As many of you know, Peluchi has become my partner down here. I see the guy almost everyday and he is the first one I ask when I need help building something or visiting someone. In fact Peluchi comes to almost all of the house visits I do. Sometimes he even helps me bake what we take with us. And in turn I help him with errands his family ask him to do (from pawning his uncle’s TV to finding his youngest brother when he didn’t come home one night). But I’m beating around the bush, what I mean is that we have become good friends.

It’s been a journey to this point, my first summer (2006) I only knew Peluchi as the guy who showed up at our fiestas. He seemed a little odd to me at the time, but nice enough. The next summer he helped me level the floor our second week (a task he still continues to do, he has a better eye for it than I do). We interacted the rest of the week as he continued to work for us. At one point I saw him get into a conversation with some people across the street. He came over and asked me to come and pray with him and the family because they were facing some tough times. I was blown away. This was the first time I had encountered a local who meet someone on the street and moved the conversation to Jesus and wanted to offer prayer immediately. I immediately knew there was more to him than the goofball reputation he had. Yet he just worked with us that week and so I only saw a little more of him that summer.

The next summer (2008) he was hired as a construction supervisor. And so we got to spend a lot of time together and we really became friends. But everything wasn’t easy, Peluchi is a hard guy to be the boss of—he shows up late and gets offended easily when given orders. These traits are why, for most of the time I have known Peluchi, he has been unemployed. His laziness was never a greater force than his compassion if he saw something as a real need. He would jump up and help me when he knew (or I yelled) that I needed it. During that summer I had felt somewhat cut off from the rest of the full time staff and this made me rely a lot on that summer’s construction team Drew, Jonathan, and Peluchi. But Drew returned to America and Jonathan now lives in Belize, so only the relationship with Peluchi remained in Croc.

When I first started house visits, they were very awkward because of my limited Spanish. I asked Peluchi to come and help and help he has! He has a great conversational gift and can glide between serious and funny like no one I’ve ever seen. He is also helping me come out of my shell with Spanish. Many Mexicans think I’m incredibly serious because I find it hard to joke around at all when I speak Spanish. But when Peluchi is around this is a lot easier, I feel a lot more confidence with my Spanish when he is part of the conversation.

This past spring I faced a hard decision, whether to hire Peluchi once again for construction. We had become good friends and he really wanted to work for us again, but his previous actions really spoke against him. I also was, and have since been struggling with whether I was having a good impact on Peluchi or not. He is my age, and yet he can’t hold down a job. I feed him a lot and pay for him whenever a group of us go somewhere. He had an incredibly hard childhood: bouncing around between uncles’ families, living on the street for a few years dealing drugs, and now coming back to live with his mom and four half brothers here in Croc. He never finished school. He has some chips on his shoulder that are the source of his response to orders. I wondered if I was just empowering these weaknesses to continue? Without my help, which was more than financial—it gave him a place and a purpose that had to help him answer his conscience when he thought about not having a job, would he be forced to grow out of these bad traits?

I talked often about this broad topic and whether to hire him or not with my roommate Rodolfo (who has been good friends with Peluchi for several years). I prayed about it a lot too. I felt that God had brought us together to do these house visits—we each had a drive for it and strong gifts/weaknesses for it that completed very well. I didn’t want to ruin that by turning him down. And I knew he truly wanted to help build the houses for the sake of helping the people of Croc. In March we had a month of construction and he volunteered at this often. He only came about half the time while the groups were here and he continued to sit around some, but this is fine when he’s not on payroll. When the groups left there was still a lot of work to be done and he helped me with all of it—I don’t know how I would have gotten the rehab center roof done without him.

Yet the spring helped confirm that his work habits hadn’t changed, he would be late (he never came to help in the morning) and would sit around more than was right for someone on payroll. And when he was volunteering we got along super well because I never did order him to do anything and everything he did I took as a favor and praised him for it. We got along incredibly well at this time. In the end he was more helpful as a volunteer than a worker.

In the end, with Rodolfo’s encouragement, I decided not to hire him this past summer. I laid it all out to him and explained why I wasn’t going to hire him. It was an awkward conversation and we had to have it twice because he didn’t take no for an answer the first time. I felt the conversations hit him hard; he could tell that I cared a lot and that it was difficult for me not to hire him—and that understanding gave force to my critiques about his work ethic and that he should be getting fulltime work.

By God’s grace our relationship didn’t regress after this and we have continued to grow closer. Throughout the past summer he would come to construction as he liked—some weeks often, some weeks only to help me level the floor. He would come more regularly when just the summer staff and I were finishing up things between groups. He is still helping me often with house visits, in fact yesterday, after a couple days without a house visit, he came by to ask when we were going again. It was great to see him eager and pushing me to visit.

But what is even better (and in fact is the motivation for taking this whole look backwards at our friendship) is that Peluchi has, just last Monday, both gotten a job and started going to night school! The job is only doing the electrical in a building and will probably be finished next week (and he has occasionally had jobs like this in the past), but the school thing really has me pumped. Rodolfo was just telling me about a month ago that he thinks I have been having a good impact on Peluchi. I’m a pretty disciplined person and, when the tasks are there, I can work very hard. I think this has gotten Peluchi thinking. He has also been around enough to see me get mad, depressed, and frustrated. We have talked about a lot of things. We’ve given each other advice about soccer, how the world should work, what the church should be like, and girls. And I think we have changed each other for the better.

A small piece, and the most difficult, of our history was to talk to him about why I didn’t want to rehire him. But I think it had an important part to play. I think unfortunately we typically critique our friends in a burst of foolish emotion or not at all for fear it will damage the relationship. But I think to really consider who the person is, to pray about it, to think about it some more, to have a mutual trust built, to love them and from this place to offer critiques can bring life. In fact I question a love that refuses to critique when there is need for it.

 Proverbs 27:5-6 

“Better is open rebuke
 than hidden love. 

Wounds from a friend can be trusted,
but an enemy multiplies kisses.”

But since Peluchi got a job this week, we decided to hold off on visiting his uncle’s (which I mentioned in the last post), We plan to go a week from today.

 Lastly, please be in prayer for me. YouthFront, in response to the lack of housing need in Croc, has asked me to lead a sister site to Croc. They want me to commit 5-7 years and have given me two weeks to decide (they asked me last Saturday, so it will be Saturday, September 19^th).