Part 1

The Alamos Language School
Alan Thompson took a 16-hour bus-ride from Tijuana to Alamos. There was no air-conditioning, and the open windows made way for dust to blow around the inside of the bus. Sleep was next to impossible.

“Every time the bus would shake you would say, ‘Thank you Lord. We didn’t crash,’” Thompson said.

This bus-ride brought then 27-year-old Thompson to the city of Alamos where he would reside for the next 22 years, sharing his love of Jesus Christ with anyone who would listen. But Thompson did not know this was his future as his bus arrived in Alamos. He only knew he was attending a language school for four months, aiming to become skilled in speaking Spanish.

“I wanted to learn Spanish, but I knew it wasn’t a normal desire. It was more than that. Almost like an obsession. I have to learn this language,” Thompson said.

Thompson was a believer in Jesus Christ at the time he left for Alamos, but he had no idea why God was bringing him to Mexico.

He and seven other Christian students arrived at the language school and received intense language training for the next three months. It was Thompson’s fourth and final month at the school that changed his life.

Every student was required to spend their last few weeks of school in another village, using the Spanish they had learned to survive. Generally, students would go in pairs. Frank Robles, founder of the school, had a different vision for Thompson.

“He met a Christian lady who had come down from Sante Matilde, and she wanted people (there) to hear about the Lord. He wanted to send me there,” Thompson said.

Robles wanted Thompson to locate this small village and find the woman he had met, Maria Zamorano.

The Journey to the Sierra Madres
Thompson accepted the challenge, and left alone to find the village of Sante Matilde. He took a train line that he thought would head in the direction of Sante Matilda, located in the Sierra Madre mountains of Chihuahua. After spending the night at the train station, he purchased a ticket to Santo Nino.


“When I got to Santo Nino I saw a small shack and three people standing there with mules, but nobody really lived there. They were just there to sell things to people who got off the train,” Thompson said.

He approached the woman in the shack and asked her where Sante Matilde was located.

“She pointed straight up to the sky. I was in the bottom of a canyon, and this place was at the top of the mountain,” Thompson said.

He asked this woman how to get to the village and she told him to take the path, pointing her finger at it. The path was so worn that Thompson continued walking past it until the three people at the train station yelled at him to turn around.

The trail he hiked was completely uphill, and carrying a backpack stocked with a month’s worth of supplies, this was no easy task. After three hours of hiking, he arrived at his destination: the village of Sante Matilde.

“When I arrived at the top it was a flat plateau, and dropped into a valley below. There were houses scattered around, and it looked like a small farming village, probably about 250 people,” Thompson said. “All the houses were made of adobe with pine-slatted roofing. They were beautiful earth tones. Reds and browns, and some multi-colored, and everyone had a garden.”

Thompson walked up to a house and greeted the family standing outside. He asked them where Maria Zamorano lived, and they pointed to a house across the valley. He made his way to the house, legs shaking from hunger and thirst.

“I went through all my energy bars for the month in one day, and I didn’t have very much water,” Thompson said. He refreshed himself from a small waterfall nearby and continued to the house of Maria Zamorano.


When he arrived at her home, Thompson said he felt like he had completed his mission already and in a sense, he had. Frank Robles had only asked him to find the village of Sante Matilde and make contact with Maria Zamorano. However, another mission was beginning to unfold, and it would consume the next 22 years of his life.

Part 2