I wasn’t able to be seeded in this contest. But that made me available for this trip instead.”

  “Do you have to be in contests?”

  “Well, my sponsor likes for me to be in the contests,” Bethany grinned. “And I like competing too.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Holly snorted. “She lives for a good challenge!”

  Kai coughed into his napkin at the table as if to emphasize the point, and Maggie chuckled.

  “A good challenge, huh? Well, I promise you won’t go home disappointed, Bethany.”

  Bethany didn’t ask Maggie what she meant by that. Instead, she took another bite of her taco and chewed slowly. She’d already come to the conclusion that today was just the tip of the iceberg.

  After a five-minute sprinkling back at the dorm, which most of the girls didn’t feel was even close to a long-enough shower, they settled in their bunks and began chatting about their day.

  “Doesn’t this place have central heating? It is freezing in here!” Monica exclaimed as she burrowed under the covers on her bunk.

  “Zip yourself up in your sleeping bag and you’ll be fine,” Bethany said, sounding content from the depths of her own sleeping bag.

  Holly, Malia, and Jenna quickly followed suit and were huddled in their bags just as the lights went out.

  “At least we don’t have to live in one of those tiny old shacks,” a voice noted from somewhere in the room. “Can you imagine how cold they get?”

  “I couldn’t have imagined a lot of things I saw today—until I saw them,” another voice said soberly.

  “We went to an orphanage,” Bethany said. “It was so sad to see all those little kids…and no parents to love them.”

  “I never even knew this kind of world existed until I came here,” Malia said.

  “You mean you never saw the pictures of poor people on TV?” Holly asked.

  “Yeah, I saw them…but they were just pictures. It was never real to me.”

  Others agreed softly.

  “I really admire Eddie and Maggie,” Bethany said. “They don’t have to work and live down here. They’re Americans and could be living large across the border—instead they choose to spend their lives helping the poor. It really makes you think.”

  “It makes me appreciate what I’ve got,” Monica admitted softly.

  “It makes me feel stupid for complaining to my mom that I don’t have enough clothes or that our house is so small,” Jenna confessed.

  “I had a doll house bigger than the house we built today,” another girl said close to Bethany’s bunk.

  “What are we doing tomorrow? Does anyone know?”

  “I know we don’t have to worry about the van being stolen again. Sarah says Mike is sleeping in the new one tonight—just to be on the safe side.”

  “I heard that we were going to help give baths to kids,” Holly said.

  “Now that’s a unique concept. Are they going to want these baths? I mean we’re talking about little kids, right?” Bethany said grinning in the dark.

  Holly giggled. “Oh, these kids will want them. Eddie said they don’t have running water. He said that these kids only get a bath once every six weeks. So, there should be like a couple hundred kids lining up for a bath by the time we get there!”

  “Oh, this is going to be fun,” Bethany said, remembering the eager faces of the little boys at the orphanage.

  “We also get to check kids for ukus—except they don’t call them ukus here; t
hey call them lice. Maggie said other groups that came from Hawaii were pros at finding them.”

  “Probably because every kid in Hawaii has had ukus at least once,” Bethany said yawning.

  “Yuck! I’ve never had them,” Monica stated emphatically.

  “Yeah, they wouldn’t dare, huh, Monica?” Jenna teased, and the girls laughed.

  “It just came to me who Monica and Jenna remind me of!” Bethany exclaimed. “Anyone ever see that movie Grumpy Old Men?” The girls burst out laughing again. “That’s them—except they are grumpy young women.”

  “Grumpy young women with lice!” Holly added with flair.

  “I’m starting to feel itchy. Can we talk about something else?”

  The girls laughed—including Monica and Jenna. But the truth was Monica wasn’t alone with how she felt; just talking about lice made everyone feel like scratching their heads like crazy.

  The conversation slowed, and in the dark, the deep breathing of sleep could be heard mingling among the last whispered conversations of girls who had not yet given in to their exhaustion.

  Bethany stared up at the dark ceiling, listening to the noise of traffic filtering in through the window. She thought once again about the little boy who wanted to see God’s face.

  The best father you could ever imagine having. In spite of the bitter cold that seeped through his thin blanket, Eduardo smiled as he thought about the words of the girl visiting the orphanage. His mother had told him God was the father in his dream. The girl had said it even better. Eduardo bit his lip. It had to be true!

  He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed—prayed like he had never done before—and asked God to please let him see his face. His brothers, after all, remembered the man they called father—remembered what his face looked like. I need a memory like they have, Eduardo prayed fervently. That way if I see you again, I’ll know who you are—I’ll know I have a father of my own that is watching out for me.

  five

  “This morning all of you will have a chance to do something very simple and very humble,” Eddie said as Bethany and the team gathered in the meeting area of the dorm after breakfast. “We are going to a place called The Dump to give the children who live there a chance to get a quick shower and shampoo and some clean clothes. These are children and families who make their living collecting salvageable materials from the dump. They have next to nothing.

  “Now you can look at giving these poor dirty kids a bath as just a nice thing for one human being to do for another…and you would be right. But maybe, just maybe, when you are doing it for one of these little ones—one of these overlooked and ignored kids—you can think that you are really doing it for Christ himself.”

  Eddie smiled at them and then glanced to where Sarah was standing.

  “Now, before we head out, your youth director has a Scripture passage she would like to share with you.”

  Sarah, looking as fresh and pretty as ever with her blonde ponytail and perfectly applied makeup—something that didn’t go unnoticed with Holly—quickly opened her Bible. “I know I’ve read this verse to you all before, but I just thought it might encourage us before we head out today. It’s in Mathew 25:35–40.

  “’For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

  “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

  “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ “

  Sarah closed her Bible and looked around the room. “I guess Eddie couldn’t have been more right about us doing this for God.”

  It was a short devotional, but so powerful, Bethany thought as a peaceful silence fell over the room. Even Kai and Dano, who often had a hard time settling down and focusing, appeared to have dialed right in on what Sarah was trying to say.

  The caravan soon left the dorm and wormed its way back through the city, then veering off to take the bouncy, rock-strewn dirt roads.

  Even though the vans’ windows were shut tight against the dust, the dump broadcasted itself with its strong, pungent odor long before it was ever seen.

  “Yuck! What’s that smell?” Holly said, wrinkling her nose.

  “The sweet smell of trash,” Eddie grinned. “Rotting trash…the aroma of a working landfill.”

  “I’m gonna gag!” Monica declared.

  “Ah, don’t be such a baby,” Jenna said airily.

  Bethany said nothing. She stared silently out the window at the broken skeletons of cars along the road, the tiny shacks that were dug into steep dusty hillsides, and the treeless, brown landscape. She thought of the little boy and the other children who had to face this every day, and she hoped like crazy that they could make some kind of difference.

  As the caravan of vans pulled behind a trash truck and waited until it was clear to pass, Eddie began to tell them how he had discovered this mini-city in the bowels of the public dump.

  “I had heard there were people living near the dump, but I didn’t know where it was. I asked around and got lots of different answers because the dump tends to move locations. Once they have filled up a canyon with trash, they go find another canyon. So, finally it comes to me—kind of like God knocking on my forehead—if you want to find an active dump, try following a dump truck. I did, and it led me right to the dump and to the people who live near it.”

  The dump truck moved out, opening the way for the vans, and they continued on. The smell of the landfill strengthened. As the vans rounded the corner, the youth group from Hawaii could see dozens of dump trucks busily depositing their loads while tractors plowed the new refuse into the mountains of garbage. Overhead, what seemed to be thousands of seagulls glided above the piles of garbage like vultures, looking for a leftover that could become dinner.

  “Look! There’s something going on in the trash,” Holly said, her face pressed against the window.

  “There are people digging through the trash piles! They have bags around them,” Monica said with a note of disbelief.

  “Um, weren’t you listening?” Jenna said. “These are the people Eddie’s been telling us about.”

  The caravan of vans created a stir among the black dots digging through the trash. Suddenly a number of them—all small—streamed out of the trash piles toward the vans.

  “They’re kids!” Bethany said, finally finding her voice.

  “I think you’re right, Dorothy,” Kai said as he stared somberly out the window.

  Some of the children appeared to be as young as five or six. Their hands and arms were black with filth, their clothes were soiled beyond imagination, and their shoes were terribly worn and dark with scum. But their eyes beamed with brightness, Bethany noticed. And they laughed and chattered as if they were getting ready to attend a birthday party.

  “I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” Dano said.

  The vans pulled up next to a large concrete slab, which apparently had once been the foundation of a warehouse.

  Today, Eddie informed them, it would be their bathhouse.

  Another team, who had come over for the day from San Diego, had already erected an ingenious contraption made of PVC pipes and tarps that would serve to separate the makeshift rooms for the little boys and girls.

  A team of leaders, many of them Mexicans who worked with Eddie’s ministry, were guiding the process.

  As Bethany got out of the van, she saw a collection of tiny buildings crammed together in the barren corner of the landfill. They seemed to be made of wooden pallets and roofed with blue tarp.

  Bethany grabbed Eddie’s arm as he walked b
y. “What are those?” she asked, pointing to the shacks.

  “Those are the homes of the people who live and work in the dump,” Eddie replied simply before moving on to help one of the teams.

  Sure enough, erupting from the hovels were scores of small children, running as fast as their little legs could carry them. They were followed by women and a few teens.

  The sight of immense poverty along with the nauseating smell of the dump threatened to overwhelm Bethany. For a brief moment she thought of retreating to the van. Then she reminded herself why she was there and quickly plunged into the crowd of filthy children who were as taken aback by her missing limb as she was by their grime.

  Eddie called out to them in Spanish, and soon they were forming two lines: one for boys, the other for the girls. Meanwhile, Bethany and her team struggled to finish erecting the bathhouse. Others brought in sacks of clean used clothes, towels, detergent, and five-gallon jugs of hot water.

  “How did they know we were coming?” Bethany asked Eddie as he handed her a stack of towels.

  “I stopped by last week and told them we would be here today. They have come to trust our word.”

  “But what if it rained or something? The road to this place would be impossible to travel on.”

  “We would find a way,” Eddie answered with a look of grim determination. “We promised them, and with people who don’t have much hope in life, our promises mean everything.”

  Soon, tables were set up with piles of clothing. Just outside the bathhouse a station was erected for those found to be infested with lice. Plastic gloves and bottles of medicine designed to kill the creatures were laid out.

  Inside the door of the bathhouse, a table held a huge stack of towels. Each towel had a Velcro strip sown into it. Bethany overheard Eddie tell Sarah that the towels were the work of love from a wheelchair-bound woman who had once come for a day visit. The woman had been so touched by the ministry of the bathhouse, she had decided she had to help. Buying and sewing the strips of Velcro on hundreds of towels had drained her small savings—not to mention her strength—but she felt it was only right to help preserve the modesty and dignity of the children.