By Sheri Monk

While Christmas may be long over, the season of giving is just beginning for many Southwest residents.
Marlene and Garry Packard and Barb Needham are leaving their Maple Creek homes this Saturday for Mexico.
This will be the Packard’s sixth trip to the impoverished country. The first three times, they went with Consul’s Church of God. Their fourth mission, they went alone and last year, they gathered a group of 14 from the Assembly of God church at Maple Creek to build an addition onto a home for a single mom and her four children. But this year, only three people can make the journey.
“Our mission has changed and for a while I was feeling sad, that there was just the three of us,” Marlene said.
The Assembly of God’s Mexico mission work is co-ordinated through Erma Fennell Foundation.
“Erma was really anxious to bring a group big enough to do another build project and she had a request from someone who desperately needed a home. I was feeling sad and praying about it,” Marlene explained.
She also said the recent earthquake in Haiti prompted her to re-evaluate their plans.
“I thought maybe we should be going to Haiti. This is crazy that we were going to Mexico and we really don’t have the means to do something. But be careful what you ask for – there’s been a terrible flood at the Vicente Guerrero area where we go and four of the major bridges were washed out,” Marlene said.
So, with renewed purpose, the trio will head right for the natural disaster to distribute food, water and hand out tarps for temporary shelter. The floods began on Jan. 20 after intense wind and rain storms and also struck California, causing damage in many major cities.
“People were literally stranded on either side of the bridges. There now has been some bridge reconstruction and if the storms don’t come in again and if the rain stops, God willing we’ll get there and there’s a lot of stuff we can be doing.”
Marlene says cash is what is most urgently required right now, though they will also be bringing food and tarps, as much as their vehicle can carry.
“They had so little to begin with and now whatever they did have has been washed away in the flood,” she said.
Marlene and and the others are very anxious to return to the project they constructed last year for the single mom.
“They were all five sleeping in one bed, the mother and her five children. Our team last year was able to go and add on to her house and build a lovely little home for her. By our standards, honestly it’s not much, Really it’s not much more than what you and I have for a garage or a shed, but to them it’s a beautiful castle. But she’s ben displaced because of mud in her home.”
The trio will travel to the home to see if they can help dig it out from the mud caused by flooding.
Needham and the Packers will be driving to their destination, a 2.5 day road trip. She says so far, they have never had any trouble getting into Mexico and are trying not to think of any dangers posed by the drug trade and the notoriously violent border towns.
“We’ve always been blessed. Erma frowns on anybody that has fears. She says if you have faith, faith is the opposite of fear. So we try not to have any fear. We’ve never had any reason to have fear, nothing bad has ever happened to us, so we just go covered under lots of prayer and lots of support. We’ve never had a problem and we don’t anticipate one this time.”
The Consul Church of God will be taking their mission sometime in March and the Burstall’s Hope Church will be performing their annual Mexico mission during the February break.
Anyone wishing to donate to Packard’s mission can contact her at 306-662-3592 or 306-662-3784.