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Buckner Explores Needs in Mexico By Analiz González
There are hundreds of people groups in the country, dozens of languages, lifestyles and dialects. In the cities, adults often crowd into forsaken rooms in overpopulated barrios and in Mexico City there are at least one million homeless children, raising each other on the streets and high on solvents. Mexico City is the largest in the Americas: 25 million are accounted for and there’s probably more. Vendors are everywhere and poverty is as stale as the yellow smog hanging over the city. Buckner International is exploring the need in the country under the leadership of Dexton Shores, director of ministry development in Mexico and the Border. And according to Shores, one of the biggest problems is hunger. Twenty-year-old Saul Martinez, with Iglesia Bautista Horeb in Mexico City, has coordinated a ministry to feed children for the past three years. He hands them a bowl with rice or soup, something simple. As a boy, he went there to get food himself.
Some women trek as far as 30 minutes for the free meal with babies tied around their backs in pieces of cloth and more walking by their side. Other children go alone. Yanina Briseño de Gutiérrez, wife of Pastor Gilberto Gutiérrez, is the driving force behind Iglesia Bautista Horeb’s efforts to serve the women and children in Mexico City. She and her husband have dreams of one day creating a school to educate the street kids and stop the cycle of early death, HIV and crime. Buckner is looking into the amount of aid it can provide to these ministries. Many of the street kids are children of inmates. Mothers in prison can raise their children behind bars until their babies turn 6. After that, they are thrown out to either live with a relative or find their own means of survival. In Mexico, those accused of crimes are guilty until proven innocent, explained Jorge Quezada, who leads a ministry through Horeb to teach rondallas, or ethnic music, to prison inmates. Suspects are thrown into prison, often for as long as a year, while they await their trials. Sometimes they’re innocent.
It was initiated by Leticia Hernandez and Laura Chavez, two young women who were raised in traditional Baptist churches. They were part of an evangelism team, and as they went out and shared the Gospel with teens clad in black and smelling of narcotics, they found their words rejected. So they changed their approach. They live by the verse in 1 Corinthians 9:22, which says, “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” So they’ve taken on black garb and tuned into Christian rock. And by this scripture, they’ve grown in number, enlisting drug addicts and witches to the army of God through Christian heavy metal and testimonies they can identify with. They’re also providing counseling to get them on their feet and away from their old habits. “We accept anyone who is rejected by the churches,” Hernandez said. “We tell them to come as they are and that God will clean them up after they decide to follow Him.” Buckner serves this ministry by paying the rent for the building used for counseling and congregating. And Buckner’s ministry spans into another part of Mexico: the outskirts of Oaxaca City, where an indigenous people group lives in a community called Cumbre, which means “peak of the mountain,” because they’re closer to the sun than the surrounding villages. These people make tortillas by hand, grinding, mixing and cooking inside smoke-filled aluminum huts that are also their bedroom and living room, and everything. They die at an early age, and their children often don’t live to age 2 because of poor living conditions. They are called Zapotecos – a group brown in skin and short in stature. They are one of the many different indigenous groups in the state of Oaxaca. Although this community knows Spanish, there are dozens of languages and dialects spoken in the state of Oaxaca alone. The Zapotecos have been abandoned by the government and are often denied basic voting rights, said Jaime García-Merino of Iglesia Bautista Esperanza. “They have little to no say in politics and are poorly educated,” he said. “And for this group, there is no church in the area.” Buckner is planning to send volunteer mission groups to work with the Zapotecos and help build water filters that would stop the parasite problem among the children. Missionaries would also provide job skill training and build green houses. Mission groups will also go work in many other ministries in Mexico, like the Mefiboset Shelter in Oaxaca. Mefiboset was started by Alfredo and Nidia Lopez, who live in a small apartment by a child rehabilitation center where infants and babies are treated for birth defects. With a disabled child of their own, they realized that a lot of the people taking their children in for therapy have no place to stay. So the Lopez couple and their two boys began renting an apartment where they house guests who are in need free of charge. While they stay in their home, Nidia works with the guests at putting together meals. And she sells hand-made jewelry so she can buy food for those who stay the night. Another ministry Buckner seeks to help is a community center by the Oaxaca landfill in the Guillermo Guardado Colonia. Most of the children attending the community center come from families that live off of the city dump. They pick out cardboard and aluminum from the trash, anything that they can sell. The community center serves between 100 and 120 children through a collaboration between Misión Maranata and Compassion International. Compassion International provides financial support for physical, spiritual and social needs. But they don’t aid in construction, so the children are crammed into a tight, uncomfortable space. They have only one restroom available and they sometimes soil themselves when they have to wait in line for too long. The ministry’s only vehicle is over 20 years old and barely fits the 10-12 church volunteers who ride into the center together. Buckner missionaries will be needed to provide parenting classes, teach Vacation Bible School and help improve living conditions with house repair projects. For information on taking a church mission trip to Mexico, visit www.ItsYourMission.com or call 1-877-7ORPHAN. To read more about ministry opportunities in Mexico, visit our missions blog at www.itsmymission4kids.blogspot.com. |
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It’s hard to put Mexico on paper. Its needs are as varied as the versions of “Mexican food” we eat in the United States. 
“Most of the people who live in this area are not originally from Mexico City,” Martinez said in Spanish. “They don’t have steady salaries and sometimes they have to go away to find work and they leave their kids alone and with no food.”
The first, and so far the only Mexican ministry in which Buckner has begun investing is a gothic church plant and counseling center called Comunidad Subterránea, or “Subterranean Community.” This ministry has pulled drug users and satanic worshipers out of occults and addictions and into lives of freedom. 
