El Comedor - part 3

Shortly after I arrived at El Comedor, a pretty young woman approached me shyly with a smile. She grasped my hands, and spoke softly but rapidly - searching my face. My Spanish is still pretty limited…I squeezed her hands and nodding my head, smiled back, "Buenos dias, hermana." (good morning, sister). She gave a quick dip of her head and turned to find the bathroom.

10 minutes later she was back, this time talking even more intently, scanning my face. Carol was standing next to me and began to translate, “She’s offering you $2,000 if you’ll take her to Florida. She knows it’s dangerous to cross and she doesn’t want to go with someone who will hurt her. She says you look kind…that she will be safe with you.” Stunned, I slowly shake my head no…her voice grows more urgent, ”then papers, please sell me papers…put me in your pocket and carry me across the border to Florida. I have a brother there, he will pay you. Please…” Her name was Caterina and she talked faster than Carol could translate, so after a bit, Carol gave up and I followed the conversation as best as I could. And then Carol filled me in afterwards.

Caterina had been repatriated that morning. She’d been caught just over the border and sent immediately back. She’d lived four years in Florida with her brother, working in a hotel, had then returned to Michoacan (in southern Mexico) where she married and had 3 children. It wasn’t clear to me what had happened to her husband, but he was no longer in the picture. Carol was clear – no we could not help her get into the U.S. or get her papers. It was illegal for us, and could mean 20 years in jail for us and jail time in the U.S. for her as well. Caterina seemed confused that Florida was as far away as Carol described. Surely it was only a day away.

When Carol and I returned from the bus company Caterina was sitting on the wall outside El Comidor and we talked more. She’d been working in a hotel restaurant and enjoyed that work, but her mother and father had died and she’d ended up living with her sister and brother-in-law. “They do ugly things. It is not good for me to live with them, not good for my children.” She was desperate to get to the U.S. to earn enough money to get her children out of that situation…even though it meant leaving them for now in the care of people “doing ugly things. What choice do I have?”

That’s when her face crumpled and she began to cry. “What will I do?” I asked if I could pray each morning for God to answer that question for her. She said yes and asked for me to pray for strength and for God to help her.

And that’s what I’ll do. Her picture will hang on the bulletin board above my desk where I’ll see it each time I sit down to work. But…it hardly feels enough. On the day after Valetine's day, my heart got shattered. I'm praying it stay's that way.

El Comedor - part 2

Carol, a member of a UCC church in Tucson, comes to El Comedor every Tuesday with a group of the Green Valley Samaritans that delivers blankets and hygiene kits. She invited me to walk with her around the corner to a bus company. “When people are deported here – they walk back into Mexico with what they’re wearing. No one I’ve seen arrive at El Comedor, lives here in Nogales – they’re all from somewhere else in Mexico. Our work is to help stabilize them and help them get back to their homes. The man we’re going to see has a local bus company. He offers the returning migrants ½ price bus fares and free phone cards, so they can call friends and family to wire the other ½ of the fare.

“It’s not much of a place, you’ll see, but he’s put in showers and created shade, they can get water – it’s all free. He's a good man.” In front of the dirt yard, there’s a sandwich board sign that Carol translates. ‘Migrants you are welcome here. You can take a free shower, rest in the shade, get a drink of water. We'll help you get home.’”

She continues, “I’m stopping by because I’ve found someone who will donate some solar hot water heaters and I need to find out if this fellow can use them and if so, how to get them across the border to him.” The Mexican border guards can be picky about what they let in. Bring clothing and supplies over in plastic bags and they may decide to not let them them in. Bring then in a suitcase and all's well.

We walk into the bus yard. The office is a battered trailer. Next to it is a large shaded pavilion created by stretching blue plastic tarps between poles. Underneath are banks of what looks like greyhound bus seats – probably 50 seats in all – and a quarter of them are filled with men resting and waiting for their turn in the showers.

“We want to help them get home. Providing this kind of support helps. But also, we talk with them about the dangers of illegal crossing and living as a undocumented worker in the U.S. We do our best to discourage them. Most are uniformed about what they face. A good number are picked up and deported after living and working in the U.S. for several years. When they first entered, it was much easier, much safer. The new policies have funneled people deep into the desert and the mountains. They don’t have a good idea of the distances involved or of the dangers.

“Some of the women and men I talk with are determined to try and get into the US – that’s the only future my family has, they say. I don’t know the answer. We have to have secure borders, but we also need ways to allow people to immigrate into our country – that’s our history…and our future. What we have now isn’t working."

El Comedor - part 1

Cross the border from Nogales, AZ to Nogales, Mexico and one of the first buildings you come to is El Comedor, a Kino Border Initiative center providing food, clothing, blankets, hygiene kits and first-aid to people who've been deported from the US. Men and women come with only the clothes on their back, many of them are injured from having tried to walk the desert. Some of the most common routes are from the border to just south of Tucson - that's 90 miles.

I spent Tuesday morning, at El Comedor with a group of volunteers from Green Valley Samaritans - an ecumenical group that provides humanitarian aid. (The Samaritans partner with ranchers, the county, and the park system to place barrels of water in the desert They clean up the camps they find, where migrants have changed into their one set of clean clothing and then left everything else behind - so they will blend in better as they leave the desert. They help injured migrants they come across. )

Last year there were 253 confirmed deaths in the desert sector from the border north toTucson. That's just the persons that were found in this rugged terrain...and just the ones in this sector. Many are young women. Many are children. Last year, volunteers found a child nestled in mother’s lap, under a bush, both dead. Estimates are that 5 times those counted in the Tucson sector died. In just this past year…after the border was "closed." For the Samaritans, the issue is, "people are dying in our back yards. It's inhumane and unchristian to not provide aid." Border control appreciates their work - they don't want people dying in the desert either.

Back to main story...El Comedor started in 2006 when 8 area families simply began serving breakfast one day a month. That moved to twice a month, then others started joining in - the sisters, the jesuits, Kino - now it's twice a day, every day of the year. I was there with a group of pastors from our conference who'd come to Arizona to learn about immigration and border issues, issues that directly affects Washington State and particularly my district.

Aldo, a young man doing his required year of community service as he heads toward becoming a Jesuit, met with us to talk about the ministry at El Comedor. The structure is built into a dirt hillside – dirt walls on the back and one side – open steel grating and tarp enclose the other two, corregated steel roof on top. The 16 x 20 room is filled with rows of picnic tables. At 9am and 4pm a simple meal is served by the volunteers– they go through ton of tortilla a month. After the meal, the tables are cleared and re-filled, this time with clothing, blankets and hygiene kits. Repatriated migrants are allowed back in, the newest repatriated first, to pick up one item from each area. A small health clinic is across the street. Foot injuries are common. Not knowing what lies ahead and having been told it's only a short walk, it's common for women to wear shoes they'd wear to church.

Many if not most who choose to walk across the border north into the US, are not prepared for the journey they face, particularly if they’ve come from the more verdant or tropical parts of Mexico or Central America. They are told by the “coyotes” they’ve hired (I was told the going rate is $1500 - $7000/person) that freedom and hope lie “just over the hill…an easy path!” They are totally unprepared for the heat of the day, for the below freezing temperatures at night, for the sand, for the lack of water. It’s five days if all goes well. Much longer if they stray off the very hard to follow paths.

Harry, one of the Green Valley Samaritans, gave us a nutshell briefing on the illegal economy of this border area. “Guns and money south into Mexico. Drugs and human trafficking north into the U.S.” Aldo adds, “we have a saying in Mexico – the poor are not criminals and the criminals are not poor. You can really see that here. There’s a lot of money to be made in this area if you’re doing criminal things (drugs, guns, money, human trafficking) – so those aren’t the people we get here at El Comidor… they generally aren’t the people who get caught, they know better.” El Comidor and other border area ministries end up working with men, women and children who are economic refugees. They’ve left home because there’s no way to support themselves or their families. They come to work. To stay is to die.

Aldo says that undocumented workers were the first in the U.S to know that a recession was coming. They were the first to get laid off from their low-paying jobs. "They'll also be the first to know that things are getting better." Grateful to work for less than minimum wage , they'll be the first for companies to re-hire.

I'm starting to understand that migration is driven by economies. And, that migration is a world issue - I've so much to learn.

the AND

Did you know...

in 2009 in answer to survey question "are you spiritual or religious?" :

• 30% spiritual
• 48% spiritual and religious
• 9% religious
• 9% neither

In 1999 only 10 years earlier, this is how people responded:

• 30% spiritual
• 6% spiritual and religious
• 54% religious
• 9% neither

Did you catch that???? We went from 54% of the population who identified themselves primarily as religious (identifying primarily with the organization or institution, where spiritual meant identifying primarily with experience) to 9%.

What's going on? That group is aging and dying, said Diana Butler Bass (who writes on the intersection of religion, church, culture, political life) They may still be in our churches, but they are growing fewer every day.

I spent the day with Diana and a group of faith-based coaches, consultants, spiritual directors and denominational leaders from 5 denominations in Balitmore at a 3 day networking/learning/resource sharing event.

The group that's growing? The percentage of people who say they are spiritual AND religious.

Now, that's not to say that those two happen in the same place for most people. Often spiritual happens in the Thursday morning yoga class or the Tuesday evening meditation circle and the religious part happens in the once-every-couple-of-months church service a person attends. Religious is their church part. Spiritual is their circle of support or their art journal group or their woodworking or..... Often things that have no connection with the church they're affiliated with.

"Show us the AND!" is what folks in our churches are saying. "Give us a structured way to experience the transcendent and a way to talk about it with each other." Historically, that's what renewal movements have always been about, whether it was the Franciscans or the Methodists, or today the emergent church and neo-monastic movements (among others)

When Diana speaks to groups she's been running an exercise where the group lists words they associate with religious and with spiritual. She has them make lists, take off the loaded, judgement laden words, and then note the words that are on both lists. After running this exercise with lots of groups from lots of faith traditions here are some of the words she finds on both lists: community, justice, liturgy, singing, worship, theology.

That, she says, is our to-do list.

Now....what is our stop doing list?