I drove to Nogales, Arizona yesterday to work for the day. Although the health project I was there to observe is on both sides of the border, I wasn’t able to cross to Mexico because I forgot my passport. (Such a consummate professional.) Regardless, we wouldn’t have been able to cross because the lines each direction for those walking was three hours and longer if you were going by car. I didn’t have six hours total to observe, much less just that for a silly queue. Needless to say these new passport-for-Mexico-travel rules are slow-going in the effective implementation department. I can only imagine how businesses on both sides of the border are hurting with decreased traffic.
Instead, I spent my time visiting with our health project workers and catching up with the progress we are making in these poor communities. It was an exceptionally fulfilling day professionally.
On the way home, I stopped at the Mission of Tumacacori and the Mission of San Xavier del Bac. First up, San Xavier:
This church is everything you’d imagine a Spanish cathedral in the middle of the Arizona desert on an Indian reservation to be. It is starkly beautiful, ornate and mind boggling. It is surrounded by poverty you cannot imagine being “American.” Nonetheless, it is a very pretty building and I am glad we stopped. It was a great place to sit down for a few minutes, collect my thoughts from the day and refuel spiritually during Holy Week.
~K