For our final month of the Race, my team and I are serving in the small agricultural community of Pasman, Argentina. It’s a town of maybe –m a y b e– 150 people, two sheriffs, a general store, and no traffic signs. Traffic signs aren’t needed when there is no traffic! Most members of the community walk or ride bicycles to wherever they need to go. I’m not saying that there aren’t any vehicles in town, they just aren’t used much unless you are working on a farm or traveling outside of the town limits. If you need to go further than the town limits and don’t have wheels, you just stick out your thumb and hitch.
Why are we in such a small community for our last month, you ask?
Oh, believe me! We asked ourselves the same thing once we searched for the town on Google and nothing but an image of a man sitting in front of a television came up. (Seriously, Google “Pasman” for yourself if you don’t believe me.)
We are here to assist a family of 24 in their transition from Buenos Aries.
Yes – 24 – Dad, Mom, and twenty-two kids ranging in age from 5 to 20. (All but six of the kids are teenagers.)
There are actually 25 in all, if you count Grandma, who moved here with the family.
Dad began working with children in poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aries in 1997. He would befriend them, play games, and share the Gospel. After he got married, he and his wife continued working with the children while building their own family. Even though they have four children of their own, they felt called to open their home to children in need of a safe, stable, loving place in 2007. These children are essentially foster kids who have been removed from abusive or negligent families and drug-related situations. (I don’t know if “foster kid” is a term used in Argentina, but it’s the best English equivalent I can use to describe their situation.) While Dad and Mom have legally adopted some of the younger children, the older ones aren’t adoptable for various reasons; the law is preventing them from becoming a legal family. You’d think that there would be constant squabbles between so many children of similar ages, but there is much peace and laughter between them; everyone looks out for and cares for one another.
Dad and Mom felt the Lord asking them to step out in faith and move the family from Buenos Aries to Pasman because some of the children were falling back into old habits or wrong crowds. Not sure of how this process would go or how they would find housing for 25 people, they still said “yes.”
The family arrived in Pasman three weeks before we did.
We are helping them get settled into their new way of life within this small community. We spend our days working at one of the three properties the family currently inhabits. The family was gifted property on which an old cheese factory stands, and they intend on rehabbing the building, so the whole family can live under one roof. However, the factory was abandoned in the 1970’s, so it will take a lot of time, money, and labor to get this property in livable conditions. (If we were in America, this building would be condemned and torn down.) We’ve cut waist-high weeds with shovels, organized moving boxes, disassembled, moved, and reassembled furniture, planted potatoes, and replaced sections of the roof. Once school dismisses for the day, we hang out with the kids, help them with homework, and play games until dinner. The parents asked us to share our experiences from this past year with the kids, so every evening we all come together and talk about what we did in each country.
The sounds and landscapes of cows in pastures, grain silos, and tractors in fields or sputtering down dusty, gravel roads remind me of the communities near where I grew up in northern Indiana. It has been a great blessing to be in a location that is so relaxing and reminds me of home as I am processing this past year and what going home will be like. It has been a beautiful month with some pretty amazing teenagers who taught me about joy and contentment just by allowing me to witness their life.
