Elizabeth Rougeux
Reporter
March 5, 2005
By February many students are ready for spring break and the time they will spend with friends and away from school. However, Jennie Powell, Heather Klinger, Josh Tysinger, Sara Fowler and Candice Yates have other plans.
On Friday, these five students will depart from Milligan College for Nashville, Tenn. to meet up with doctors and nurses heading for Piedras Negras, Mexico on a mission trip with Crossroads Missions.
Piedras Negras, in the state of Coahuila, is located directly across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, about 150 miles southwest of San Antonio.
Powell has been planning this trip for a while.
“I’m so busy,” Powell said. “I have all my school work and I go to work, but a lot of my time has been devoted to this.”
Through her youth group at Hopwood Christian Church, Powell has been involved in Crossroads for years. She has participated in four mission trips already, all to Mexico. Last summer she did a two-month internship with Crossroads.
Crossroads Missions was started by a group of Milligan College students and has grown to be a well-known program working in Mexico, Missouri, Kentucky and Illinois.
The missions teams that work with Crossroads participate in multiple areas of ministry, including construction, medical missions, education, discipleship, evangelism, worship, community development and disaster relief. It also sponsors retreat weekends and conventions that involve thousands of young people in meaningful building projects.
The spring break mission trip is devoted to medical service and soccer. A number of doctors and nurses will set up booths focusing on general hygiene. They will pass out hygiene tools, such as toothbrushes, along with instruction sheets on proper usage. The group will also hold a soccer clinic for the young children in the area to teach them the rules and skills of the game and then play games with them.
“The soccer is so much fun,” said Powell. “Not only do we teach them, but I learn so much as well.”
Most spring break trips that Crossroads takes are of a similar nature while the summer and winter trips involve more construction and building. In Piedras Negras, they have purchased land and started a development that will eventually host 57 houses. The houses are usually one to two bedrooms and are much more livable than the current houses available.
Powell described the current houses as “ovens in the summer and freezers in the winter,” made out of a cement block with only one room about the size of a small office that serves as a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. These government houses cost about $200 a month, and the families pay on them for 35 years but never truly become owners.
The one-to two-bedroom houses that Crossroads builds are spacious and cost $95 to $115 a month. Families pay this for only seven years until they become the owners.
“Some people don’t agree with them having to pay for our houses,” Powell said, “but I think it teaches them discipline, and if they’re paying for their house they take better care of it.”
Crossroads stands by the motto that they would not build something they would not want to live in. However, the main goal they have is to reach those in need through Jesus Christ.
“We don’t want them to think that it is the Americans who have blessed them,” said Powell. “God has blessed them; it is just our privilege to get to be there.”