I arrived in El Paso last night, through towering thunderclouds as the plane, an hour late, negotiated the air currents of the arid region. Flight attendants remained seated, but lightning never hit us, nor did we hit any real turbulence. I emerged from the airport baggage area and felt the warm, desert air wrap itself around me like a coat. Fr. Bill came by in the car in a few minutes, and I tossed my bag in the back seat and got in.
Part of the peace and joy of arriving is seeing old friends from my days in Chile, and even before. Fr. Bill and I were in the seminary together, jamming with piano (me) and guitar (him), before I left for Chile in 1980, still a seminarian, and grew to regard Fr. Dennis with awe, as a moral theologian who lived among the poorest and kept an open house for the homeless and the alcoholics in the town of San Antonio. I live with Fr. Dennis now, and we relived some of the adventures of life under Pinochet, especially the peaceful protests against torture. Fr. Dennis' fifth arrest during a protest--which usually counted on the participation of over 100 well-organized people, deeply instructed in the ways of civil disobedience and not offering resistence to aggressors--ended in his expulsion. He spent five days in a police holding cell--including Christmas Day--before being put on a plane without luggage or passport.
As it happened, my parents and my two younger brothers were visiting me at the time, and while Mom and I and the boys were busy at something, my Dad was invited to go along with one of our priests to visit Fr. Dennis in jail. The people from the anti-torture movement, waiting outside the police station to keep vigil for Dennis, convinced the police to let this tall, distinguished-looking American in to visit him, accompanied by another priest. Dad was moved--Dennis wasn't the wild radical he was expecting to meet, but a quiet, thoughtful and rather ascetic-looking man with a gentle smile. But Pinochet's officials considered him a threat to the security of the country.
I live with Fr. Dennis, now. This morning another 'old Chile hand' stopped in, fresh from his visit to his homeland of Australia, Fr. Kevin. He's been over the border--only 20-minute car ride away from downtown El Paso, where we live--in the parish we run for about 15 years, now. Our parish is in Anapra, the poorest section of Juarez City, Mexico, where homes are sometimes demolished by powerful companies in order to frighten people off the land the companies hope to own, so close to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Fr. Kevin and I lived in the same house in Chile--in fact, with three bedrooms and four of us, he graciously offered me his bedroom when I arrived, the newest member, and moved into another guy's bedroom, installing bunkbeds. He later came to my ordination in Massachusetts and helped me place the priest's vestments on during the ceremony. Fr. Kevin is charming and affable, and we caught up on the latest news from Chile--he paid a visit there, as well--along with Fr. Dennis, with many jokes and laughs.
I also managed to negotiate the waiting rooms of the local Social Security office--nicely air-conditioned and not too crowded--in order to begin the process of getting a Texas driver's licence. The license begins with the necessary documentation of a passport or birth certificate and a social security card (or a stamped document from the Social Security office verifying that the process of getting a card is begun--the card is mailed and not issued right away), as well as the previous, unexpired card--from Nebraska, in my case. The license office was very crowded, and the wait was near two hours. But, I've been through worse, and just resigned myself to chatting with the others waiting, watching a cooking show on the television anchored into the ceiling of the room, and studying a map of El Paso.
I could see on the map that the two houses--the Mission Center, where Fr. Bill lives and works, and the residence next door, where Fr. Dennis and I live--lie only a few blocks from the center of the city of some 800,000. An emergency residence building for refugees and undocumented immigrants was only about a block away, and the team of volunteers that live with and help the 40 or so residents know Fr. Bill well. To the north of the city lay the huge expanses of the military bases and housing, as well as the airport, next to the rocky hills that seemed to bisect the city. The famous Rio Grande--Rio Bravo to the Mexicans--has been smoothed into a concrete-lined canal that winds along the south of the city. I noticed an El Paso Holocaust Museum, which must mean that there is a sizable Jewish community here, as well as a couple of art museums.
The woman waiting next to me was from Juarez, but didn't seem worried about all the violence taking place there. "It's the people involved in drugs that get shot," she said, "not ordinary people, minding their own business." I didn't argue with her, although I knew that the numbers of people fleeing the violence in Juarez were increasing since 2008 precisely because the violence spread and became random. The drug cartels were the authors of the violence, as a group from western Mexico moved in to take the territory--and routes to the U.S.--over from the local group, but this escalated and required the intervention and seige of the Mexican military, supplanting a police force already known for its corruption. This much I knew from the press, including a long article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine from a couple of weeks ago--but I suspect that I, too, am due for more education on the matter, as I begin my assignment here.
Now it's time for supper, and Fr. Bill and Fr. Dennis are going to take me out to a favorite place of theirs, a Vietnamese restaurant--my first day concluded with some festivity. Fr. Kevin returned to his parish, where I'll undoubtedly visit soon. This afternoon's thunderstorms have cooled the air considerably, although there hasn't been any rain that I could see. A mysterious place.
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