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Family plans trip to Mexico to share blessings
CULBERTSON, Neb. -- Alicia and James Hegwood feel blessed.
"We have been very blessed," Alicia says. "We have our family. We have a nice home. And we have love."
She continued, "God has called us to share that with others."
For that reason, Alicia and James and their five children, of rural Culbertson, Nebraska, will make a mission trip to Tijuana, Mexico in February to build a kitchen in a hospice center whose patients, until last summer, were shaded only by a tarp.
This trip will be James' third trip to Tijuana, and Alicia's and two of their sons' second trip.
It was last summer that another missionary group built a permanent structure for the hospice center under the tarp. Alicia and her fellow Baja Vision Ministry missionaries return next month to add a kitchen to that structure.
Alicia doesn't have qualms this year about the trip as she initially did last year. She admits that she struggled last year over whether to go or not. "Not with my own children at home. And I have no carpentry skills. And I don't speak their language," she said were her thoughts.
"But God sent me a word: Matthew 4:19 -- 'Go and I'll teach you to be fishers of men.'," she said. "It was a very profound word for me." So she went. "And I was the only one of the 20 who could even remotely speak and understand Spanish," she said recently, smiling with the memory.
Alicia said the first hospice center they visited last year was in a nice facility. The second was under the tent. As Alicia's and James' group arrived, the hospice's officials fell on their knees and wept. "They told us they had been without food for two days," Alicia said. The experience hit her hard. "Here, if someone says, 'There's nothing in the frig,' there's always something. They have ramen noodles, at least," she said. "But these people had literally nothing in the refrigerator. It was completely empty. Nothing. They had prayed to God for food," and the missionaries arrived and were able to provide them with about $800 worth of food. "It was an amazing experience ... it was very humbling," Alicia said.
Alicia learned last year that the needs are great there. For one day of their five-day trip last year, the mission group helped at the City of Angels orphanage, providing food and purchasing a washer and dryer. The group helped wash clothes. Alicia's a cosmetologist. "I cut the boys' hair," she said.
Alicia feels she definitely got more out of the experience than she put in. "That's how God works," she said.
It's at the City of Angels orphanage that Tenielle Lytle of McCook works. She keeps track of the needs there, and works closely with Sergio, who started the Baja Vision Ministry, with which the Hegwoods are involved.
Tenielle is right now at Sheltering Wings orphanage in Burkina Faso, Africa, but she and her mother, Michelle Lytle, also of McCook, will be in Tijuana when the Hegwoods and the missionary group arrives.
The mission trip costs $1,200 per person: $400 for the plane ticket and $800 to put toward meeting the needs of people they encounter and help in Tijuana.
Sergio will make arrangements to purchase supplies and pay for labor to pour the new kitchen's concrete floor before the mission group arrives, so they can get right to work on the structure. The kitchen will cost about $4,000.
Alicia says, with conviction, "Life is about serving others. God tells us, 'If you love me, you'll feed my sheep.' That's what we're doing -- not just physically, but spiritually as well."