Photo by Bruce Berman of Border Blog

My spirit craves relief. The desert cries out for liberation. This afternoon is dragging on and the pain in my neck has moved closer to my brain, tender lightning storms brilliant in my skull. I just read about some more people being shot up and down. Another drug rehab place. 18 dead. It’s the 4th Drug rehab center to be attacked this year. Nobody in the business is impervious. There is no escape. No resignation to be placed on the boss’s desk. Ciudad Juarez and her lonely sons and daughters stare into the trash filled streets, the broken down buildings and tyrannizing military convoys. Over 1800 sons and daughters murdered, their blood staining the asphalt and the sidewalks that we walk over. Little girls watching their brothers spill blood out of their skulls, twitching bodies in the gutter. Little boys being shaped by whizzing bullets and the barbaric show that opens each new day in this unbidden drama… (My journal September ’09)

From the west, Interstate 10 bends around El Paso’s Asarco, an old decaying smelter, and runs teetering over the Rio Grande nearly spilling into Juarez. It might be the most outlandish stretch of highway in the country as it flaunts its flashy curves over one of the poorest neighborhoods in our hemisphere, Anapra, Ciudad Juarez. The air over Juarez is often tainted brown with smoke rising from piles of burning garbage scattered across the city. The decorated mountainside rises in the Southwest with Benito Juarez’s whitewashed face painted on the rocky slopes. He smiles down upon the blighted city. My friends from Juarez say that it is a painting of Homer Simpson. My colonia is holed up directly under his worn out grin.

The distance between El Paso and Juarez is the width of a fence; houses face each other across chasms of self efficacy and the swollen rivers of pride and personal advancement. From above the Borderland is a sea of physical and spiritual poverty; over 2400 people were murdered on the dispirited streets of our city in 2009. El Paso urgently clings to the title of the 2nd safest city in the U.S., while Ciudad Juarez is being drenched in blood. The answers for this madness do not come easily, if at all, as Mexico is one of the most treacherous countries in which to be a journalist. Report the facts that are released by official sources, anything else is a death sentence. “In Mexico it is dangerous to speak the truth. It is even dangerous to know the truth.” (Atlantic December 09)

Sometimes I read through these articles, drifting through the words, the numbers and statistics like they were a grocery list: 2007 there was a record 300+ deaths. In 2008, that record was shattered with over 1600 murders. 2009 stands alone. But the problem with statistics is that they are ambiguous and nearly impossible for my mind to wrap around, and it frightens me that I can so easily ignore it all. So many miserable places in the world, yet most of the time I live spoiled nearly rotten, submerged in my comforts and my catered religion. It is only until I remember that within these statistics there are faces, names, voices; these are real people that have been murdered, flesh and blood, my brothers. “Statistics are human beings with the tears dried off…”

After living for over a year in Juarez I have had some face-offs with theses statistics and numbers, and I have had to make choices about how I am going to respond to them: from fear or from hope. And that is where the crux of living in a culture of despair and resign has been for me. Some days are submerged under the whitewater of a tenacious adversary, but most days the dream I carry for our fledgeling city burns like a hot coal on my tongue, hope coursing through my veins, and it’s hard not to scream out. We see the mess, it’s all around us, but we fight from victory. Darkness will not win. A brighter day is coming…

And now, God, do it again— bring rains to our drought-stricken lives so those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest, so those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing with armloads of blessing. – Psalm 126