Days 2-3 HEPAC

TRIP TO THE BORDER:  Part of the Solution

BorderLinks Delegation:   Tucson to Nogales and Back

Participants:  Steve Goering, Susan Ortman Goering, John Schneider,  Anne-Marie Patrie

March 11-14, 2013

HEPAC, South of the Border.  Part of the Solution. March 12-13.                                                

By: Steve

The HEPAC Community Center.  As noted earlier, our Borderlinks delegation stayed at the HEPAC Community Center for the evening of March 12.  HEPAC is an acronym for Hogar de Esperanza y Paz (Home of Hope and Peace).  The activities and the life there are at least part of the answer to the continuing migration challenge.  HEPAC brings justice and reasonable living conditions to the people of neighborhoods in Nogales near the HEPAC Center.

Hogar de Esperanza y Paz Entrance

The Center itself is comfortable, though basic in its amenities, i.e. composting toilets, etc..  It consists of meeting rooms, a dining hall/kitchen, playground and overnight facilities.   Pictures of HEPAC are shared below.   

The areas surrounding HEPAC developed as squatter neighborhoods when people came to Nogales to work in mequiladoras.  As such, electricity and full water/sewer service in these neighborhoods is a patchwork. At least 30 families must organize in any one neighborhood/hill area in order to be serviced with electricity, etc..   Mequiladora is the Mexican name for manufacturing operations in a free-trade zone near the borders, where factories import material and equipment on a duty-free and tariff-free basis for assembly, processing, or manufacturing.  The resulting products are then exported to the point of sale.  the first mequiladoras began in the 1960s and now flourish even more than they did initially, since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in the mid-1990s.  As noted in an earlier post NATFA enabled subsidized corn from the United States to enter Mexico, and this undercut Mexican corn farmers.  Nearly 3 1/2 million farmers were displaced as a result and the migration to work near the border and in the United States increased dramatically.  Workers at the mequiladoras work long hours and both parents normally must work for the families to meet minimal expenses.  The typical mequiladora salary is $5.00/day (yes, $35 for the week) for a

full 8-12 hour day. A picture of one of the nearby neighborhoods –the Colonia Bellevista - is shown below.

Colonia Bellevista, Sonora, Mexico

The HEPAC Mission:  Jeannette, HEPAC’s director is an extremely competent woman full of energy and passion for the Center’s mission.  She explained that HEPAC’s primary mission in Nogales is to serve children of mequiladora workers and also to empower women of the neighborhood.  Children in Nogales are able to attend school four (4) hours per day. Thus, one shift of school students attends in the morning, and a second completely different set of students attend in the afternoon.  With parents working long hours in the factories, the children are unsupervised much of the day and often do not have proper food/nutrition.  HEPAC has a “Children’s Food Security Program” that serves lunch to an average of 100-200 children per day. (30-60,000 meals/year!) The food is good and nutritious. (We ate there.)  Children’s activities provide safe places for children to be when not in school.  HEPAC also sponsors “Culture of Peace” workshops for children encouraging ways the cycles of violence in their neighborhoods and culture can be broken.

HEPAC also has programs empowering women to address domestic violence, creating cooperatives such as the “Medallion Cooperative” that helps women earn money by making “No More Deaths” pendants and earrings (in tribute to migrants who have died in the AZ-Sonora desert). They teach sustainable organic gardening practices such that family diets can be improved. Finally, they also have Adult and Children’s education programs that include adult elementary and secondary school certification, a Mexican government-sponsored job training program, English courses, week-long educational kids camps, and various community workshops.

St. Cloud Delegation Members with Middle School Youth from HEPAC

The children we met were laughing and joyful, full of energy as are all children.  Several pictures are below.

A Neighborhood Child Eating a Nutritious Meal per the Food Security Program.

Boys Being Boys at HEPAC

We visited many places during our March delegation, and I must say that HEPAC was one of the places of hope.  Children were loved and cared for.  There was joy there. New life and transformation was happening. Not without cost and struggle, but it was alive and hope was/is there.  While at HEPAC, we shared space with a Unitarian Group from Albuquerque who was spending a week there – painting, doing maintenance and also experiencing the city, its challenges and hopes.

During this past month, I have been trying gather an extra sense of meaning of the HEPAC experience, and why it carried this hope.  Perhaps it simply seemed that Christ’s Spirit was in this place:  its leaders, the women cooking for us, the Medallion co-op, the teachers sharing the voice of peace, and in the children.  It is a small place, and affects tens and hundreds of people, rather than thousands and millions.  And yet, that is the way change happens.  Jesus was a boundary walker, a day to day liberator, calling for change, for justice.   His spirit was there, liberating the women and the children there every day physically with food, education, etc. and also spiritually with hope and determination. It too will liberate us if we have the necessary spirit to have that happen. Then we may have new life too.  

If through our own commitments and those of governments, there could be hundreds of these places. Then maybe the basic needs of humanity could be met in these neighborhoods, in Mexico, and people then would not choose to migrate. People are migrating simply to live with hope – hope for themselves and their families. That is why migrations happen.