I was raised in a unique place. My hometown of El Paso, Texas is a city that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border and bottlenecks in between the Franklin Mountains and the Juarez Mountains. This is a land marked by dichotomies. Throughout my teens the most stark of these dichotomies came in the fact that El Paso was one of the top five safest cities with a population over 500,00 in the country, while across the Rio Grande (which, that far south, is so dry most of the year it’s hardly accurate to call it Rio much less Grande) Juarez was frequently referred to as the most dangerous city in the world outside of war zones.
When this stigma first started becoming commonplace, Juarez showed few signs of being the most dangerous city in the world to those who didn’t know what they were looking for. My own family made the five-minute trip from our home into Juarez fairly frequently. In high school the recreational aspects of Juarez became more appealing and I began to venture across the river on my own. Wandering the dim-lit taverns of ‘the strip’ and drinking among the same bars as the likes of Hemmingway and the Grateful Dead gave me a sense of independence I carry to this day.
Still though, as I began to learn more and more about differences between populations in classes like Geography and World History, and words like ‘third-world country’ started becoming active pieces of my vocabulary – I was still no closer to understanding what about Juarez made it ‘third-world’ as apposed to the ‘developed world’ that lay a stone’s-throw away in El Paso. It was not until later in my high-school career that the harsh realities of just how different El Paso and Juarez are would catch up with me.
My junior year of high school brought about the opportunity to visit Juarez in a different capacity than I was used to. Members of several student groups had fundraised enough to allow for 25 students to participate in ‘Casas por Cristo’ – a non-profit organization based in Juarez that builds small, two-room homes for families in need living in the shanty-towns, called Anapara, at the outskirts of town. My mother’s demand that I start volunteering still fresh in my mind, I signed up reluctantly.
The next day, a five minute drive from school and few short feet into Juarez our van made a sharp turn onto dirt roads that made our journey more like a ride on a bronco in the rodeo than a twelve-passenger van. Twenty minutes later we arrived at an empty lot in between two houses composed almost entirely of wood scraps and cardboard. Looking around I found myself lost despite the fact that my neighborhood was in clear sight on the horizon to the north.
Over the next three days my classmates and I poured concrete, built a house-frame, installed pluming, put up dry-wall, insulated, and even had time to decorate the new house of the seven-person (and soon to be eight-person) Gonzalez family. I watched in amazement as a young couple raising three children, a nephew, and a younger sister arrived on a foggy morning, tears streaming down their faces, to see their new home.
My fears that what we had built would certainly be inadequate for such a big family were washed away as I received heart-felt hugs accompanied by sobs of gratitude from each and every member of the family. These sentiments were reinforced as our trip-leader, Juan, revealed the application of the family to the ‘Casas por Cristo’ program, which included a snapshot of their previous, tiny, one-room house, scrapped together with found objects.
It was a different person riding back towards the comforts of the ‘developed world’ in my body that afternoon. I nearly chuckled in disbelief as I thought about the fact that as a child, on my way to school, I had driven a mere 100 yards from the site where we built the Gonzalez’ home. Despite my proximity to the desolate living conditions of Anapara on a dailiy basis it took the kind of experiences that ‘casas por cristo’ offered me to change the way I thought about the differences between El Paso and Juarez.
The disparities between these two cities suddenly hit me square in face, and there was no place to hide. I became uniquely aware of the ridiculous fact that two-million plus dollar homes stood a mere half of a mile from the Gonzalez’. This new knowledge changed my trajectory in life. I could no longer ignore my privilege. This change was subtle at first, a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that let me know: athletics, friends, and grades weren’t enough anymore. I ignored this voice inside my head at first, continuing my plans to swim in college and focus on myself rather than others. I chose Kalamazoo College accordingly, the small up-and-coming division-three swimming program and when I arrived at school proceeded to focus on swimming above all priorities in my life.
As I looked around at the opportunities available to me, though, I was not satisfied with the physical challenge that swimming provided me. I wanted to be challenged emotionally, intellectually, and most of all, in a way that used my position of privilege to benefit others. Last spring, my former teammates placed forth at nationals – the best finish the men’s swimming program has ever seen – without me. I looked on, content with my decision to quit the team.
What kept me content were the memories of my experience four years ago. The tears of the Gonzalez family, the tight squeezes of the children who had running water for the first time in the life, and the smiling faces of the neighborhood children who we played soccer with at lunchtime all continue to eternalize the strength of the grave discrepancies in wealth and opportunity that mark this country and this world. Those memories will never leave me and neither will my desire to level the playing field and to expose those discrepancies to anyone who will listen.