Borderlands - Day 5

Our team awoke refreshed and ready for our final day of experiences and more learning.  Abara did a great job equipping our residence for the week with all the breakfast basics, so that we would always be ready to face another day of absorbing new experiences and information about this place they call “The Borderlands”.  By the way, many of other our meals were prepared by local caterers based on authentic Latin American cuisine from multiple countries.  All were delicious!

The day began with Jon from Abara greeting us at our apartment for a 20-minute drive to a place called Ascarate Park, and a community-created memorial to lives lost in a racially/immigrant motivated shooting at an El Paso Walmart store in 2019.   Our guide for this sobering experience was Sarah, an El Paso native and UTEP professor, who gave us all the details about the event itself, the community response, and the heroic efforts of so many surrounding that day.  It was a moving presentation, and a chance for all of us to prayerfully reflect on how these types of events can occur.   Mostly, it was a chance to quietly honor the 23 victims and pray for survivors in a setting that has become a solemn place of remembrance for El Pasoans, despite the memory of such a horrific day in the history of this Texas city.

 Later in the day, we heard from Sigrid, who has done immigration work for 20 years, about the legal challenges immigrants and migrants face. She talked about the antiquated system that governs it and the current confusion and chaos that can make life difficult for immigrants, as well as agencies and officials dealing with this population. Immigration laws have not been overhauled since 1986.  Efforts to accomplish that keep collapsing in Washington.   She also talked about how damaging terminology can be, using examples like “aliens” vs. “non-citizens” that seem to change based on the political climate and leadership.  “People want to stay in their community,” Sigrid said. “It’s really a false narrative that everybody wants to come to the United States.”

 Our final presentation by Reverand Marta, a local pastor, was titled “The Theology of Migration.  We learned how migration is part of our faith history throughout the Bible, from Abraham to Jesus to Paul.  It helped us to understand the need for peoples to migrate throughout history – for many reasons, but often for survival.

We closed out our time with Abara with its leaders in a moving debrief session, allowing each team member to assess their own response to the week-long experience, and how we each might think and live differently as a result.   Abara is doing something truly special here, creating a place for peace and connection in this amazing strip of land called the Borderlands.