Short-term missions trip report
by Mike Murphy
Each year Southern Nazarene University plans an annual Christmas vacation trip called "Commission to Mexico". For this particular year, 150 people signed from various states to go to Juarez, Mexico (across the border from El Paso, TX). However, because Arkansas, Oklahoma and northern Texas had a bad ice and snow storm, only about 75 showed up.
SNU decided wisely not to take their bus. Out of 50 people that were supposed to go on that bus, five of us were determined to go anyway. We decided to try to make the trip in in my Toyota 4Runner.
It was Tuesday, December 26, when we learned the bus had been canceled. I did some time calculations and figured that if we wanted to go in my four-wheel-drive Toyota, we would be better off leaving at night. That way, we would miss the daytime driving madness of Dallas. We decided to leave that night, try to get to the other side of Dallas and then stop at a hotel. This would also make the trip less grueling by breaking it up into two parts. It's a good thing we did this because the total driving time ended up being 22 hours.
We made this decision to go in my vehicle about 5 p.m. So, we all had to rush around and get ready to leave. John Jones and I left from my house at about 6:30. We drove across Oklahoma City to pick up Susan Jeffries at the Culbertson's house. Then we picked up Zach and Biji Sakariah. By 8 p.m. we were headed south toward Dallas on Interstate 35.
Road conditions were worse than we had thought they were be. And there were more people on the road than we had expected. When we got to southern Oklahoma, we found only ice. It was extremely slick and much worse than the snow/ice mix we had had in Oklahoma City. The traffic through the Arbuckle Mountains was backed up because trucks were having a hard time getting up the steep grades.
As we waited in the traffic we listened to the truckers on the CB. They said that northbound I-35 had about seven trucks jackknifed and that they were expecting an 8-hour wait. We finally got over the highest spot in the Arbuckles and started down the other side. After a few minutes we noticed that we were the only ones on the road. The other vehicles around us had already passed us (I thought they were all going way too fast for road conditions). We could see that there were no more people coming over the crest behind us. Then John heard on the CB that a truck had just jackknifed on the southbound side.
Thankfully, we had gotten over the crest before the accident happened. We heard on the CB that there were about 150 accidents along that one stretch of highway. We saw cars and big 18-wheeler trucks on the side of the road all through that area.
Around 3 a.m. we finally got through Dallas and started looking for a hotel. We didn't know it until the next day but God may have helped us find what was likely the last hotel available for hundreds of miles. Abilene was about 100 miles away and the roads into and out of it were impassable due to ice. So, all the Abilene hotels were full. We would have driven 100 miles only to turn around and go back to that one we stayed at. We were thankful that God led us to it first because we almost drove by it to look for the next one.
The next morning we headed toward Abilene. The local people advised against it, but we didn't want to miss another day of the mission. Abilene was certainly bad because it had about an inch of ice everywhere. Still, traffic was slowly moving and we got through it in several hours. About 100 miles past Abilene the roads finally got better, so driving was normal and we got to sing, tell stories, and pray.
As we got closer to El Paso, we all started getting excited. At about 11 p.m. we called Ron and Laura Sylvester, Work and Witness directors for Mexico. We had talked about ways we could hint to them that we wanted to go ahead and cross the border into Juarez that night. Fortunately, without our ever asking, Laura told us that we would cross the border right away.
By following her directions we found El Paso First Church of the Nazarene. There, a van was waiting to take us to the hotel in Juarez. We parked my vehicle in the church parking lot, loaded our stuff in the van and headed through El Paso toward the border crossing. Making the crossing into Juarez was fast and easy and we arrived at the Hotel Monte Carlo around midnight. The 750-mile trip had taken about 28 hours with 22 hours of driving time. . . [ read more ]
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Howard Culbertson, Southern Nazarene University, 6729 NW 39th, Bethany, OK 73008 | Phone: 405-491-6693 - Fax: 405-491-6658
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