Juárez. Just one word – disdained by the world, restricted by the fear that shackles her. A terror. Abandoned, scorned, forgotten.

Juárez. Just one word – my heart leaps. Excitement fills the air. Anticipation. My city, my home. LOVE. Beauty. Life. Friends. Hope and anticipation of what is to come.

I recently had a conversation with a sweet lady, a distant relative I had just met. We discussed the holidays and lovely things. She smiled, we laughed. Then one word changed everything. Juárez. Her face turned cold gray. She began with panic-stricken eyes to notify me of all of the horrors in Juarez, and that she lived in Tucson as if she were smack in the middle of it all.

She went on desperately about the cartels and the danger, spouting those fear-soaked phrases I have heard all too often. I explained to this sweet panicky lady that my belief is in One greater than the cartel, that we cannot abandon the ones left behind. I told her that we had lived in Juarez for nearly two years and have been making trips back ever since. I explained that I knew what it was really like and I was not afraid. Again she charged at me, slashing her words of fear in my face.

Eventually, as she realized that I would not concede, a vaguely familiar look came upon her face. I remembered this look from my childhood, it wreaked of disapproval and disappointment. Then, in a ‘tsk tsk’ tone she said,”Well, good luck.” And there it was. I had just been handed my papers and asked to leave. Scorned and discarded right along with Juárez. I guess I had chosen my fate. When I responded with “I don’t need luck, I have Jesus”, I could tell that she was no longer hearing my words. She had disconnected.

After her multiple well-wishes and apparent disassociation from the conversation, I politely pulled myself away from her disapproving glare. I was enraged. Heart-broken. So this is it, the conclusion that is reached. This is the response of fear: Dis-engage. Cut-off. Escape. Forget.

We get to be in Juárez again and my heart breaths a big sigh of relief. I am renewed. This is a beautiful place, a safe place, a place where my soul is restored, where I feel the presence of God like nowhere else. This is my favorite place because it is His favorite place. There is an excitement in the air here in Juárez that I cannot explain, an electricity that can only be experienced. In this place hope is born and dreams come alive. In this city of wild opportunity miracles happen, lives are altered, joy is discovered and love is found. This is the only place I want to be.

The comforting words of my faith that I repeat so easily must surely ring hollow to people struggling to find daily food and watching their children die.

Phil Smith, The Poor will be Glad

If some 30,000 people have been murdered in Mexico in the past 4 years, who do you think is really taking the hit? What do these murders mean for the future of Mexico and how will the children of Mexico respond to growing up under this tremendous oppression?

Undoubtedly, the reverberations of these murders, the grotesque violence and the endless convoys of men with guns, will have a long lasting and destructive effect on this generation. It has already been reported that 40% of young men in the state of Chihuahua “want to become sicarios, professional killers.” These types of reports are finally starting to weed their way to the surface of our entangled media outlets. But still, words are cheap without action. So what’s the answer?

On September 8, 2010, the El Paso Times posted a front page article about how Juarez police officers are giving hands-on “training sessions” at elementary schools teaching children what to do in case of a shooting. They will be doing these training sessions at every school in the city. I cringe when I imagine the little ones in Colonia Palo Chino on the dusty basketball court learning skills no child should have to learn. But this is happening. Ciudad Juarez is a complete mess and very few are willing to go there.

Most recently Denver’s Westword published a well written, poignant but unsettling article called Juarez’s children: Drugs, death and fear I have posted some intense quotes from the article, but I encourage you to read it in its entirety. The condition of Juarez and the detrimental transformation of an entire generation is terribly real and should propel all of us into action on some level.

What does this issue stir in you?

Juarez’s children: Drugs, death and fear
by Jen Friedman-Rudovsky

Laura says keeping Alfonso inside (her home) is her only choice, though she admits it’s no way to raise kids. “We have to put up with that for now,” says the 40-something hairstylist. “It’s got to change at some point, but the solution is not going to come from the politicians. All they do is send more Federales, and look where that’s gotten us.”

“In Juárez, your only choice is narco or the maquila,” says Susana Molina, an activist who helped revitalize a once-desolate public park. And maquilas are no dream job. The sprawling factories are infamous for deplorable working conditions, low wages, and long hours. “Narco,” Molina says, referring to narcotrafficking, “offers a better life.”

Even if Juárez were to give up its murder capital reign, it would still be deeply troubled. Education is substandard: 68 percent of 5-year-olds — about 65,000 children — do not attend kindergarten. Juárez has the highest drop-out rate in the country — 29 percent — and students begin leaving as early as the fourth grade. About 45 percent of those between the ages of 13 to 24 are neither enrolled in school nor have formal employment.

“What can you expect when the maquilas’ starting salaries are the same whether you have gone to school or not?” Jusidman asks. “There have to be other economic opportunities for Juárez residents if this city is ever going to change.”

We could not say enough about the joy, passion and energy that these young, driven students have ignited this city with this week. Their presence has been electrifying and has built a monument of love that will continue to shine brightly into so many lives. They are an exceptional team of artists who worked with delicate intention, who have cared for  and loved our Mexican brothers and sisters masterfully.

Our work here in the colonia has been liberated by the power of united creativity and joined hearts, weaving strong cords of peace into the fabric of so many souls existing together. And I can see that the swelling wave of hope has crested and is now crashing over this parched land. This is the beginning of something different. Love always wins over fear.

Visit our Gallery for more photos from our day!

Mural Photos by Aaron Johnson

Living on the border can cripple a person’s emotional range. I grow more numb with each passing day.

Charles Bowden, High Country News

The choice that we made to move to the desert cost Misty and me dearly. This has been a grueling battle on almost every level, but the longevity of the fight is what stunned me. I mean, I have been through some hard times, but I had never learned about endurance before moving to Ciudad Juarez. We had exhausted ourselves for over a year and a half in the desert trying to sustain our organization on our own with grit and determination, learning the hard way that we could not continue under that senseless pressure. And until recently our lives have been a whirlwind, a psychedelic mixture of beauty and difficulty, but we have survived the season and we are are not giving up.

In September of 2009 we came home exhausted, burnt and beaten up from a long struggle in Ciudad Juarez. We had been limping along our path, heads down against the wind and dust, locked in survival mode. We came home to recuperate and to be healed by love, not knowing that over four months would pass before we would be back to the border. The short story is that the old framework was not working anymore, we had to let go of our dependence on visiting ministry groups to sustain us. It was the summer of 2008 that the first groups started canceling their trips. I did not understand. I felt offended by the decision that so many people made to not stand with us and our new Mexican family. But seriously, how many moms and dads are going to send their children off to a city where over 4200 people have been murdered? How many adults would be willing to brave the Borderlands? The organization, like so many others on the border, took devastating blows when everyone recoiled from Juarez. When people stopped coming, funding stayed home with them.

I know what we are doing seems crazy, and I have often wondered what people really think when they look at us with those strange looks when we tell them what we doing in Juarez. I suppose it really is crazy, but what blows my mind is that nearly everyone we meet in El Paso says something like, “You couldn’t pay me enough money to go to Juarez!” Meanwhile, those same people often have close family members living south of the border. One guy said that he had not crossed the border in over a year even though his grandmother lived just a few minutes away on the other side. I find it interesting that people who are enamored with fear live in as much absurdity as people who are blinded by love.

Looking back on the road we have traveled over the past two years, I marvel that we made it. The desert did not kill us. Neither did the cartel or the thugs who wanted to kidnap us, or fear for that matter. Instead, in October we raised the stakes by embarking on a wild journey and the vigorous task of rebuilding, from the ground up, the entire Amigos organization. If I had know what I was getting myself into back in October I might  have given up and gone back to swinging a hammer. I am still learning, but I have a better grip on life and God after walking through the dark valley, the shadow of death. Through it all I have harvested some of the most priceless treasures, it has been a significant and adventurous fight.

The violence in our city has had far reaching effects and since the recent murders of Americans from the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Misty and I have had a lot of conversations with people about safety in Mexico. Sadly, this is a conversation that has been ongoing since we moved to Juarez in June of 2008. Some 4200 people have been murdered in just two years and in my next post I will recap some of the important information for beginning to understand the enormity of, as Charles Bowden says, the war next door. Although we are not currently living in Juarez, our work there goes on and we have been back on two short visits. Juan and Carmen have pushed through this journey with us and at every turn in the road they have led us from Juarez with their tireless faith and rooted hope for their people and their sad city.

There is not a darker or uglier city than Ciudad Juarez, so to me it makes sense that Jesus called us light. He said to go and shine it and to not be afraid. God’s love for his children who live under the heavy fist of injustice has marked me, and the hope that I have for their liberation drives me.

“We don’t play at the cantinas anymore because it is too dangerous. We do two funerals a day instead,” said musician Jose del Villar at the San Rafael cemetery after serenading a grieving widow, a black accordion strapped to his chest.

But residents have little hope. The only thing that the military presence has provoked here in Ciudad Juarez is more death.

- Reuters

There is a breathless moment in the early mornings in Ciudad Juarez when the the pink flush of dawn begins to glow on the horizon, bathing the streets in front of our house and the jagged desert mountains to the west in a calm serenity. The broken buildings look warm and uniquely Mexico. The moment is staggering and you have to be there precisely when it happens. Its like surfers describing that green flash of light the instant the sun sets on the ocean’s horizon: you have to be looking for it, you have to go out and meet it. The moment is a connection with purity and goodness, a clarifying burst of beauty in its undiluted form; it is hope taking the stage, like God’s face being unveiled before us for a millisecond. And for that millisecond, the atmosphere shifts, the air smells different and that flare from another world reminds me that I can go on.

These brushes with the deeper truth are always there, it is just more difficult to experience them within the rush and rumble of my day. I love catching these moments, quiet and alone in the patio, where I am infused with energy and the mountains of my day don’t seem quite so big. I have learned the hard way about being intentional in searching for these glimpses, the galvanizing connections, the intimate glances with God, especially living in a war zone. As I mentioned in Mornings in Juarez, the storm of death, violence and war can be an overwhelming cesspool of filth and residue that clings to my soul if I do not approach it from a centered perspective, God’s perspective. Otherwise I get trapped in the enormity of the statistics and the hopelessness, and spend the rest of my day buried under a pile of garbage, burdened and weary.

“Lost in the rain in Juarez…” Over 14,000 people have died in the last 3 years since Vicente Calderon stepped in as President of Mexico. 14,000 people. That’s over twice as many coalition soldiers that have died in the nearly 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The problems of Mexico and Ciudad Juarez are insurmountable if we go at them alone. We must approach them together, as family. Unfortunately, staring intentionally into the face of misery cannot be done casually, and sometimes it will spit right back in your face. It requires commitment, endurance and community. The deprivations of the earth are far too great for any one man to conquer.

Like most new and unfamiliar challenges, I had no bearing, no paradigm for what I was getting into by moving to Juarez. I remember my good friend Mike explaining that this was going to be the hardest thing that Misty and I had ever done in our lives. “Yeah, I know.” I told Mike. I had no idea what the (censored) I was talking about. I had no idea that just a few weeks after we moved to Juarez the tide of violence would surge up the sun-baked desert sand and pool in my new city. Nor did I anticipate that my entire being would meld to this city, in the midst of this wildfire, and that an outcast border town, with its trash and blood, would win my heart. The desert has changed how I live, how I respond to the needs around me. Ciudad Juarez is no longer a mysterious dusty smudge on a map or a blurb from a news story, it’s my city.

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

Billie Greenwood – Allvoices.com

Back in April we posted a short video from The Newspaper Tree about the “War on Drugs”, the failed approach to a seemingly endless war. Our friend Billie posted an incredible article about how this war has deeply wounded our border community. She highlighted a conference that took place on Sept 20-22 (this week) at UTEP (University of Texas at El Paso) addressing alternative approaches to the drug-war that President Nixon started forty years ago. It is sad to say that for 40 years we have been tripping all over ourselves in failed attempts to counter the drug problem. The U.S. has over 2 million citizens in prison, the largest prison-industrial complex in the history of civilization; most of those people are in for crimes directly related to economics and drugs. We have to change the way we have been fighting against these issues.

Watch the video and check out Billie’s thoughtful article at The Border Explorer.

If Jesus preached in New York City what he preached in Galilee, we’d lay him in his grave again.

Woody Guthrie

Living in a border town as volatile and spotlighted as the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez border will certainly challenge one’s worldview. It has flipped mine upside down. For example, try explaining the $7 million a mile border-fence, the iron cage dividing extravagance from abject poverty, to a people who have been suppressed by injustice, raped by world governments including their own, spit on and utterly demeaned by humanity. Or try justifying the meager wages, tossed from Fortune 500 companies like bread crumbs to pigeons, to my neighbors who work in the toilsome crucibles called maquiladoras. NAFTA was supposedly cooked-up to offer hope, but looking through the eyes of my new friends it seems it has only stolen livelihoods and offered shattered dreams.

There have been more arrests of social activists in this city than Narcos. My Mexican sisters are still being plucked off of the streets of Juarez, raped, cut to piece, discarded. Over 20 this year. Their innocent voices continue to cry out from the blood stained desert sand. The murders go unsolved.

Living on this side of the fence just might flip your worldview upside down too. But Juarez is fighting for hope.

Love for Juarez.

When I think about how deeply my heart has sunk into the desert sand, I laugh. I was swept away from the mountains, from friends, from community, from a lot of good stuff, only to land in the desert and begin to truly savor life. But it’s not like I have this thing figured out. I am simply here tilling away at the sand, warming up to a woeful city and falling in love with a tenacious people. This desert has scoured my spirit, revealing the marrow of life. Ironically, in a city plauged by death and fear, I have learned more than ever before about life, hope, peace, justice and love.

In a season where the world is being picked apart by war, pandemics, poverty, economic and ecologic depletion and fear, I see a movement of truth and love gathering in strength. And although the church in the United States has been lying dormant in her comfortable bed, she is waking. Justice has the upper hand. The song of hope and freedom is being sung around the world. Despite our differences, our hands are reaching through the fences of life, we’re uniting.

“We need to build justice, not walls!” – Pastor Kim Erno

I shot this photo in the square in downtown Juarez on April 16th, 2009.