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Holy Week resources and reflections

A trinity of mission: Mission Presbytery meets to do mission on the border in Mission, Texas

MISSION, TEXAS – Look at a list of the poorest counties in Texas, and the pattern is clear: they’re clustered at the southern tip of the state, in the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico.

Geographically, Mission Presbytery covers a big swath of land, encompassing the bottom fifth of the state. And the Presbyterians in the Valley – some five hours from Austin – sometimes feel “kind of cut off and left out,” said general presbyter Sallie Watson.

Valerie Young, synod leader and stated clerk of the Synod of the Sun; Vilmarie Cintrón-Olivieri, co-moderator of the 2018 General Assembly; Caitlin Supcoff, Mission Presbytery’s Youth and Young Adult Advocate; and Rita Odom were part of the “Mission in Mission” volunteer team. (All photos by Leslie Scanlon)

Watson said in July 2017, she read an article in the New York Times about conditions in the Rio Grande Valley, and thought to herself: “Why am I reading about my presbytery in the New York Times? I need to know what’s going on.” She’d been leading the presbytery for about a year then, and wanted to know more. So she called a group of pastors in the Valley and told them “I will drive down, and I will buy lunch. You need to take me where I need to go and show me what I need to see.”

On that trip Watson dreamed up this idea: a “Mission in Mission” initiative – a way to engage in a day of service and better acquaint Presbyterians with issues of deep concern along the border, including the flood of immigrants seeking asylum and the needs of a community in which poverty is a pervasive, everyday reality.

The presbytery had already scheduled its October meeting at First Presbyterian Church in Mission, Texas. So Presbyterians spent most of the first day of that meeting doing mission at a dozen or so sites in the region – some wearing bright “M&M” colored t-shirts and working at a food pantry, a soup kitchen, a clothes closet and more.

“When we come to Mission, we need to do mission,” said Eric Dittman, pastor of First Presbyterian, the host church at this Oct. 26-27 meeting. “It is unbelievable how much love and how much grace has been shared” as participants hauled from their cars piles of supplies – from baby wipes to bags of rice – they had brought with them to be distributed to communities in need.

Belinda Sanders, executive director of Su Casa De Esperanza (left) with General Assembly co-moderator Vilmarie Cintrón-Olivieri.

“The intention is on-point and it’s bold and it’s needed,” said Vilmarie Cintrón-Olivieri, co-moderator of the 2018 General Assembly, who attended the meeting. “When people come to presbytery meetings, they expect business. … To go and to give is needed. How happy the people that were involved and working were. You could see it in their faces.”

At First Presbyterian Church in McAllen, volunteers assembled bags of school supplies that would be distributed to children in Mexico through a cross-border partnership called CUPS, or Comunidades Unidas Pro Salud. At another table, Presbyterians packed hygiene kits with toothbrushes, soap, shampoo, and more that would be sent to the Humanitarian Respite Center operated by Catholic Charities, where asylum seekers who have been released from detention come for shelter before they are sent out on Greyhound buses across the country.

Volunteers at First Presbyterian Church in McAllen prepared school supplies to send to children in Mexico.

The offering collected during opening worship – $2,069 – was being given to Su Casa De Esperanza (Your House of Hope) in nearby Pharr, Texas. Su Casa is a nonprofit family life program providing prenatal care and early childhood education and services to families living in colonias, settlements in unincorporated areas outside the city limits, where people live in modest to substandard housing, often lacking basic infrastructure such as sewage systems, electricity, drinkable water or paved roads.

The settlements emerged when developers offered cheap land and weren’t required to provide basic services, although they often promised the immigrants who moved in that services would be coming. Roughly 400,000 people live in about 2,000 colonias in south Texas, and it’s estimated that about 840,000 people – most of them low-income immigrant Latinos, many of them legal residents but also some undocumented– live in colonias along the U.S.-Mexico border in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Another contextual wrinkle: Along with the poverty, “there is big wealth here,” Watson said, as she drove from one volunteer site to another – watching through her rear-view mirror as a Rolls Royce slid up behind her.

Volunteers painted the front doors of Su Casa De Esperanza, which provides prenatal care and early childhood education to low-income families.

In this area, “the greatest issue the poverty,” said Karla Lara Maldonado, an Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary graduate who was approved for ordination at this meeting and who will be working at First Presbyterian Church in Weslaco. “There is a lot of wealth in the world,”Maldonado said when asked about sin during her examination. “There is a lot of richness. And that wealth is not shared,”she said – referring to structural injustice as well as individual sin.

One group drove to several of the colonias, and met with representatives of local groups that work to support the residents who live there. In one home, two neighbors described the impact of recent flooding – including from an unrelenting storm June 20 that dumped 16 inches of rain in 12 hours.  One woman described walking through water past her knees to get home. When asked what role churches play in addressing the community’s problems, she just shook her head no.

An estimated 400,000 people live in colonias in Texas, where poverty is high and the infrastructure substandard.

At another home they visited, “you could see the literal hole in the middle of the kitchen” and smell the lingering mold, said Josh Robinson, senior pastor of Hope Presbyterian Church in Austin. The two adults who lived there had seven children under the age of 12, living in a cramped house where “you could see the outside through the cracks. They were proud of it. They had built it” by hand, he said. “It was pretty raw.”

Claire Berry, associate pastor at Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church in Austin, said “I had never been to a home that had suffered that much damage. I feel like this flood has created such tremendous need.”

A colonia resident describes walking through water up over her knees during the June 2018 flooding.

The land was sold cheaply years ago, without adequate infrastructure, and those decisions “are having manifestations in present-day problems,” Berry said. Purposely moving people not only away from you, but in an area you know will flood is horrible.”

Berry said she’ll take back with her “a vision of destruction and the smell of mold in a home where people live with children.” Also: A desire to come back with others, to find ways to help, and “a sense of injustice that people live like that here in the United States or anywhere in the world.”

 


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