There is something about them that always pisses me off.
I think part of it is that when I see them I am sad to be leaving Mexico. They are lots of smiling teenagers, as well as adults who’ve gone along mostly to supervise the adolescents. Their noses are usually a sun burnt red. They are often dressed in matching bright colored t-shirts with some kind of slogan like “The Friendship Program, Spreading God’s Love” and a big rainbow across their chest. These are the Christian (Protestant) groups who fly down to Mexico to build houses, typically along the US border. They tend to be really proud of the work they’ve done. They share stories about how they meet little Mexican children, how they got to see real Mexico. They talk about how poor those people are but how “Mexicans are such friendly people despite all that hardship”. They often talk about how people “back home” will never believe the poverty. They talk about their hard work building the houses, and all the children who would come by in the evenings.
A friend of mine recently told me that his church is taking donations to send one of their parishioners to build houses in Tijuana. He asked me what I thought about it. I answered honestly that I was often skeptical of house building along the border but that I wasn’t sure why. I told him I would ask my blog readers, particularly those of you who grew up along the border. What do you think of these house building charities in Mexico?
You can have fun doing a google search for “Tijuana House Buildingâ€Â, check out all those hits.
Haha, my sisters did that when they were younger. You’re right, it is very popular in certain christian groups.
I think it ultimately comes down to the same thing other ‘labour charities’ face – the money spent getting whiteys down to help would be much better spent on the problems. Typically in places that need help, labour is the easy part. That said, this sort of charity ‘helps’ the ‘helper’ as much or more than the people being ‘helped’. They get an experience, the warm fuzzies, and hopefully a shift in perspective. One would hope that this would make the people far more likely to donate or help other causes in the future.
Bottom line is it is not going to win any altruistic awards, but I think it can help both sides.
I’m down if the folks go help, no strings attached. Fuck it, even if they make the brown people pray, as long as their getting a damn house. These folks do good work – they have an agenda, but they do good work. I can’t complain.
I’m not sure how efficient these projects are? If they were really altruistic, the gringo church could probably raise the same amount of money, hire Mexican workers (maybe even the folks living in the barrio), and channel all of the money back into the community it’s serving, without sending their church team. But I do think it’s good these kids experience different things.
Geez. Some of these protestant groups are so pushy. It’s almost like its some type of pyramid scheme whereby the more converts they get the more likely they will get into heaven or whatever.
Well, I actually follow some of those people around via blogs, you can read them here and here. The way I see it the thang boils to nothing more than an ideological superfight. In some respects it’s good. It brings in new values into my city. Catholism has been callous and sangfroid to the needs of the people and most of the proceeds end up in the vatican nowadays anyway (that is why México did not have relations with the Vatican until Salinas came to power). The protestants are just filling a vacuum, a void. This phenomenon hasn’t passed unnoticed by the powers to be in my town and readily reckon with it but mostly shrug it off as a nuisance, catholism is still running at a high of 90% of the population approval yet one can very question the truth in that since there is every form of protestantism available in the border pueblo. One can easily see the one’s most obvious such as Jehova’s witnesses, Church of the latter Saints and the one’s Xicanos bring along with them to combat drug/alcohol abuse such as Baptist and Pentacostal on the fly churches. I personally believe that religions such as Jehova’s are good since the inculcate values such as saving and money hoigging. Remember Weber’s Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism? I wanna go that way with this argument. In other respects its bad because it alienates people and bridges gaps though am not certain about that. All in all it helps more than it damages, besides, Tijuana has always carried this notion of being bi-religious and that is way I insist that Tijuana is Aztlán too, we work harder and never had have the siesta thing in our culture. However, believe it or not, while Tijuana may not be the México of your imagination it is nonetheless just as mexican as Chiapas or Campeche.
To be fair, the group I got information about was actually “non-religious” and stressed that volunteers and locals worked side-by-side in building the houses. The photos were what got me thinking about it all. In almost all of them there was some frail little white college girl with a shovel working next to a much bigger, stronger (I presume) local guy. It made me wonder how useful the volunteers were by being there, except that they had to raise $400 a day for building supplies. The engineer in me kept screaming “plane flight money == money better spent on building materials.” But I guess the experience is the thing.