There once was a man on a mission. He had been born and raised in the heartland of the American dream, but a child of whom nothing much was expected. He spent his childhood and the greater part of his adolescence getting himself into trouble and then swiftly getting out of it using his charming grin and Irish blue eyes. He spent time in the army as a young man and was stationed in Germany where he learned sufficient German in order to be able to sell army rationed cigarettes outside the base. He was kept away from Vietnam by sheer luck; he tried his hardest to enlist but his path was not meant to go that route and he eventually found himself back in the Mid-west with a new passion: Christianity. It's difficult to say at what point he felt that call- the strange yet distinct urging to do something specific as well as immeasurably difficult- but he felt it and one day knew that he was meant to go to Mexico.
It was the height of the hippie movement as well as the radical Jesus movement of the 1970s so the fact that a young man was getting ready to head South without knowing where he was going or even how to speak Spanish did not seem out of the ordinary. Fortunately, direction came in the form of a newsletter by Danny Ost (a man known as the ‘apostle to Mexico’) which somehow ended up in his mailbox. Aha! He thought. I’ll go work with Danny Ost. And so one day he, along with a young couple, packed up his Hippie Bus (a former school bus now serving the role as a type of camper), pointed its nose South and started to drive. The first stop was at Danny Ost’s headquarters in Laredo, TX. Jaws dropped at the sight of this young man who looked a rather shocking sight to these clean cut Pentecostals. In fact, he looked almost intimidating with his shaven head and unruly dark brown beard.
“Where are you going?” they asked with raised eyebrows and wide eyes.
Almost a little too enthusiastically (let’s not forget that our protagonist was still rather young and starry eyed) he replied: “I’m going to work with Danny Ost!”. It seemed inevitable that Danny Ost would, of course, be absolutely delighted to see him.
The people at headquarters overlooked their misgivings long enough to point him in the right direction – not so much because he absolutely convinced them of his calling, but rather because they had recently received a rather cumbersome donation of two massive speakers by a freshly converted rock star who wanted them delivered to Danny Ost in Monterrey, Mexico. It seemed easy enough to send them with this hippie – despite his rather uncouth appearance.
The young hippie responded with equal enthusiasm to the idea of transporting these speakers across the border – ah young gullibility can be bliss. When asked how much he would need to pay off the customs guards he responded with cheerful ignorance: “Nothing!”. The people at headquarters were hesitant to send him away empty handed so after loading the speakers onto the Hippie Bus ( a task which took two people per speaker to accomplish) they handed him a $20 dollar bill and sent him on his way.
Hence the young hippie found himself approaching the USA/Mexico border completely unaware that the items he was carrying would be impossible to get in with a $20 dollar bribe. He walked into the offices to get his paperwork filled out and then confidently walked out to have his paperwork and vehicle checked. A minute later he found himself being shouted and motioned at in a very energetic fashion by a customs official rather on the portly side. The hippie didn’t understand Spanish but he got the general idea that the speakers were a definite problem and that he wouldn’t be crossing the border with them. He had a choice: go back and leave the speakers or simply go back to stay. But a man on a mission does not let himself be deterred by the simple international rules regarding immigration, so the young hippie just simply…well…he hung out. He’d pop in cheerfully every little while to ask the customs officials if he could go into Mexico (he asked in English of course – he only knew a handful of Spanish words) and disgruntled and annoyed they’d shout back at him in Spanish to go home. Finally, irritated beyond belief and in a final play to get rid of this tenacious American, they huddled in a group and came to the joint agreement to let him through. It seems that the minute they ran up against this hippie they also had two choices: to let him through or to be consistently annoyed until they let him through. Most, I’m sure, where wishing they had avoided the hassle and just gone ahead with the first option.
But the war had not yet been won. The young hippie made it across the border but hit a second customs checkpoint in which the reaction was pretty much the same: a customs official started shouting and waving his arms about indicating that there was no way they could take the speakers through. The hippie decided to try a different approach.
“Iglesia!” he started yelling back in his painfully thick American accent. Iglesia means church and this was, rather fortunately (as you shall see), one of the handful of Spanish words that he knew. Then he pulled out his $20 dollar bill which had safely made it through the first customs check and tried to give it to the official. It’s difficult to say why the official felt moved by this obviously oblivious American’s shouting of this single word, but he pushed the money back at the young man and waved him through. As the hippie breathed a sigh of relief and made his way deeper into Mexico he couldn’t have imagined that this would be the smallest of the big adventures that awaited him.
