In the fall of 2007, the author thought he would head south for the winter with his RV and find a nice place to take a vacation from the cold. He had done volunteer work in the past and thought he might visit a couple of orphanages he had heard about from friends of his and see if he could be of assistance. It wasn't long before he was deeply involved with a group of fifty children 24-7 playing dad to many, and sharing in some events that were incredibly funny, and too many times heartbreaking. Reading this story will give you a feel for the politics, the reality of corrupt churches and the politics played with unfortunate children in that country we all know so little about south of the border. After returning for three winters to the southern Sonoran Desert to be with the huge family he had become a part of, bizarre events and political moves by the churches involved and the government bring the completely true story to a climax.
FAMILY Time
An Adventure in MexicoBy Jacob GeimerTrafford Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Jacob Geimer
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4669-5283-6Contents
Introduction...............................................viiChapter 1 Finding A Place In The Sun.......................1Chapter 2 Doctrinal Statement Blues........................13Chapter 3 The Family.......................................19Chapter 4 Organizing The Unorganizable.....................25Chapter 5 On The Road Again................................37Chapter 6 The Beginning Of Sorrows.........................43Chapter 7 A System Of Priorities?..........................55Chapter 8 Back To Colorado.................................69Chapter 9 Three Is A Charm.................................75Chapter 10 The Other Orphanages............................85Chapter 11 The Space Shuttle...............................99Chapter 12 The Train.......................................107Chapter 13 Dog Daze........................................113Chapter 14 Don't Go Away Mad...............................121Chapter 15 Bad News........................................125Chapter 16 Conspiracy Theories.............................131About The Author...........................................137
Chapter One
FINDING A PLACE IN THE SUN
During the summer of 2007 while I was working in Colorado, I was thinking about what I might do the following winter. Since I hadn't spent a winter in the United States since 1992, and in the mountains in Colorado it isn't unusual to get a snow storm in September, and then be winter until the next May, I toyed with the idea of heading south. I had bought a truck and travel trailer the previous spring. This 28ft self-contained recreational vehicle became my home. I had been working for a landscaping company based in Silverthorne, Colorado for quite a few years. Their base of operations was on a ranch just north of Silverthorne on the Blue River. I was able to park my trailer on the ranch during the summer, and since the job was seasonal, I was quite mobile.
I was a member of a Spanish speaking church that meets in the Silverthorne public library. Since the library was closed on Sunday, we were able to use a large meeting room that had full kitchen facilities, at almost no cost to the church. This was a very mission's oriented church, so they understood that they didn't need to spend a lot of money on their own building, which would sit empty most of the time.
Most of the money that was given to the church was spent on helping needy families in the United States and Mexico, or other worthy causes. Nobody was ever told that they had to give money to the church. Also, nobody was pressured to donate any percentage of their income to the organization. It was all given freely, out of the goodness of the hearts of the individuals. I was aware that they had been supporting an orphanage in Mexico for the past four or five years, and from past experiences in my life, I thought it would be a good idea to go to Mexico and visit this orphanage. I wanted to see what was being done with the financial support these people were receiving, and possibly assist the organization running the home.
In my life I have had many different jobs. I worked in a hospital for severely mentally retarded children for two and a half years. I also had worked as a carpenter on four or five occasions, and I had worked as a mechanic for three or four different businesses. Along with that type of experience, I had lived in the Philippines for ten years, and I had completed four months in a Peace Corps training school in Costa Rica. From that standpoint, I wasn't going into this completely blind, although that may seem arguable later on in the story.
As the summer passed I informed the other members of the church of my intentions, and they were very encouraging and excited about what I wanted to do. As my departure approached, the church members collected items I could take along. This included clothes, shoes, household items and small appliances, bedding items, and some money. About a month before I left, I was told there was another orphanage near to the one they were supporting. It was mentioned that after I arrived there, I could contact them, with the possibility of working with them also. Some of the members of the church were familiar with the location of the orphanage in Mexico which was Ciudad Obregon, Sonora.
Ciudad Obregon is in the southern Sonoran desert, three hundred and twenty-five miles south of Nogales, Arizona. It is a city of five hundred thousand people, based mostly on agriculture, because they have two hundred thousand acres that is irrigated by reservoirs in the mountains east of the desert they are in. These whole geographical areas including the mountains east of the State of Sonora that are in the State of Chihuahua are relatively dry. The question that came to me later on was, "Where is all the water coming from to fill these huge reservoirs?" I asked this question many times while I lived there, and never got a reasonable answer. All I could think was that the water was coming from underground aquifers, not being fed by precipitation. Ciudad Hermosillo is the capital of the State of Sonora, which is on the International highway. You pass through Hermosillo (if you are unfortunate enough to miss the bypass) on the way to Guymas, and then on to Ciudad Obregon. Mexico is a much bigger country than most people from the United States are aware of. There are thirty-one states, and the "Distrito Federal" which is where most of Mexico City is. Mexico has more than one hundred and ten million people, a wide variety of climates and cultures, and there are still more than twenty languages in use. The State of Sonora is famous for the Yaqui Indian tribe. There are places in the State of Sonora where Yaqui is the common language spoken, not Spanish.
Most people in the United States know nothing about this part of Mexico, because it is not a tourist destination. I realized that when people would ask me where I had lived in Mexico, and when I told them, they would say they never heard of the place. In all the time I lived there I saw very little evidence of tourists except for the occasional RV parked in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and most of those were from Canada. I didn't mind not being around the tourists because I can speak Spanish, and tourists seem to attract the professional criminals.
My first trip down to Ciudad Obregon was quite an adventure. A week before I left a woman from the church named Snoria asked me if her and her son could accompany me on the trip, since she was from Ciudad Obregon, and wanted to return to Mexico. I thought this would be a good idea since she was a member of the church in Silverthorne, and was from a place I had never been before. Also, my Spanish wasn't all that good at the time. My thinking was that she knew the route, and would be able to help me with details crossing the border and making the correct turns. I didn't think to ask her if she ever actually drove to Mexico before, and as time passed this illusion I had about being helpful faded.
By the time I left Silverthorne I had a trailer full of clothes and many other items I thought were mostly for the children in the orphanage. We drove down highway 285 through Poncha Springs, then on to Alamosa, Colorado, and on down to Santa Fe. We got on I-25 there, and headed for Albuquerque, then straight south to Las Cruces, where we got on I-10. In later years I learned short cuts to this trip, avoiding a lot of traffic and making the trip one hundred miles shorter especially avoiding places like Santa Fe and Tucson. When we neared Las Cruces, New Mexico, Hermana Snoria suggested that we should just cross the border at El Paso, Texas, which is nearby, go through Ciudad Juarez, the city across from El Paso, and drive down to Ciudad Chihuahua. She told me there was a highway going from there to Ciudad Obregon, and that it would shorten the trip. At the time I didn't have a good road map of Mexico, and I could see that the highway she was telling me about passed through the mountains between the State of Chihuahua and the State of Sonora, so I was hesitant about taking that route. I decided to play it safe and drive across New Mexico and Arizona on I-10 to Tucson, and take I-19 down to the border at Nogales, Arizona, which connects with the International highway 15, that I have been told goes all the way to the tip of Argentina.
I found out later that if I would have taken the route Snoria suggested I probably would never have arrived in Ciudad, Obregon! After I was in Mexico for a while I bought a good road map, and I could see the highway from Ciudad Chihuahua to Ciudad Obregon was some kind of goat trail. I was told by other people that with a twenty-eight foot trailer, I would have had plenty of problems with the suspension, and tire repairs. I also heard plenty about the bandits and highwaymen operating in the area and, of course, the police who were looking for stupid gringos like me.
We arrived in Nogales about two in the afternoon, and crossed the border in the most obvious place that I found out later was not the place to be crossing the border at all with a truck and trailer. This entry passed through the downtown area of Nogales, Sonora. The city at this border crossing has the same name on both sides of the border which isn't the usual case with border crossings between the U.S. and Mexico. I was fortunate they weren't busy because my truck and trailer took up the whole parking area where I was supposed to get my visa to enter the country. Before we crossed the border, Snoria mentioned to me that she had relatives in Hermosillo, the capital of the State of Sonora. I could see from my map that it was a fairly large city, a million and a half people, so I asked her if her relatives home was near the highway because I didn't want to get into a big traffic mess, or get lost. She told me, "Oh yes, that won't be a problem". Well, that turned out to be not necessarily so, or "Oh, No". Besides missing the bypass around the capital city, I ended up in down town Hermosillo in a traffic jam at 7 o'clock in the evening. I should have known better than to think that I could drive to this place in Mexico while it was still daylight in the first place but for sure now I understood that Hermana Snoria was not the person to listen to about anything. Doing this trip with a car would have been one thing but maneuvering with a truck and trailer was really a hassle.
When we arrived at the house of Snoria's relatives house, I had to cut across three lanes of traffic on a one way street, a busy one way street, to enter the driveway, and then there was just enough room to get off the street. I got the impression that us being there wasn't really appreciated, but they did give us something to eat so it wasn't all that bad of an experience. Getting out of this place was even more of a challenge, because I had to back out of the driveway and on to the three lanes one way, with four people directing traffic, again in rush hour. It was a relief to get back on the International highway, and on our way to Ciudad Obregon.
The International highway in Sonora is similar to an interstate, except that it isn't well maintained, and there are many places where there is no shoulder so if you need to stop there is no place to go except into the ditch. I saw the results of doing this with a travel trailer in a few different places. There would be pieces of them spread along a few hundred feet of road right of way, so I to realize that pulling off the road was not an option. Also, there are many large tractor trailer rigs, usually with two trailers. When you are being passed by one of these rigs, you will be wishing that the road was a little wider. After my experience driving down to Hermosillo from Nogales, I made a point of doing all my driving during the day.
After we passed a city called Guymas, which is familiar to many people because it is a tourist destination on the Gulf of California, I knew we only had about an hour of driving to go before our arrival. I must admit the excitement was building. Just as we were entering the city, Snoria started making suggestions about where we should go. After what had transpired at the border, and then in Hermocillo, I just ignored that chatter. She wanted me to go to the orphanage that supposedly nobody was acquainted with first, the one that I was told that I should try to find when I had the time to investigate. Fortunately by this time I had it set in my mind that I was going to follow the map that had been given to me by the people in Silverthorne. I told her we were going directly to the orphanage that the church had been supporting, and this time the directions were right on. I had had enough of the miss-directions and it wasn't long before I got the idea that things were not what they had been described as being.
I have often told people in churches it is a good idea to check out any organization that you are contributing money to. For sure the best thing you can do is actually visit the place and get involved in what the organization is doing. Me showing up at the Casa Hogar de Jugetes Rotos was no exception. "Jugetes Rotos" means "broken toys", and is my substitute name for this orphanage. "Casa Hogar" is the expression used for an orphanage in Mexico. Before I arrived there I hadn't seen any photographs and nobody described what the place was like at all, but for sure there were people in the church that knew what this orphanage was all about. I had this picture in mind of a few small buildings in a crummy little town in Mexico, with a crowd of children needing a lot of help, this picture being drawn from letters that had been read in the church when they would write and ask if we could send more money.
Even though I had plenty of experiences with churches and missions in the United States and the Philippines, when I arrived at this orphanage, my thoughts immediately went to my times that I had told people in churches that it is a good idea to physically check out any organization you are giving money to. There are a few good reasons for doing this, one is you know for sure whether they actually exist. This one did. The most important thing to me is that there is the possibility that you could get involved in what they are doing. The director and his wife of the orphanage I finally end up at would agree with me that it is really difficult to find people to work at an orphanage that are dedicated and willing to do a good job. It doesn't matter too much what you are paying them, if they are doing the work just as a job, they won't be there very long. Another reason is people need to be held accountable for what they are supposed to be doing, or not doing. Christian groups have a problem with this. They aren't the only ones with accountability problems but they are the most obvious in most communities.
So when we arrived at the orphanage it was a big surprise to me to see a large gate and entry way, on a two and a half acre plot of land on the edge of the city, with eight or ten buildings that looked like they had recently been constructed. I pulled up to the gate, and was ushered in by one of the employees who took me over to one of the buildings that he said was the office. Actually there were two offices, one for the director, and one for his assistant. There I met the director, who was a pastor in the "Iglesia de Tontos en Mexico", or the Church of Goofballs in Mexico, and he gave me the grand tour. Somehow I feel my substitute names for organizations may be more meaningful than the originals!
The first building that was pointed out to me was the home of the director and his family. This was like a normal size home. The next building was much larger. It was the common meeting building, cafeteria, and kitchen. There was a separate building for the girl's dormitory, and another building for the boy's dormitory. They were also constructing another building for storage, I was told, and who knows what else. In the center of the orphanage they had a small amphitheater, and stage for social gatherings, and other events like when a group would come and put on some entertainment for the children and young people. I use the term "young people", because after living in the orphanage for a while, it became obvious that there were two distinct groups of individuals, the children, and the young people, the dividing line being roughly twelve years old. I realized after my first winter there that this was significant, and this concept would play a major part in the construction and advancement (or non-construction and non-advancement) of the orphanage. It had very much to do with the way that you provided for the needs of the individual.
There is no doubt that I was shocked to see such a modern facility in a good location. Obviously a large amount of money had been spent. I couldn't help but think of the families that I knew in Silverthorne that had been sending money here. Most of the people in the church had families, and were in lower income brackets. I knew it was a noble sacrifice for them to send this orphanage financial support. I found out later that this whole facility had only thirty-one children to take care of. After the tour, I was wondering what I could possibly do to help these people out any more than they had been helped already. I mentioned to the director that I had a trailer full of clothes and other household items for the orphanage, and that I was interested in visiting this other orphanage nearby. He told me, "why don't you take all that stuff over to them, they probably could use it". He also told me they didn't have much room to store things anyway.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from FAMILY Timeby Jacob Geimer Copyright © 2012 by Jacob Geimer. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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