Cuidad Juarez

I am returning to one of my favorite places in a few weeks: Mexico. Honestly, I can't even wait. This will be my fourth trip to the country and the third to a border town. In fact, this will be my second time building houses in the colonials outside of Juarez. The realness, the humanity, the need displayed in the people make my heart beat a little different. It always blows me away as I drive from one desert town across the border to another. The cultural and economic differences are stark. They may be our neighbors, but a lot of the time it doesn't necessarily feel like it and all too often we revel in the glory of an 'out of sight, out of mind' attitude. Having the veil lifted to see anew a people in desperate need makes sense of the human plight. I find myself thinking, it isn't all about that, because here there's this...there's a lot more to the story.

I am going down over New Years to get more filled in on the story. A group of 15 or so and I are going down to build a house, to see the change, to feel the people.

Aaron wrote this about Juarez and our trip:

Ciudad Juarez sprawls across the desert landscape, a mirror image of El Paso reflected out from the Rio Grande. To say it is an enormous place does not do the city justice. By some estimates, Ciudad Juarez grows by 50,000 to 60,000 people per year. As the population rises, so does its influence. It is, in many ways, at the epicenter of the social, political, and economic changes that are rocking the borderlands, that distinct cultural space riding the line between Mexico and the United States. The drugs used by your college friends pass through Juarez. The blinds hanging from the window of your bedroom were made in Juarez. And the wall separating the United States and Mexico was first conceived of, and built, outside of Juarez. But behind the political is always the personal. Life in Juarez, like in many of the newly industrialized global cities, is very difficult. It is expensive, dangerous, and hard. Minimum wage hovers around 5 dollars a day, but the high price of everything from land to milk would suggest otherwise. For many of the people fleeing rural poverty in southern Mexico, there simply is no way to get ahead. Casas Por Cristo is the chance to provide one of the four basics: food, water, shelter, and medical care. These are the things that make survival possible. We have no illusions. We are not changing the dynamics of poverty and systemic inertia that have trapped people in houses made out of cardboard, crushed tin, and pallets. But we can give one house. We can piece together the money and make ourselves present. Open ourselves to the possibility that hope and renewal always start one person at a time.


I anxiously await seeing God move in the lives of those effected by Casas por Cristo and in our own lives. I anxiously await better understanding the story of how our humanity meets God's divinity.