Our work was nearly complete. Though CFE's permission was still in limbo, a bit more diligence on the website and we would be done.
So why was I headed to an orphanage on Saturday morning when I could have been enjoying some well-earned rest?
I had barely finished my third cup of coffee when Jennie mentioned the day's plan. The translator who had helped us at the school, an immense woman with triple chins and a beatific smile, also volunteered at a local orphanage. She had mentioned the orphanage to Jennie, who had immediately agreed to visit. Mati was already packing his cameras in the living room in preparation. My wife and I had been thinking of adopting, so I dutifully signed on, too.
Opposite the airport, a dirt road led toward the scrubby flanks of a convoluted hill. We followed it past a decrepit auto-repair building through flora I couldn't name. Spiky trees bearing what looked like giant wooden peapods leaned in over the road as we navigated the ruts.
After a mile we came to a wildly leaning barbed-wire fence held up by dead branches. Behind it lay a building with pink cement posts, Caribbean-green walls, and pink borders around the windows. Corrugated metal walls and a corrugated roof composed the second floor, which winked dully in the sun. A large pink cross on the wall faced the road.
We turned through a metal gate into the dirt driveway. "Casa Hogar," read a sign. Beneath it, smaller words announced: "Hijos del Rey."
An acne-faced teenager in jeans and a white t-shirt sat on the open porch, staring at his hands from beneath a brown Levi's baseball cap. In the background, at the far end of the dirt parking lot, stood a squat, two-story house painted in pastels. Bars guarded the windows.
We parked in front of a wire fence. A Mexican woman of an indeterminate age stood waiting on the porch, her gray hair piled up into the beginnings of a beehive. "Hi," she said, in English as good as my own. She was perhaps fifty-five, perhaps ten years older. "I'm Mrs. Navarro. Welcome."
A young boy burst out of the screen door as Mrs. Navarro held it open for us. She rattled off something in Spanish, and he stopped and politely shook our hands.
Inside, a large room doubled as the living room and kitchen. Metal-legged tables, plastic chairs and an old blue couch comprised the majority of the furniture. The room was spotlessly clean. I asked to use the bathroom. It was spotless, too.
Jennie sat down beside the table and began speaking to Mrs. Navarro in Spanish. More children emerged: two teenage girls, whose English was as good as Mrs. Navarro's, followed by a succession of boys, each younger than the next. She ruffled their heads lovingly as she directed them to greet us. Jennie caught the hand of the youngest and followed him back out to the porch.
"How many children are here?" I asked from the couch.
"Ten," Mrs. Navarro said. Her eyes twinkled as if she were about to smile. "Four from the same family."
"Where'd you learn your English?" I asked.
To my surprise Mrs. Navarro grabbed a chair and pulled it over to where I sat. I liked her instantly.
"Phoenix," Mrs. Navarro. "Jessie, my husband, and I both grew up there. We were called by God to come here on a humanitarian mission... and this"--she swung her hand to encompass the room and the children, who seemed to be multiplying as we talked--"just sort of took off from there."
Casa Hogar, Mrs. Navarro explained, was more accurately a foster home: when children were taken out of crisis situations by Desarrollo Familiar, Mexico's children's welfare organization, they often ended up in places like this.
"What's the building in front?" I asked.
"It's a medical building," she said. "We invite doctors from the US and Canada to come down to do work for free. Right now, we've got two dentists from Seattle doing dental work. Do you want to see?"
We walked outside and across the lot to the other building.
Ten adults and a flurry of children were parceled out on the concrete porch, in the shade of the scrubby trees, on rickety metal chairs and their adobe-colored pads. Mrs. Navarro chirped out greetings to them in Spanish as we walked up to the porch.
Out of the open door emerged a woman with scrubs and glasses who carried a stainless steel bucket that sloshed with spit and blood. "There's a hole over there," Mrs. Navarro said, gesturing at a depression in the parking lot between a purple Grand Voyager and a Jeep with Arizona plates. The dentist walked into the flat noon light and dumped the bucket's contents in the low spot.
I poked my head inside the building. A white plastic bucket beside the door held Amoxicillin packages, toothbrushes in plastic wrappers and Crest in travel-size containers. Black PVC pipes radiated out from a central array. Styrofoam blocks and fluorescent lights comprised the ceiling. Donated dental chairs were separated from the rest of the room by moveable cotton walls. A young boy lay prostate on one of the chairs.
"You're from Seattle?" I asked the dentist as she walked back in.
"Tacoma," she said from behind her mask, then--"Excuse me"--walked to the boy in the chair. A moment later I heard the sound of high-speed drilling.
When we returned to the main house, Jennie was still on the porch, sliding colored beads onto string for necklaces with three little girls, one brown-faced little boy and two moms. The mother of the youngest girl, in an orange t-shirt and pink sweatpants, grabbed her daughter and pressed her lips against her cheek. She was hardly older than a girl herself.
The dentist's teenage daughter came up to Mrs. Navarro. "My mom needs a magnifying glass," she said.
"Do you want to come with me to my house while I get it?" Mrs. Navarro asked me.
We walked down a smaller dirt road toward her house. Banana trees, mango trees, and grape vines crowded her front yard. "We've got twelve kinds of fruit in our yard," she said.
The house was locked. Inside, Mrs. Navarro scurried about, looking for the magnifying glass in places heaped with sundries: a small shelf beside the front door, a side table, an island next to the kitchen. Three fans hung from the ceiling, still in the January cool.
"Do you want a burrito?" Mrs. Navarro asked.
As she cooked, she talked. She told me with surprising candidness that as a little girl she had been abused by a relative; the experience devastated her self-esteem. "Forgiveness is the beginning of the healing process," she said as she delivered my burrito. I wrote it down.
Mrs. Navarro and her husband had come down to Guaymas as part of a mission with their local church, but something had compelled them to stay. Though they had had no money, everything had worked out thus far: the construction of the buildings, the rearing of the children, the orchestration of free medical care for the people of Guaymas.
She paused. "Why are you here?" she asked.
"That's a good question," I laughed in response. When I'd left Jackson a week earlier, my car had been filled with climbing shoes, ice tools, ropes, skis and ski boots. I'd had no idea that three days later I'd need a sunhat and steel-toed shoes.
I told her about the Guaymas Project, about our efforts to salvage the defunct solar energy systems from San Carlos and repurpose them in Fatima, and about Greenscool's mission to provide renewable energy to impoverished schools and educate the schoolchildren in the process.
"What touched you most about the project?" she asked when I finished.
I paused. The whole thing had occurred so quickly--from the decision to fly to Mexico to the immersion into the group to the late-night work on the website--that I'd had no real chance to reflect. But now, as I looked at Mrs. Navarro, a series of thoughts came to mind.
Apart from the project itself, our little team of budding humanitarians was united by a common love for adventure. Often, our journeys had taken us past places like Fatima as we traveled to remote peaks or wild rivers in the far reaches of the world. But rarely did we stop. Lord knows that in twenty years of climbing, this was the first time I had.
In a few days we would all be making our way back to the States. Jennie was flying home tomorrow; I was departing on Monday. The rest of the group--Mike and Mike, Khyber, Kina and Mati, and the three dogs, Deuce and Molly and Squirrel--would get back in the van a day or two later and begin the 2,000-mile drive home.
When I'd agreed to come down to Mexico, I'd thought that the children would affect me the most. I'd thought that interacting with them as they were mired in poverty would break me wide open. I'd hoped that somehow mere proximity would deliver an empathy I'd never been able to imagine before.
But it hadn't really worked out like that.
I realized now that what had touched me most about the project was not the children, nor renewable energy, nor the poverty of the barrio, but Mrs. Navarro herself, right then, right there. Her, and people like Mark Mulligan and Terry Challis and the dentist from Tacoma, who had found a way to give something back to the world without thought for anything in return. Whether it was the children of Fatima or kids displaced by broken families or people without medical attention, there was an infinite number of good causes in the world. All you could do, I realized, was focus on one good cause at a time.
Mrs. Navarro watched me as I mulled it over.
"I guess it's the people who find a way to make a difference," I said.
She nodded, smiling.
We said goodbye to Mrs. Navarro and got into the rental car. The acne-faced teenager in the jeans and white t-shirt was still waiting for the dentist as we drove away.
EPILOGUE
On Friday, February 6, Mike Miller received an email from El Presidente, Antonio Astiazaran Gutierrez, the mayor of Guaymas. "I... spoke with the CFE [the Comision Federal de Electricidad, Mexico's state-owned electric monopoly] for the permit [to tie the solar panels on Fatima's Vicente Guerrero de Guaymas Primary School to the grid], and they will help us with it," wrote Gutierrez.
The Guaymas Project was done.