by Robert Fraga
A woman named Gloria supplied our meals. She lived three blocks to the west of Casa Emaus and contracted out the preparation of our frijoles y arroz. Sometimes this came with molé and chicken. The woman who did the actual cooking lived over the cusp of a hill in the opposite direction. Each night a couple of us would trudge off over the hill to collect our supper, which came in large stainless steel pots. We would clean and return the pots the following day for our cook to fill them up again. This was how we handled our meals, with only a few breaks in what became a monotonous diet. Every morning at Las Abeyas, the women would offer us freshly squeezed orange juice. That was a treat, but one that Evaristo, a diabetic, should have resisted. We learned later that he had to increase his medication as a result of guzzling too much jugo de naranja.
One night Gloria paid us a visit to Casa Emaus. She was a small, chunky woman, habitually dressed in a blue tee shirt and jeans, with a white baseball cap jammed down over her curly black hair and a silver cross looped around her neck. Gloria had seen something of the world. Having lived for years in L.A., she spoke perfect English. She had met Alfred Von Bachmayr on one of his previous projects in Anapra. She even lived in a house roofed with one of his pallet creations. Gloria was Anapra’s version of Mother Courage, coping with one rambunctious son. (The other son was more docile than his brother.) She drank beer but preferred tequila. “Two tequilas and I’ll dance on that,” she told us, gesturing to the long fold-up table where we ate our breakfast and supper.
One day we took some time off to help the women at Las Abejas fashion a sandwich board sign, which they installed in the median of the road that ran past the restaurant. As far as we knew, this was their only advertisement. My contribution: I learned how to say “hinges” in Spanish, walked down the street and bought them at a hardware store called Mas Barrata (Cheaper). Our sign got blown over a week later by a powerful dust storm that plowed through the barrio.
By the end of the first week, we had lifted all the trusses up to the roof. Dean Coil and I took some time off to do some laundry on-site. This meant immersing our dirty clothes in a five-gallon pail, sloshing them around in sudsy water, then hanging them on a clothes line strung between a skewed pole and the wall at the back of the yard. A pair of my jeans dried stiff as wood pallets, but at least they were cleaner than when they had gone into the pail.
We were ready to insulate the south and east elevations of the restaurant. First, the straw was doused in a mixture of mud, clay, and water, which we churned like butter in an enormous barrel. It had the consistency and look—but undoubtedly not the taste—of chocolate pudding. Getting a pail full of the mixture and hauling it to a concrete slab to pour over a batch of straw took serious strength. We threshed the mixture to coat the straw evenly. Then we carried pails of the goop across the yard to the restaurant where we crammed it between the studs. The straw/chocolate pudding was held in place by two slip forms screwed into the studs, one above the other. After a couple of levels of insulation had been packed in and left to dry, the bottom slip form was unscrewed and repositioned above the one still in place, in a kind of leapfrogging technique to retain the insulation as it rose, layer upon layer. Variations of this technique are found elsewhere in the world. It is generally known by its French designation, pisé. We rammed in each layer with two-by-four boards. In Spanish, the word for straw is paja. Our constant need for it led to what Gary Aitkins called a mantra: “mas paja.” Evaristo was the most enthusiastic of the straw hawkers among us. He charged back and forth, pushing a wheelbarrow of the straw-chocolate goo between the threshing slab and the restaurant. As he ran, he bellowed out our mantra, “Mas paja, mas paja!”
A second mishap at the worksite, this time my fault: while taking down some of our scaffolding, I lost my grip. Part of the scaffolding came crashing down on a screen door, gashing a V-shaped hole in it. Gary Aitkin, ever resourceful, and a volunteer from Las Cruces sewed the hole shut with a strand of electrical wiring.
Our project was garnering a dollop of recognition in Juárez: one afternoon a group from across town came to have a look at our work. The group was called Bitechi. A sort of Grameen Bank–type operation, it loaned small sums of money to families too poor to finish their modest houses. The boss was a Salvadoran named Mauricio Castaneda. He was accompanied by a Mexican architect, Aylette Galvan. Despite being well advanced in her pregnancy, Galvan clambered up a ladder to inspect the trusses on the roof. A few days later, some of us returned the visit, driving across Juárez to the Bitechi office. As luck would have it, Alfred’s Toyota merged with an army convoy. We were squeezed between two trucks in a column of army vehicles. The front truck had a machine gun bolted down on its cab. We did not know it at the time, but this was the opening phase of a war between Mexican drug cartels that would empty Ciudad Juárez of much of its population over the next two years. Five thousand people would be slaughtered, and this city of two million souls would be paralyzed. The army—Los Federales—had been called in the day of our arrival to restore order to the disintegrating city. They did not succeed.
Bitechi had expansion plans. Castaneda asked Alfred Von Bachmayr about using the shack in front of Casa Emaus as a kind of Bitechi branch office for the west side of Juárez. The organization had made a total of six thousand loans in eleven years. Funding for Bitechi came almost entirely from U.S. sources like the Ford Foundation, although one maquila—Johnson & Johnson—did participate in the program. As to the shack in front of Casa Emaus, Von advised Castaneda to raise the issue with Padre Pablo, since the property was owned by the Columban Order. Castaneda pointed out that converting the shack to a Bitechi office presented a design opportunity for World Hands Project.
I began to develop a thirst for something other than the water that we habitually drank at supper. There was a hole-in-the-wall grocery store just down the hill from Casa Emaus. I was sure that like all the other abarrotes in Anapra it sold beer. Dean Coil advised me to take precautions. Local hoodlums—called cholos in Mexico—had once waylaid him—remember that Dean is a strapping six-foot-plus Scandinavian type—and made off with his spare change. Take one route to the store and another one back, he advised me. The store was tiny but packed with boxes and cans of comestibles, fresh fruit like bananas and apricots, and a variety of Mexican beers. I made my choice—Tecate if I remember right—and made my way back home. Keeping in mind Dean’s admonishment, I plowed uphill through ankle-deep dust, skirting the abandoned school bus in front of the house. No cholos barred my path. I repeated the operation the next day with equal success. In fact, I never had a run-in with any lowlife types during the two weeks that I lived in Anapra. But I rarely ventured out alone and never after sunset. We worked as a team, lived as a team, and pretty much partied as a team.
It was our first weekend since the beginning of the project. Dean Coil’s fiancée came by bus up from Chihuahua to join us for a couple of days. Her given name was Lupita, but Dean’s nickname for her was Tiger Lily. None of us knew the woman, and we felt that to call her Tiger Lily would be too forward. Her bus from Chihuahua arrived late in the night, so we decided to meet her in the center of Juárez where we had supper at a place called the Kentucky Club. This is a famous watering hole, a favorite of Ernest Hemingway when he came to town, a wood-paneled pub with wood beams running across the ceiling. Green glass lanterns hung in front of Palladian mirrors behind the bar. The Kentucky Club served cold beer and sizzling hot shrimp fajitas. Dean knew one of the bartenders, a man who had spent time in the States and spoke unaccented English. He had returned to Juárez to raise his kids. It was a matter of family values, he said. Two weeks after we talked to him, the police busted the man for transporting cocaine from Mexico to the U.S.
Tiger Lily arrived just as we were finishing up. She had taken a taxi from the bus station on the east side of Juárez to the center of town. She was a handsome woman, with mid-length black hair and black eyes, nearly as tall as Dean. Her English was functional, certainly better than my Spanish or Er
in’s. With Dean, she spoke only Spanish. We returned to Anapra the way we had come in, on a municipal bus. Bus schedules (and routes) were something of a mystery, at least to me. Juddering over the unpaved streets of Anapra, the bus—our #10 lacked both shock absorbers and muffler—offered something of a joy ride, something to knock your teeth loose, and at night there was only the sickly pale glow of ceiling lights to see by. The bus was crammed on weekends with young people: poker-faced boys, their skinny legs squeezed tight together, sitting beside girls in party dresses, chattering like magpies, off for a night of fun in a Juárez dance hall, some of it innocent, some less so. The sign in the window opposite me read: Ni tire basura—don’t litter.
Breakfast on Sunday was more relaxed than usual since this was a non-workday, and we had Lupita as our guest. Conversation drifted from one subject to another before settling on one that was becoming a lodestone for me: Father Joe. Dean Coil knew the priest best. Von scarcely knew him at all and only through a previous encounter in Anapra. Who was this enigmatic man? Why had he been tossed out of Mexico? The only Catholic priest in the history of the country to be deported for working without a work permit. Would it be possible to meet him? He lived a few miles away, across the border in El Paso. Dean promised to do what he could.
Later that morning we strolled down to the main street of Anapra. This was the site of a Sunday market called Segundo. Everything from plastic toys to work shoes was for sale. The Segundo spilled over both sides of the street and down the median. We had come down for a splash of local color and to offer moral support to our colleague Evaristo, who had staked out some space on the median. There he had lined up plants from his nursery. When we got to him, Evaristo told us what had happened earlier that morning. He had arrived at 5:00 a.m. Shortly thereafter, a motorist had come to a stop just in front of Evaristo’s space. A couple of cholos jumped out of nowhere. They rushed the car. One of them had a knife. He jammed the blade into the driver’s body, first slicing his neck, then sticking it up to the hilt between the man’s ribs. They pulled him from behind the steering wheel before making off with his car. Evaristo was shaken to the soles of his zapatas. Later he told us that the motorist had died.
That afternoon Dean Coil and I accompanied Lupita to the bus terminal where she caught a bus back to Chihuahua. Erin had missed mass earlier that day in Anapra, so we took her to the cathedral in downtown Juárez. Dean and I wandered around the starkly modern building that housed El Centro de Arte while Erin attended mass. Afterwards we killed more time by chatting to Dean’s drug-trafficking buddy at the Kentucky Club. Then we went back to the cathedral to wait for Erin. Our blond pixie was ecstatic: she had understood enough of the sermon to know that it dealt with the appearance of Jesus on the road to Emmaus. This, she told us, was one of her favorite Bible stories. The name of the town was also that of our dwelling place in Anapra.
Early the next week—the day, in fact, when some of us had joined the Mexican army to visit the Bitechi office in east Juárez—there occurred the third and final accident of the project: Erin Campbell shot a staple from our staple/nail gun through two of José Bernal’s fingers. Work came to a halt while we sought medical assistance. The local clinic was closed, but eventually Von Bachmayr located a hospital where José got a tetanus shot. Then he had his fingers bandaged. They stayed bandaged for a couple of days. But José did not lose a day of work.
The dust storm that toppled the sandwich board advertising Las Abeyas came in from the southwest, and it came in strong, with a wind fierce enough to rip the exposed straw insulation off the restaurant roof. The storm did damage, not to our building but to our director. Von Bachmayr had had a cornea transplant two weeks before our project in Anapra. The day after the storm, he complained of discomfort in his left eye. True enough, that eye was alarmingly bloodshot. We insisted that he consult an ophthalmologist in El Paso. Friday afternoon, Von returned from his appointment with a patch over his left eye. The doctor had removed a particle of dust from his eye.
The storm continued for twenty-four hours. We carried on, hauling straw to the roof, sprinkling it with a mud and water mixture jerked up to the roof in plastic pails. Face boards were cut and holes caulked, all in the teeth of a desert gale. Tons of dust particles filled the air, including the little varmint that sabotaged Von’s artificial eye lens. When visibility dropped to a few feet—the houses across the road were blanketed in a yellowish-brown fog—we packed it in for the day.
To raise our spirits, Gary Aitkin and Erin Campbell improvised a way to make chocolate chip cookies. They had neither chocolate chips nor brown sugar. Never mind. Hershey bars, broken into little chunks, white sugar, even M&M’s—our cooks had bought out Anapra—were all available. Erin phoned home to get her grandmother’s recipe. Casa Emaus became, overnight, the cookie capital of north Mexico.
Accidents notwithstanding, our fame continued to spread, at least in Juárez. A newspaper crew came out to interview us and to photograph our work. Their article appeared in El Diario on the Saturday before our departure. Erin bought two copies to take back home. Our sponsors, Las Hormigas, came to the restaurant to compliment us on our work and to congratulate everyone on the article in El Diario.
But the clock was ticking on the project. It was clear that not everything would be finished by the time we strapped on our knapsacks and decamped. We had insulated the building, but the solar water heater that we made out of a salvaged cylinder encased in tin wrapping never left the ground. (Its final resting place was to be on the roof, where it eventually came to rest, but only after we had taken our leave.) Nor did we have the time to plaster the walls. We did manage to get our hands dirty concocting various sample mixtures of clay and sand. We smeared these on the south wall, like poultices on a straw skin, to see how they looked and how they would weather, each sample tagged with the proportions of clay to sand—1:1, 2:1, 1:4. The decision on what proportions to use and the plastering itself were left to a later workshop. None of us realized at the time how violent, how chaotic, Juárez would become over the next two years as drug cartels battled over turf. Be that as it may, the plastering was completed and the water heater hoisted into place before all hell broke loose in the province of Chihuahua.
Following Alfred Von Bachmayr’s lead one night, I paid for a four-hand massage at Clinica Santo Nino. Two heavy-set, middle-aged women, Sophie and Lucy, took care of me. They played New Age music—I remember a CD of native flute and a gong—while they rubbed me down by the light of a feeble lamp. The massage didn’t last long. One of the masseuses had an autistic child with her. The other woman had bronchitis.
Next door, the night ended with a viewing of a DVD called Crossing the Border. The video showed the trials faced by people trying to cross Mexico from Central America to the U.S. Some sympathetic Mexicans would toss food to the emigrants riding the tops of freight trains. There were obstacles long before the Central Americans arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border. Gangs preyed on these people, refugees, in effect, fleeing their homelands. The most notorious of these was an organization called Mara Salvatrucha, otherwise known as MS-13. Its roots go back to Salvadoran neighborhoods of east L.A., where it arose to protect its fellow countrymen against other gangs. But it soon morphed into a pack of vicious killers and extortionists. U.S. authorities deported some gang members to their homeland, but this only spread the contagion. From El Salvador, the gang crossed into neighboring countries like Honduras, where it committed horrendous crimes, e.g., murdering twenty-eight people, children included, on a public bus in Tegucigalpa in 2002. Dean Coil told me that he had seen members of MS-13 in Anapra. Each was recognizable by a mosaic of tattoos, writhing across his upper torso and face. These made a gang member look like a Maori warrior. During our stay, none appeared. Nor did the local cholos ever accost any of us, possibly because our work was respected by the residents of Anapra.
Our last full day of work, Dean Coil put together a barbeque lunch. José Bernal did the actual cooking. His fingers were no
longer bandaged after their stapling by Erin. He used some of the sticks from the dismembered pallets for his fire. Then he put an iron wok on top. His stir-fry consisted of strips of beef and onion slices. It was the best meal we had in Anapra during our two weeks there. As memorable as it was, our barbeque was eclipsed by a Saturday night fiesta at Las Abeyas. The work may not have been 100 percent finished, but we celebrated anyway. Gary Aitkin brought out his banjo, Erin Campbell her guitar. They sang a ditty about the two-week project, roasting everyone who had taken part. There were emotional goodbyes, because early the next day, Sunday, in part to beat the traffic, some of us boarded the Toyota truck, others an asthmatic jalopy loaned to us by Gloria. We drove back across the Stanton Street bridge to the U.S. My nagging paid off: Dean Coil managed to arrange a get-together with the man himself. Midmorning, Father Joe strode into an El Paso restaurant. He was tall and handsome. Man, how he could talk! It was hard to describe him physically without falling back on clichés. The need to delineate him in psychological terms and in a theological context will come in the course of time. Father Joe was dressed not in a clerical dog collar but in jeans and a windbreaker. He spent two hours talking about the events that had led to his expulsion from Mexico. I scribbled maniacally on table napkins that Gary Aitkin kept feeding me across the table. In a sense, that collection of coffee-stained tissue paper is the origin of this book.
There followed a second round of goodbyes. The Santa Fe contingent, with Gary Aitkin in tow, drove north up to Las Cruces and I-25. Somehow Dean Coil coaxed Gloria’s automobile to the airport, where he let me and Erin off before turning back to Ciudad Juárez. I was standing in line at the check-in desk when I heard a familiar cry. Mas paja! Mas paja! I turned around to see her, a blonde ponytail swishing past in the crowd, Erin Campbell in pursuit of her own flight and the rest of her life.