Margarite
Sign at the Boarder between the USA and Mexico
I think it appropiate to give Margarite almost an entire post to herself. This woman has blessed me by her story in such a profound way. Any woman in the United States in her situation would find it hard to get by, but especially here in Mexico her strength stands out.
Margarite knocked on our door our first day without the boys to translate for us. She was the second person to knock on the door and I was feeling a slight bit over confident after my success praying and helping the first woman who knocked our door. However, Margarite was on the verge of tears when I opened the door and when I asked her if she wanted food or water, she quickly shook her head and launched into a stream of rapid Spanish and started crying. I was in way. way. over my head. I had a quick flash of my dad with that look on his face telling me, “you know we can’t understand you when you talk while you’re crying!” I totally understand him now. And I didn’t know the words she using to talk to me. I tried calling the boys in Saltillo for help translating. No one answered. Another knock on the door! Oh no! This woman needed food. I understood that! Joanie went to get some food, when behold, another knock on the door!
At this point, I wanted to cry.
I answered it, to be crushed by another woman in greeting (this is normal as it turns out). Who asked for something involving prayer and needing to use the phone, something which I was pretty sure we didn’t really allow. She kept saying someone was dying or really sick and she desperately needed to call her brothers and sisters. At least this is what I thought I heard. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I understood and what I was making up at this point. Joanie returned with the food for woman #2 (whose name was Maria), when another knock sounded at the door. I tried to smile at Margarite to assure her that I hadn’t forgotten about her. Woman # 3 (her name is Goya as it turns out) answered the door for me and invited woman #4 inside.
I really wanted to cry now.
Woman #4 (Marisela, who is in fact Raul’s sister and a good friend of the missionaries, but I didn’t know that at the moment) only popped in to ask if a mission group was here (no), when one might be coming (possibly in August?), and if it was possible for someone to ship them some swim diapers (I definitely had to look up that word, not having needed to know the word for diapers before). I couldn’t really tell her anything helpful beyond I would ask about the diapers when I called FMC next, and I was sorry that I didn’t speak any better, but the boys would be back next Monday and they spoke better than I did. She thanked me and left. Whoa, I handled that one! Down to 3.
We prayed with Maria and over her food and she left rather quickly. Down to 2!
At this point, I had no choice but to call the FMC office in Louisiana. The boys in Saltillo weren’t answering their phone, and it was obvious that Margarite needed something really important, and Goya kept talking to me and I was having a hard time following her story about her family. Luckly, there are 3 or 4 Spanish speakers who work in the FMC office off and on and Joseph answered and was willing to translate for me. He spoke to both women and then told me what was going on. Goya is her mother’s primary caretaker can not leave her alone, but her mother-in-law is very near death and she wanted to use our phone to contact her family and in-laws in Monterrey, which Joseph gave her permission to do if she was quick and didn’t tell anyone in town that we let her use our phone. We tried to let her use the phone, but it actually didn’t work when she tried. We ended up buying her a phone card to call from the street and having a rather blessed conversation about our mission work and our time in General Cepeda. We eventually fostered quite a friendship with her and have been with her to visit her sick mother on a couple of occasions.
But I digress. Margarite waited patiently while we sorted out all these other womens’ concerns as we could understand them so much more clearly. We eventually called the FMC office for a translator to tell us her story which is as follows: Margarite lives at a Rancho that the missionaries used to go to pretty regularly for prayer meetings and catechisis. She and her two children would regularly attend and she would ask for prayers for her husband who had no prayer life to speak of, rarely helped her keep house, and had a tendency to drink too much. Most of her time at the prayer meetings she spent praying for her daughter who was born without a colon. This birth defect requires a life time of surgeries and other problems that Margarite can not afford and her husband shows little interest in helping the situation. At the time that she knocked on our door, Margarite had just left her husband to move into town and she was asking us for help with her groceries and if we could possibly help her daughter to get her next surgery. That her need was real and pressing weighed on me. Certainly we could buy her groceries for the week, but could we really do much more for her than to pray for her daughter’s healing? So that is exactly what we did. We bought her groceries and sat down to pray in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. She left that afternoon as a thunderstorm rolled in and it very much seemed to me that the sun had left with her.
That afternoon I thought back on the stress of the day and my internal count down of sorts of the women who knocked on the door. Trying to rush them out was not the reason why we were here, and I knew that. I felt that God was trying to let me know that I could actually handle quite a bit on my own. Even with minimal language skills, I helped and communicated with four women! All at the same time! And after that, the door was not a daunting aspect of our mission anymore. It has actually gotten to the point where I actually look forward to hearing people knock on the door, despite knowing I will embarass myself by speaking or that I have so little to give them.
Margarite came back to see us this week. Her daughter needs the surgery very soon as her stomach is growing bloated. We offered to take her to Saltillo with us when we next went, naivly thinking we might be a comfort to her at the hospital. She then told us exactly what the hospital required, which was to set the appointment in person, at least 24 hours in advance, and she needed to go on a weekday before 3pm. This proved problematic for us, as we try to do as much ministry work with Tono as we can here in town during the week. We came to an agreement though, when she told us she had been unable to find any work around town this week to earn the money for the surgery. We offered to let her clean our chapel, something we had been wanting to do, but lacked the time to do so, in exchange for the money for the bus fares and the surgery in Saltillo. She did such an amazing job in our chapel, she even thought to cut some flowers off the tree and place two vases full of blooms before our tabernacle. She hasn’t been back since she left for Saltillo, and we ourselves have been traveling to and from the city as well, so I do not know how the surgery went yet. But I am confident that God looks after and follows her like the sun.
