"What would you say you do here?"

Yes, it's a famous Office Space quote, but it's also a common question that I get asked by friends and family back in the States. What kind of work am I doing in Mexico?

Los Niños, the organization that I work for, has been working in Tijuana for many years. The organization has a number of different branches, which would take a lot of time to fully describe in detail, so let me describe what I'm working on – we can save the other branches for a later post.

I'm a year-long volunteer with the service learning program of Los Niños. What we do is we bring groups of students from the United States down to Tijuana, and these groups typically stay here for anywhere from 5 up to 12 days. "Service learning" is an apt description for what they do during their stay – they work with the communities here on service projects, while also learning about the Mexican culture and people. In short, my job is to work with these groups.

That's a deceptively simple summary, because the work itself entails a lot more than being a glorified tour guide. When the groups are here, I'm not just supervising and giving talks – I'm working alongside the groups in the projects that we do here. The projects usually involve working to improve the schools in Tijuana. Three miles from the United States border exists some of the most profound poverty that you could ever experience – and education is key to breaking that cycle of poverty. Therefore, it's important that the kids in the schools get to go to school as much as possible, so they can learn. One of the obstacles to that is rain – although it doesn't rain here often, it can be a real mess when it does. Any unpaved surfaces here (and there are lots of those) turn to mud when it rains, and a lot of the schoolyards here are unpaved. So if it rains, the kids can't go to school for a few days, until the mud dries. Most of the time, our projects involve paving the school yards – that way, the kids can go to school as much as possible.

A lot of people ask me if it's like Habitat for Humanity, but really, it's not. What Los Niños does isn't charity – our mission is not to do work for the people, but rather to work with the people. We're facilitators – the students that come here and the communities here in Tijuana actually do the work and benefit from the work. The Mexicans are more than capable of doing work to improve their communities – but they just need people to help organize these work projects, and that's where we come in. We start out helping them organize these projects, but eventually, the communities start doing them on their own. And in a nutshell, that's our mission – community development. The communities here learn to come together, work to improve their lives, and develop themselves at the same time. It really is great to be a part of.

That said, it's also a lot of work. To pave the schoolyards, you need concrete, and that means we have to mix it – so it's a good amount of manual labor. We also have to make sure everyone is mixing it correctly, drinking enough water, and mingling enough amongst themselves. The idea isn't to have a bunch of Mexicans working together and a bunch of Americans working together, it's to have everyone work together. The culture mixing is every bit as important as the concrete mixing.

In the end, everybody benefits. The Mexican schools are improved, the communities come together, the students who come down here learn, and it's just a great experience in general. It's a lot of work, but to be honest, I wouldn't want to spend this year doing anything else.