wfn.org | Borderline morality

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Note #6348 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

25-January-2001
01025

Borderline morality

Presbyterian-related group feeds Mexican children,
educates North Americans about the evils of exploitation

by Evan Silverstein

NOGALES, Mexico -- It's another sunny day and Rodolfo "Fito" Alvarez has a
smile on his face, as he does every morning in this poor Mexican town across
the border from Arizona. That's because in just a few hours, some of the
hundreds of children he cooks for at Casa de la Misericordia (the House of
Mercy) will file into the simple barn-like mess hall for what will likely be
the only balanced meal they will eat all day.

	"I've made a habit of coming up here and being with them every day," said
Alvarez, a man in his 60s who has worked continuously at the Casa since
1982, two years after the mission opened in a chapel he had helped to
construct. "And if I'm not, I really miss them a lot, the kids. There’s a
lot of kids. I play with them."

	The free "hot lunch program" is one of a growing number of social and
educational services now offered to the center's neighbors by its new
non-profit, ecumenical owner, BorderLinks. The Tucson, Ariz.-based,
cross-border educational organization, founded by a Presbyterian mission
volunteer in 1987, is operating the Casa as a neighborhood resource center
while working to extend services to Presbyterians and other Christian faith
groups from North America.

	"I'm very happy working here," Alvarez said with a smile, attentively
stirring a steaming vat of chili on the Casa's gas stove. "I give thanks to
God that I've been put here where I can help and serve the community."

	The meals program, which feeds 300 to 400 children each school day, evolved
from the efforts of another Nogales resident, Sixta Torres, a Pentecostal,
who 20 years ago started handing out sandwiches to school-bound children
each morning.

	BorderLinks bought the two-story cinder-block lunchroom-and-chapel complex
last year from the Torres family, which had dreamed of transforming the site
into a full-service center for the struggling community.

	Last year Alvarez and other Casa staff members served about 63,000 hot
meals to children from several surrounding neighborhoods, kids ranging in
age from 1 to 15 years. Casa de la Miseracordia is believed to be the only
program in Nogales that serves square meals to the poor at no cost.

	"I just think this is a really great program to have here for the kids,"
said Katie Hudak, a Cleveland, Ohio native who works as a BorderLinks trip
organizer. "It is a great help, because what often ends up happening is that
the mothers go to work. The kids will come home from school and there's
nobody there. There's no food ready. So this is where they can come to get
something to eat, and have a place to hang out."

	Topping the Casa's lunch menu on a typical day: tuna salad, macaroni,
potatoes with cheese, beans, milk or fruit punch. Sometimes there is meat
with vegetables.

	Officials of Casa Misericodia, which sits atop a steep hill overlooking the
Colonia Bella Vista neighborhood, also sell donated clothing at low prices,
with all proceeds going to support the hot-lunch program. The Casa also
provides clean, safe drinking water at about half-price; sponsors
adult-education workshops aimed at strengthening families; and offers
educational programs that nurture grass-roots community organizations.

	"This will become a full-blown community center," said Rick Ufford-Chase,
the founder and international director of BorderLinks, a mission diaconal
worker for the Worldwide Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church
(USA). "What we hope will make it unique is that it will also be an
international learning center. We want to run retreats here at the same time
we’re reaching out to the local community."

	The sprawling urban area that includes Nogales in Santa Cruz County, Ariz.,
and contiguous Nogales in Sonora, Mexico, lives up to the checkered
reputation of U.S.-Mexican border towns. Tiny homes made of packing crates,
cardboard, scrap lumber and corrugated tin hug the sides of steep ravines
littered with garbage, abandoned cars and rusting household appliances.

	Children and teenagers who live in the festering drainage tunnels under the
border come out to run the streets, ripping off tourists or travel-tired
stragglers from the south. Most streets are narrow, rutted dirt paths
winding up the sides of dusty hills. Schools are so overcrowded that
students attend classes only four hours a day.

	In most families, both parents work most of the day sewing women’s
underwear, preparing surgical prep kits or assembling computer boards or
electric power supplies in foreign-owned factories known as maquiladoras,
typically earning $45 to $50 for a 48-hour work week.

	"With the kids in school just four hours a day, one of the big problems in
the neighborhood is vagabonds," said Ufford-Chase, a native of York, PA.
"What do the kids do with all that free time and no supervision because
their parents are working 10 hours a day?"

	BorderLinks hopes Casa will increasingly become the answer. In 2001
BorderLinks hopes to launch a new day care center while promoting cultural,
educational and sports activities for neighborhood schoolchildren. Officials
are also developing small community banks to foster small businesses and
other economic opportunities.

	Also in the planning stages for the Casa: computer literacy and Internet
training; small business incubation and skill-building/self-esteem workshops
for adults; and a "safe place" program to keep kids off Nogales'
crime-infested streets.

	"Part of the idea is to use the day care and food program to draw the kids'
parents onto the property," Ufford-Chase said, "and then to begin offering
classes in parenting, computer technology, literacy ... anything that they
think they want and need."

	Meanwhile, BorderLinks' primary mission continues to be providing
experiential education with a theological perspective to people of faith by
conducting tours of the U.S./Mexican border area, allowing participants to
witness first-hand the harsh consequences of an exploitive global economy.
Last year more than 900 people representing church groups, community
organizations and universities from the United States and Canada took
BorderLinks-sponsored tours ranging from one day to three weeks.

	"For the last six or eight years, BorderLinks has been saying, 'Come to the
border, see what happens when the First and Third Worlds come together,'"
said the Rev. Lerry Chase, a Presbyterian minister who is Rick
Ufford-Chase’s father and BorderLinks’ director of development. "The
question we ask is, 'What does it mean to be a person of faith living in the
First World, when you understand that your lifestyle is supported by the
labor of the Third World? What moral, theological and ethical questions does
that raise for you?'"

	The ecumenical organization, which employs 11 full-time staff members in
the United States and eight in Mexico, recently shuttled a PC(USA) committee
around the Arizona-Mexico border area, introducing them to Nogales
residents, stopping for lunch in struggling neighborhoods and visiting a
maquiladora factory.

	Members of the Presbyterian committee on Mission Responsibility Through
Investment (MRTI) also met with a Mexican order of Catholic Sisters in
Nogales who work as BorderLinks staff.

	"Part of the reason for that is we want people who come here to go away
empowered by what they see Mexicans doing for themselves in a neighborhood
like this one," Ufford-Chase said outside Casa Misericordia, addressing the
MRTI committee members, who sacked out in a modest dormitory above the Casa
dining hall during their two-day visit.

	"What we have here is the social reality of the maquiladora economic
system, and BorderLinks is helping us not only to understand that system,
but to meet the real human needs that are created by it," said the Rev.
William Somplatsky-Jarman, the PC(USA)'s associate for MRTI, which monitors
corporations whose stock is owned by denominational entities. "You have
thousands and thousands of people here working in these maquiladoras living
this way and trying to house and feed their families. Without this program
their lives would be a lot more miserable."

	MRTI members also met with border-patrol officials, members of a Nogales
Presbyterian congregation and a local chamber of commerce representative,
all of whom challenged them to re-examine their beliefs and assumptions
about economic issues relating to low-income border towns and the rippling
effects they have on lives in the United States.

	With an annual budget of $450,000, BorderLinks depends on donations from
individuals and churches, including PC(USA) congregations, which provide 30
percent -- roughly $135,000 per year -- of its income. The rest of its
revenues are from program fees and grants.

	"BorderLinks over time sees the (Casa) property as a place where Latin
Americans and North Americans can come together to look at the difficulties
that the border highlights, but (that) take place in all of our
communities," said Ufford-Chase, "and to start working on how to build an
international movement of justice, and how we cross borders to do that
work."

	For more information, contact BorderLinks 
by phone at (520) 628-8263 or by email at program@borderlinks.org, or log
onto the group’s Web site  — www.borderlinks.org.

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