VIRGINIA THOMAS
Staff Writer
Editor’s Note: Over Spring Break, staff writer and junior Virginia Thomas led a team of 13 students on a service trip to Argentina. One of 14 such service groups from Pepperdine, the Argentina team spent a week at the Adulam Community Farm — a refuge for single mothers and children in an impoverished barrio west of Buenos Aires. All the team members said they would do it again, in spite of the challenges of illness and injury.
A tear tumbled down her dirty face as she arched her back. While an Argentine doctor smoothed white plaster around her torso, junior Elizabeth Martin kept calm despite overwhelming fear and pain. She didn’t expect to fall down a ladder and fracture a vertebra during her Project Serve Argentina trip. Yet she stood at the front of Elkins Auditorium on Thursday, March 9, wearing a medical corset to support her spine, and told the Convocation crowd that she would without a doubt go back and do it again.
“Going to Adulam was worth breaking my back,” Martin said. “I can’t wait to go back there.”
Martin said God used her injury to help her rediscover joy.
“When I entered high school, I entered a world of emotional problems, eating disorders and stress,” Martin said. “I became selfish and lost that joy that only comes from completely trusting in the Lord and living a selfless life for Him.”
Martin said breaking her back forced her to rely on God. That renewed trust, she said, coupled with the loving influence of the people of Adulam, gave her a joy she has not had since middle school.
“I will never forget,” she said. “An elderly man told me I should be in a toothpaste commercial because I was always smiling. I had not even realized it; I had been smiling nearly the entire time I was at Adulam. I found that inner joy that can only come from God.”
Junior Amber McMahon was hospitalized with Martin for a concussion she received in a soccer game and an infection. McMahon fainted in the waiting room. Martin, who thought she had only a muscular injury and not a fractured vertebrae, was treated in the Emergency Room as well because I could only translate in one place at one time.
“I would have been in so much pain waiting for a doctor if Amber wouldn’t have fainted,” Martin said. “That was a blessing in disguise.”
The doctors were curious about why we had come to a poor part of Argentina never visited by tourists. We told them we were Christians, who had come from America to help. We told them we were students at a Christian University that gave us the chance to spend our Spring Break serving people in Argentina.
“What do you mean Christian?” they asked us in Spanish. In the conversation that followed, we got to explain the difference between empty religion and a relationship with God, that Protestantism isn’t a cult, and that we feel more called to love God and love people than to draw denominational lines between people who worship Jesus in different manners.
“What are you studying?” they asked.
In her broken Spanish, Martin explained that she was studying medicine so she could be a medical missionary in third-world country.
The doctors looked at her in awe. Several of them gave us their email addresses and phone numbers. One of the doctors on call, a prominent surgeon and former hospital chief in Buenos Aires, was a Christian. He spoke with the people from Adulam that took us to the hospital, and told them he wanted to help them however he could.
“I felt like God was using our being sick to minister to other people and make vital connections for Adulam,” McMahon said. “It’s not a good thing that I had to faint. But like Romans 8:28 says, we know that God uses all things for good for those who love him.”
Above and beyond Project Serve
Martin is already making plans to return to Adulam next summer. She wants to help more, though her team has long since gone above and beyond the call of Project Serve. Instead of merely paying $825 apiece to cover their plane tickets, they raised roughly $20,000 for a Vacation Bible School event, two week-long English classes, and 75 percent of the construction of a new house on the farm.
Because the students’ efforts, a $4,300 grant from the Pepperdine Voyage Project, and a contribution from SGA, lives will be changed. More homeless single mothers and children will be able to come in off the streets. They will be given a new home at the communal farm, thanks to the Project Serve construction efforts. They will receive Christian counseling, rehabilitation from drug addictions, healing from diseases, and be welcomed into a family that lives, works, and worships together.
Walking Miracles
McMahon she said she will remember people’s testimonies of God’s deliverance far more than she will remember her injuries.
“When I feel unworthy of God’s love, seeing the change he has brought to these people’s lives is such a great reminder of how his love is so unfailing,” McMahon said. “It really doesn’t matter what you have done. There is always forgiveness.”
McMahon saw this especially in a father named Miguel. She and Miguel were fast friends, constantly giving one another high-fives in soccer games after work and exchanging encouragement in the few Spanish words she knew.
Two days after meeting him, McMahon heard Miguel’s story. He was a murderer who had been at Adulam for less than a year. Before arriving, he had been in prison for theft and killing an Argentine policeman.
“I couldn’t even believe it,” McMahon said. “I feel like when you’re a Christian you can see it in someone’s eyes. And I saw that in Miguel.”
McMahon said she felt absolutely no danger at Adulam.
“The Miguel that I saw at Adulam was not the Miguel that had killed a policeman,” she said. “When you give your life to God, it’s amazing what a different person you become. I saw how you can be completely reborn in Christ.”
Junior Alex Schulz, said he was amazed by the healing God has done at Adulam. For example, the farm was founded in 1996 for an HIV positive couple who today, live healthy, normal lives. Though he is at risk of developing full-blown AIDS, Gabriel Tabera is an energetic bus driver who never misses work. His wife Alejandra stopped taking medication three years ago, because the level of her virus has fallen to “undetectable.” It disappeared. The Taberas have four children. Though they were born after their parents contracted the virus, the children are all HIV negative.
“You can’t question God working down there,” Schulz said.
From poverty to Pepperdine
Since returning to the States, team members have sent many a Spanglish email, yearned to go back, reexamined their ideas about vocation, formulated a plan to send Adulam supplies, and drawn many conclusions. Several students have already started planning, as Martin has, to return to Adulam. Others are contemplating ways they and other Americans could use the advantage they have in currency exchange to do much good in poor countries. The team saw how much further dollars go in third-world nations.
“I have $4,000 to my name and I always think about how that’s not a lot of money, but I think about how much my meager earnings in the American world could do so much good in the rest of the world,” McMahon said. “We could build half of another house with that $4,000.”
Schulz had many ideas of ways Americans could make a difference.
“Conserving water, recycling, giving 5 percent of our salary to non-profits, going on mission trips once a year, sacrificing time, money, anything,” he said. “How much does it cost to build a house in Buenos Aires? We could build plenty of houses with our annual salaries. There is so much we could do.”
McMahon shared about a single mother named Isabel at Adulam who could not afford to buy pens for her eight children.
“If I gave her five dollars, she could buy hundreds of pens,” McMahon said.
Calling over comfort
Though many have missed class because they are recovering from injuries or sickness, every team member said they would do it again.
“Thinking it over, it feels like a dream,” junior Ashleigh Salios said. “A dream where we had freezing cold showers, ate only bread for a week, slept in a house that wasn’t insulated with one blanket each, communicated using mostly hand signals or broken Spanish, and hung out with former prostitutes, drug addicts and murderers. I would go back and do it all again if I could.”
Junior Sarai Small said a changing factor for those former addicts and criminals was not just faith in who God is, but in what God can do.
“Not only do they know God’s love, but they know God’s power,” Small said. “They do not limit themselves in their beliefs. People in the United States think they have to be independent and do not need help. The people of Adulam are so broken and desperate that they seek God and his power like I have never seen. We saw people there who have been healed of AIDS, drug addictions, and all kinds of sin and diseases.
Small said the Adulam people have what is really important.
“I’ve never seen a people like the ones at Adulam,” Small said. “They are poor and broken, but it does not matter. They are rich in spirit and in love. They don’t have what people in the United States think they need: money and comfort. However, they have what the people in the United States are still longing for: true love, acceptance and community.”
She said she thinks Americans, and especially many privileged Americans such as Pepperdine students, have their priorities dead wrong.
“We are not called to have money and be comfortable,” she said. “We are called to follow Jesus.”
03-16-2006