Judy Mays recently got back from the Caribbean, but it wasn’t a pleasure trip.

The Apex resident was volunteering at a church in Cuba last month.

It was hard work, but worth it for the 47-year-old who calls her 12 trips in several years to the impoverished country spiritually renewing.

Mays takes the trips with her church, Pullen Memorial Baptist in Raleigh.

She and other church members work with a Cuban Baptist church on building and other community projects in Matanzas, Cuba.

For Mays the trips are often like “going home.”

After all she grew up in a Spanish-speaking country herself.

She and her three siblings grew up tucked away in small-town South America where their parents served as Baptist missionaries in Chile.

Mays didn’t even make it to the states until high school, where she looked more like everyone else but never quite felt like she fit in.

These days she still dances between two cultures.

“Linguists would say my first language is Spanish,” Mays said recently from an outdoor cafe in Apex.

That’s where she lives now — Apex — and where she works putting her trilingual (she also knows French) skills to use as the owner of Language Solutions, a company that produces translations for materials like technical manuals.

It’s just her and one other employee working from a home office. She farms out contract work around the globe — South America, Europe.

She still travels the globe too. After coming to the states at 16, Mays has pretty much stayed put in North Carolina, mostly around the Triangle area where she attended Meredith College in the late 1970s, getting degrees in Spanish and business administration.

She and her then-husband did return to Chile for a year in the late 1980s, though that didn’t work out and they had to return.

Mays said she still feels attached to Hispanic cultures — their warmth, their openness — and gets to feel those things firsthand on the many mission mission trips she makes.

It is one of the reasons she likes to take the trips to Cuba.

“We learn more than we teach in terms of Christianity,” Mays said of the trips, noting that they reinforce the core of Jesus’ principles — taking care of people.

Mays said she also admires the way that Cubans, and people from Hispanic cultures in general, “live in the moment” and appreciate family and friends more than possessions.

Mays has tried to live in the moment in her own life. She calls her father Bill Andrews, now in his 80s, a hero, saying that even though they disagreed often on issues, she admires how he lives true to his beliefs.

Mays also lives a life true to herself. Married and divorced from the father of her two kids — an 18-year-old daughter and 23-year-old son — she now lives with her partner of 12 years, Martha Mullins.

While her American life is fairly stable, on her recent trip to Cuba last month, she saw some things changing — for the better.

She attributes Fidel Castro’s decision to step down as the reason it seems like the Cubans she worked with felt more comfortable talking about their country’s politics.

“It seems like there are beginning to be voices of change,” she said.