The history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins. He has been influenced at one time or another by France, Spain, the United States and the militant indigenists of his own country, and he crosses history like a jade comet, now and then giving off flashes of lightning. What is he pursuing in his eccentric course? He wants to go back beyond the catastrophe he suffered: he wants to be a sun again, to return to the center of that life from which he was separated one day.

Octavio Paz

Seven months ago I was not talking like this;  I was not writing like this. Of course, seven months ago I did not live in the so-called “Murder Capital of Mexico”. Maybe you all should not have sent us down here. I could still be tooling around with a saw and  a hammer and following Chad up routes that are way over my head on the weekends. I could be finishing the flagstone on my endless landscaping project, or buying dented cans and cheap coconut oil from the ‘weird store’. I could be skiing, maybe in some new AT setup or at least enjoying a mid mountain ale. 

Instead, I am looking out my barred window at razor-wire and trying to convince folks back home to join us here in the desert. 80 Mexicans have been killed in our tormented city since January 1. 13 over the weekend. Add that to the estimated 1600 in 2008. In 2007, there where less than 400 murders in the city, and it was a record number. The military and Federal Police have made the entrance to our patio a consistent parking spot for their Hummers and Pick-ups so that they can conduct their coerced searches. I was working in our future garden a few days ago with Cesar, our 10 year old neighbor and friend, when the convoy set up a check point just outside the gate. El Toro and El Lobo had been lazily and innocently enjoying their Mezcal and juice in the sun across the street. The soldiers, with the help of the Feds, rushed over to my inebriated amigos and stood them up, and obliged them to put their hands against the wall and spread their feet apart. This was nothing new for the Bull and the Wolf and I was impressed with their calm cooperation. At the same time, other soldiers were shaking down the ‘Yonke’ (Junk Yard/Car Parts/Mechanics) across the street. Nothing new for those cats either. The dissatisfied raid ended with the captain forcefully grabbing each hand of their detainees and pulling their fingers up to his nose hoping to smell residue from a ‘rooster’(marijuana cigarette). Nope. Innocent they were. The military searched a few cars, then the captain whistled to his men, pointed his forefinger to the empty blue sky and made a whirling motion, all the men jumped in their trucks and they zoomed away. I will never forget Cesar saying to me after the convoy was gone, “I cannot wait until things are normal again.” Yesterday Misty and I were eating breakfast at our kitchen table while we watched the soldiers running around outside again. What is ‘normal’ for Mexico?

Still want to come to the desert? Still think that we should be here? There is a lively debate taking place about the stability of the country, some are saying that Mexico could easily become a failed state. “Experts” from around the globe are calling the streets of Juarez a no-man’s land. The mayor of Juarez is supposedly living in El Paso. All U.S. soldiers are banned from partying in Tiajuana and Juarez. But I am not super concerned with experts making such claims, especially if they have never spent much time in this city, and our soldiers should probably stay home anyway and rest up for a new war or play cards in their barracks. What has me concerned are all of the aid organizations, churches, and well known ministries that are pulling out of the city. Without these groups who have historically lead in the struggle to bring peace, hope, and opportunity to this city, there is something very powerful missing.

Being present in a dark situation is a powerful tool. Imagine what Gaza would be like without aid workers. Imagine what Darfur would be like without peacekeepers. Recoiling from the situation, closing up our homes, putting up fences, and giving in to fear only empowers that which we are fighting against. Like Desmund Tutu says in God Has a Dream, “The statistics are discouraging and can be numbing. Only when we remember that the people in each statistic could be a member of our family, ARE members of our human family, do these statistics come to life. When we look squarely at injustice and get involved, we actually feel less pain, not more, because we overcome the gnawing despair and guilt that festers under our numbness. We clean the wound, our own and others, and it can finally heal.” I wrote this same statement as  a comment on a recent internet article posted by an El Paso blogger called Border Explorer. She posted her article on the All Voices site writing about the start of the New Year in Juarez where, the first day, three people were killed. I cannot help but feel that gnawing idealism creeping on again when I talk like this. I mean, how much philosophizing can we do before something actually gets done around here?

Seven months in and I am still stoked to be here. As much as I would like to be in the mountains, with all the richness and familiarity of my life in Colorado, this is where I am supposed to be. This is where God is waking me up, schooling me, breaking my heart for the things that break his, bringing my spirit to life in a way that I could never have imagined. Ironically, in this city where there is so much death running rampant, in this desert, I am coming alive.

When someone strips a man of his clothes, we call him a thief. And one who might clothe the naked and does not – should not he be given the same name? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat in your wardrobe belongs to the naked; the shoes you let rot belong to the barefoot; the money in your vaults belongs to the destitute.

-Basil the Great

Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.

-James 4:17

Recently I have been challenged to look at my life, at what I have not as my own, not as my right or entitlement. It was only by chance that I was born into an American family, have freedom and opportunity, can get a job, have a nice house, have food on the table at every meal, take vacations, buy a new car, change jobs and houses and cars, have hobbies like skiing climbing and jewelry making… I did not merit this blessing, but because of it I have a responsibility to give out of my abundance. Recently God has rend my heart, turned me upside-down, broken me and put me back together, and broken me again, shaken up everything I thought I knew, and challenged me to step into an uncomfortable beauty.

The early Christians said that if a child starves while a Christian has extra food than the Christian is guilty of murder.

-Irresistible Revolution 

How do we live truly transformed lives? We have to seek out the poor and destitute, we cannot remain in our insulated lives where the poor are nowhere around us. We have become such a sterilized society, scrubbed clean of all of our poor and unseemly; we look around and see everyone smiling, looking just like us. We have removed the gnawing reminders of the destitute poverty that most of the world is drowning in every day. We have stuffed our untouchables into the dark cold gutters and walked back out into the sunshine, proud of how we have squelched the problem. These are our brothers, our sisters, our family who are hurting, and we have the resources to help them. We are called to go out to those in need and to love them with the love of Jesus, who ate with tax collectors, befriended the prostitutes, and embraced the leper. But instead of going out, taking steps into this broken and scary world we don’t understand, we throw our money at institutions who are, in our place, being the hands and feet of Jesus, the active, grimy, heartbreaking love that cares for and embraces the untouchables. We toss our money and then go about our lives, living in so much excess that it rots around us while our brothers and sisters are alone, hungry, cold and dying. Where is the church, the body of Christ who is called to be the hope of this broken world?

Ask the poor, they will tell you who the Christians are.

-Gandhi

Our culture, in addition to instilling in us the ridiculous and false priority, nay necessity, of independence, the every-man-for-himself ideology that leaves you in the dust if you don’t fight and scratch your way to the top, has blockaded us in with an overriding and blanketing fear that if we do reach out, open up our doors, go out and find the poor and invite them to eat at our table, that we are in danger of something awful happening to us. We’re petrified. We are caged up by our fears, chained up and locked in, and the world is locked out.

God speaks to this fear that we have of man in Luke 12:4-7, “My friends, do not dread and be afraid of those who kill the body and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom you should fear: fear Him Who, after killing, has power to hurl into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And yet not one of them is forgotten or uncared for in the presence of God. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not be struck with fear or seized with alarm; you are of greater worth than many flocks of sparrows.”  His intent is not to scare us into serving Him, but to point out how ridiculous it is for us to fear man, and how much value that we hold. God’s love is powerful. It created life, died at the very hands of its beloved, and always welcomes us back in no matter how many times we walk away. This same love can cast off fear, go out and find the broken, and give them dignity and hope.

Once we conquer this fear, we must tackle the daunting task of getting past ourselves. It is uncomfortable to love as Jesus did. It takes our stepping out into sadly neglected and unchartered waters, and hearts pounding, sticking our hands into someone’s brokenness, someone’s poverty and pain, and most certainly getting their mess all over us. That is loving with abandon, loving till it hurts, loving your neighbor as yourself, that is perfect love.

It is easy to hide, and much more comfortable. Even though we have moved here to one of the most dangerous and hopeless cities on earth, plopped ourselves smack dab in the middle of poverty, destitution, corruption, brokenness, powerlessness and pain, even though my heart is breaking, crumbling to pieces for my brothers and sisters, my flesh and blood, and I get more passionate every day that this must change, I find as I read the words I’m writing that I am still hiding. Hiding behind language and cultural barriers, behind our metal gate and razor wire, and behind my wall of hard questions. How on earth can my actions truly make any difference? And even if they could, how do I even begin? What will this cost me? Even in the magnified simplicity that we are now living in here in Juarez, I feel like a gorged pig, reveling in my plenty and wealth while our next door neighbor just yesterday was wondering how he was going to feed his wife and children that night, while little Abby comes to our gate inquiring if we had eaten, saying she is hungry, that once again her parents couldn’t buy food and she and her 9 siblings went hungry. So we give her something to eat, and walk back through our gate into our cozy little house where the cupboards are stuffed with food, tripping over the shoes that fell off the pile by the door, we sit down on our giant beanbag sofa in front of our large screen computer, we put in a movie, grab our overflowing bowl of popcorn, turn up the volume, and forget where we are.

 

True generosity is measured not by how much we give away, but how much we have left…

-Shane Claiborne

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight, the weight we carry is love. Who can deny? In dreams it touches the body, in thought constructs a miracle, in imagination anguishes till born in human– looks out of the heart burning with purity– for the burden of life is love, but we carry the weight wearily, and so must rest in the arms of love at last, must rest in the arms of love.

Allen Ginsberg

Not long ago, Juan and I were driving down the road and I drove directly through a small stream of human feces. A pipe had burst open next to the road and sent a steady flow of sewer water, and all of the wild smells that come with it, into traffic. That was the first time that I had ever driven through human waste. This summer we had tremendous rain storms; so much rain fell that our sewer backed up into our house. The water bubbled up into our shower and from around our toilet, flooding our bathroom with an inch of sewer, and coming to its final rest in our living room. Nasty. That happened about four times this summer.

One of the first smells to greet us when we cross the border is a faint smell of waste. There are several places in the city that carry a constant and quite potent smell of crap, which you catch a whiff of when you drive by. It would be wrong to say that I appreciate that particular smell, and I am not entirely sure why I am thinking about it this morning. Maybe because it is good to reminisce about the funny stuff like driving through poop, but it is certainly not what has captured my heart about this city, nor is it the first thing that I think about our new home. It seems that blood and bullets, razor wire, violence, and waste overwhelm what is truly capturing about the desert and what is alluring about this country. It is unfortunate that Mexico can be such a barbarous place, it is certainly not just a long walk on the beach, sun tans, and margaritas. There is a darkness and oppression that has been rooted here for ages.

There are other roots as well, amorous roots that reach deeper, have lived longer, and indeed are much stronger than the incorrigible ones that everyone wants to talk about. Those are the roots of family and an ancient love that continues to thrive amidst the thorns and terror. This is the desert that I am beginning to know. The desert is not simply a scrap of dirt with a cactus and a vulture perched on top of it. The desert is just as alive and feral as the people that live in it, and it would not be what it is without them. It is part of those people, it works and lives along side of them, it is a convergence of emotions and feelings, beauty and passion. I have spoken to many people about my own surprise at how connected I feel to the desert and how I had never dreamed that I would live in a place like this. I even used to loath simply driving through this corner of the world. It seemed depressing, dry, burdened. I did not know the people and I had no connection to them. But over 2 million people call this piece of the desert home. Children live here, moms and dads, families, life is reborn and deteriorates, it blooms and wilts, just as it does back home. It is easy to forget that there are normal, everyday people that live their lives here when all we hear about are the guns, violence, and poop. It is easy to forget that these people are our next-door neighbors and that their problems are truly our problems, that their pain is our pain.

Hope continues to push us forward even though it is ferociously opposed on many levels. I need to continue to speak about that hope, foster it, and let it grow within me. And with resolution and belief, we can carry that light burden together. There are messy things all around us (I will not ignore them or stop pointing to them), but in the spirit of hope I now point to what is greater, stronger, deeper, and richer: love.

I have been making friends with El Toro and El Lobo. They are the neighborhood inebriated revelers. Nearly every Saturday morning astoundingly early we find them in the street, already halfway through a plastic bottle of Mescal, tottering around with brooms, sweeping the streets and stopping to howl out greetings to everyone that passes by. “Hey, Bro!”, they call out to me in heavily accented english as I begin sweeping our patio. Both of them have spent time in the States. El Lobo had jobs in Denver and Colorado Springs as a roofer. For the last month or two they have been hiring themselves out to the convenience store named Abarrotes Danny (Danny’s Grocery), the junk-yard, and our next door neighbors, sweeping and cleaning the streets for food and money. One day I was using a push-broom to clean up our street and El Toro yelled, “Competition?!” He likes to banter with everyone, routinely crowing like a rooster with that quintessential Mariachi squawk. He offered to borrow my push-broom and clean my street; now I am one of his clients. We give El Lobo and El Toro food, Izzy Juice drinks, or buy them soda from Danny’s for their time. I let him use the broom frequently to continue his work around the block. 

These are the cats that Juan does not want me talking with; he told me so again today. I know that it is good advice, but there is something about the way he says, “It makes me sad to see you talking with those guys. Avoid those guys. You cannot trust them. They can rob you or try to fight with you.” He is right, and I know it, but I cannot reconcile it in my heart, or my head. I think of Chad’s comment from Wide-Eyed. He said, “Minimize risk as much as possible, otherwise live. Just like the mountains I think.” And that is kind of how I feel about it all. When El Toro, El Lobo, and their sketchy side kicks are brazenly wasted, or high from huffing whatever they can find, I stay completely clear. I try not to even give them the chance to say ‘hola’. The mountains are not much different. Dangerous, inviting, lovely, mesmerizing, unpredictable;  but I do not want to stay away from them. I respect them. I know their danger but still I plunge into their granite cracks and snow filled couloirs. The truth is, I cannot live in this neighborhood and ignore the very people living in it; they are the alluring lifeblood of this community.

I have always been drawn to similar crowds from the streets. Spending significant time in East L.A., Skid Row, and in the heart of Mexico City not only added fuel to my addiction to this population, but it educated me in some alien way. I am from the rural lands: a country boy, almost a hick, and I was exposed to the wild way of the city. It left me with some hickey-country-hippie-townie way of thinking. I was branded by it. El Toro does not intimidate me, but almost inflicts my heart with pity. When I see him working so hard in the street I am laden with a deep sense of hope for him. Maybe, I think, today he will stay sober; this is his day… I am not naive, maybe a bit too graceful, but I understand his kinds’ dubious persistence. Even though they catcall her often when we walk by or if she is out in the patio, Misty will only smile, but never talks to them, interacts with them, or enables them space. We do not allow that risk. Like John commented in our previous post, “- just promise the people here who love you both that you will not lose vigilance and that, though you will trust in God, you will also use the brains he gave you to the fullest. Please watch each other carefully. Also, keep the mop handy in case one of the lions gets away from the circus.”

There are Bulls and Wolves prowling and snorting their way around in every neighborhood in this world. Chances are, one is kicking up dust next door to you. We keep praying for our new neighborhood and watching for that day when something as simple as a push-broom can bring light and truth to the hopeless.