It was there in the city of Mazatlan, Mexico, where a small-town boy from Peoria met Jorge, a man who would change his outlook on the world. Jorge, a father of five, had recently quit playing the guitar, his only means of income for his family in this coastal city with a population of 800,000, to work on building a better relationship with God.

Struggling to find salvation and bring food to the table for his children in what Mike Berardi, Peoria native and children’s pastor at the Vineyard Community Church, describes as a clash of “extremes,” Jorge picked up a brush and started painting on plates.

In a matter of weeks, Jorge was selling his artwork for more than $5 a plate and providing for his family. His success, Berardi says, is linked directly to his relationship with God.

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Berardi led a group of 13 church members last week to the Mexican coastal city to donate food and clean water to the many impoverished locals who live around the center of the tourist area. Berardi has been on these short-term missions to Latin American countries before, but he said the desperate poverty he sees astounds him every time.

He witnesses men scavenging for plastic and scrap metal over heaps of trash.

“They are incredibly poor and incredibly impoverished,” Berardi said, “but the people who have relationships with God are so incredibly happy.”

Doing such short-term and long-term missionary work has its dangers. Last year, 17 missionaries lost their lives in countries in Africa to the Americas, according to a report by the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Three deaths were reported in Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia.

Berardi said he never felt any danger while in Mazatlan or the surrounding village areas and never encountered any opposition to their work or its message.

Stephannie Cabrera, a graduate student at the College of Business and Administration, was one of three Spanish-speaking missionaries along for the trip. She watched what the locals called “infernito,” or “little hell,” out of her bus window.

“Infernito” is a camp for about 500 people who squat in makeshift homes made of cardboard and drift wood. The squatters are always at the whim of the government because they do not own the land they live on. Cabrera would see children working any way they could to make a living, selling gum or hanging around dangerous construction sites.

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Cabrera watched all of the extremes that Berardi witnessed and realized how much she took for granted in the United States.

” They have absolutely nothing and they’re happy,” she said. “And here we’re not happy until we have everything, so it was great to see that life is not about material possessions.”

In the village of Madero, a town outside the tourist attractions of Mazatlan, Cabrera sat and chatted with women of her age who have three or four children and were married at the age of 15. They told her their stories of how they wanted a better life for their little girls, a life with a future away from the physical labor they had come to know all their lives.

“They admired me for going to school,” Cabrera said. “They would say that’s what I want for my little girl.”

The trip was emotionally and physically draining. The mission group would return from long days outside the city, where they would be building sidewalks and feeding large groups of children from mobile kitchens or building water filtration units to allow some of the squatters access to clean water.

Mirielle Lugo, a 25-year-old senior in radiological sciences, is still drained from what she witnessed. She also translated for the group. Translating stories of extreme heartache and listening to mothers, some like Ida, a mother of three who became addicted to drugs, after her husband had left her.

” (Ida) is a survivor,” Lugo said. “She is a survivor for trying to quit drugs and giving herself a try again. She is the picture of a woman doing it for herself.”

And through this picture of extreme poverty, the Vineyard church group came away with one thing in common, as Cabrera put it:”The only God they will see is through people’s actions,” she said.

Reporter Moustafa Ayad can be reached at [email protected]