Mexico Mission

From May 15-25 Assumption College’s Campus Ministry department organized the 21st version of its perennially popular Mexico Mission. Under the leadership of Mr. John Fleming and Fr. John Franck, AA, twenty students, faculty, and friends of the College, who had prepared for the trip over the previous eight months, left for Mexico the Monday after graduation.

 

Religious Sisters of the Assumption in San Ildefonso

After an initial day visiting the impressive and bustling Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the city’s historic center, participants divided into three groups to assist the needy at three different sites: working side by side with the Assumptionists in Magdalena, a forested mountain region on the way to Veracruz and the Gulf of Mexico (where they visited the infirm and the homebound carrying out much needed chores and errands) and in Valle Verde, one of the mushrooming poor barrios on the outskirts of Mexico City (where they contributed to the construction of a long-awaited chapel) and working side by side with the Religious Sisters of the Assumption in San Ildefonso, an Indian village in the desert highlands 100 miles northwest of Mexico City (where they cleared fields of seemingly endless expanses of rocks and stones in order to prepare for the planting of corn).

 

Participants

At each site the common afternoon activity included games with the local children, who increased in numbers day by day. Once again this year, in the words of the missioners themselves, they left with a deeper sense of joy, simplicity, community, and faith.