We are calling to tell you we are free.

I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about this:

At my church I sit on one side of the long white plastic tables; our guests sit on the other. I ask their names and if they’re traveling with anyone, how old their kids are. I write down their contact’s name and city and then dial their phone number and pass the phone across the table. “If you want to say hello to your relative, tell them how you are, then I can explain how they can buy the tickets for you to arrive to their place.”

People mostly nod, take the phone, and talk with their cousins or brothers-in-law or family friends or whoever it is who will offer them a safe place to stay while they fight for asylum. I try not to listen. Our guests have very little privacy, and it feels like the least I can do is try to give the impression their conversations are their own.

On Wednesday there were three people doing this intake work, while I managed paperwork and made connections. I wasn’t working so hard not to listen. Maybe that’s why I heard it, over and over - we are calling to tell you we are free.

“Hola, tía! Estamos llamando a decir que estamos libre.”

“Cuñado, habla María. Estamos libre.”

“Oye, hermano - estamos en Tucson, Arizona, estamos libre.”

We’re free. We’re free. We’re free.

I’ve been free my whole life and I’ve never once called someone to tell them I’m free. ​

Today was my third guitar lesson. My teacher, generous human being that she is, greets me each time with a print out of a song she has selected just for me and the YAV sing-alongs I will someday lead. This week it was Woody Guthrie. You know, “this land is your land, this land is my land,” and “this land was made for you and me.” I immediately thought of Colombia.

The Colombian conflict is all about land.

.

That’s it, that’s the whole message. If you understand that, you understand the whole thing.

.

Of course, there’s a chance you don’t understand it, not fully. I certainly didn’t. Not until I sat in a circle with a whole community driven off their land, not until I heard ex-combatant members of the FARC talk about land with their own voices, did I understand a fraction of what it really means. It’s possible I still don’t.

I have a theory that it’s nearly impossible for someone brought up in my circumstances to really understand what land means to a campesino. I’ll go through the identity markers again - white, U.S. passport, middle class, highly educated - and throw in a few more: raised in the suburbs, only distantly related to farmers (I don’t think my grandpa’s dog breeding place counts), nearly always have bought my groceries from a supermarket, lived in four different states.

If you share some or all of those labels, my theory is that you can’t understand the deep relationship a person has with land that they rely on to sustain their life, either. Or the deep trauma of displacement and loss of that land. Maybe it’s a U.S./Majority World disconnect. 

Issues of land reform motivated the campesinos who would become the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to take up arms in the 60s. Land reform is one of the six major pillars of the Peace Accords. Issues of land reform motivate ex-combatant members of the FARC into active political life today. Issues of land reform impact the daily life and plans for the future of thousands of Colombians.

One woman in Currulao estimates that 60% of all Colombia has been displaced. Documented percentages vary - the UNHCR counts 7.7 million people displaced within Colombia, about 21% of Colombia’s total population - but 60% rings true to her, from her experience. In 1991, three of her brothers-in-law were killed by armed groups. When the armed groups came back, her family was forced to leave their land. In 2000 or 2002, her family was forced to sign a paper that said they voluntarily sold their land.

Her pastor interjects - “The government says land will go back to those who lost it, but that’s mostly not true. A few have returned to their lands, but most won’t.” He adds, “Recently, maybe last year, they killed two campesino leaders who were working to get land back.”

Unpicking the complex violations of land ownership in Colombia is a nightmare, one that millions of people are living out. Some people have been displaced off their land and forced to sign false sale documents, making it extremely difficult to prove they were forcibly displaced and difficult to have their land restituted. Some people have been displaced off of land that was subsequently planted with African oil palm, which eats up the soil and leaves it dead. Some people have been displaced off of land that was then sold to multinational corporations for palm oil or bananas or other export crops -- good luck getting the land back from a powerful MNC with governmental pull. Some people were displaced from land that is still occupied by armed groups. Some people were displaced from land where they had lived for generations without formal deeds, so they can’t prove the lands were theirs to begin with.

And land is everything. Land is food, land is a dignified living, land is heritage, land is self-sufficiency, land is life, land is the essence of being a campesino. ​

What are you thankful for that you didn't think you would be? What are you thankful for that you didn't used to be thankful for? What has surprised you with an upwelling of gratitude, something you were dreading, something you didn't look for but were thankful arrived? 

It's not an easy question. Not a simple prompt for a ten-minute exercise (sorry, YAVs). In this time approaching Thanksgiving, it's easier to list the things that I've gotten used to being thankful for: the beauty of the desert. The work of my volunteers. Snuggles from my dog. Good food. Good weather. I am thankful that my life is full of such good things, and I recognize how easy it is to get used to the goodness. I don't feel thankful for good food, I just know I am. 

Vidalia (not her real name) was the first woman off the ICE van in the Inn Project parking lot, the first of 16 new arrivals. She started asking questions right away, as I led the group down basement stairs to where they could rest. I listed what we could offer: bathrooms, laundry, food-- "Burritos? No mas burritos, por favor!" Vidalia called down the stairs, "no more burritos, please!" before erupting with laughter. The rest of the group chuckled, and I assured them that we don't have any burritos here, no, not like ICE with a scoop of refried beans in a a tortilla, we have other food, good food. 

At the table where I filled out paperwork for each family, Vidalia laughed with me at my fumbling with phone numbers and phone calls (both harder in Spanish). She passed her phone across the table to me and I entered the WiFi password, so she could call her family member from her own phone. I continued with other families, seeing Vidalia on the phone out of the corner of my eye - sitting on her cot and crying. 

Laughter is all that's left, sometimes, when you're trapped in a system you don't understand and that doesn't care for you. 

Later on, I answered a call on the site phone. I thought the person asked for Vidalia , so I passed the phone to her. After a brief exchange, she looked up at me before getting up and taking the phone to another woman. It's for her, she said, not me.  

I hit my head theatrically and laughed at myself, apologized, said something about how phones are hard. Vidalia smiled and pulled me down in a hug, arms wrapped around me very tightly. It's okay, she said, thank you so much. 

Feeling strange, I realized it was the first time I had been hugged in days. I was flooded with gratitude. I don't know how to receive this grace. 
​
Later, Vidalia showed me a cut on her scalp. What happened? I asked.
It's from when I crossed, she said, from jumping off the wall. 

Tucson is a small town inhabiting big city sprawl. It's a city of 1,000,000, in the metro area, but feels like much less. I yell in my car when I have to circle the block once for a parking spot in downtown Tucson, and white-knuckle the wheel feeling overwhelmed when I visit my sister in Seattle. I crane my neck in bars and coffee shops, sure that I'll see someone I know. I'm usually right. 

Tucson is brown and flat and covered in harsh sunshine. Front yards are gravel, unless you're planning to waste money and precious water on irrigating grass year-round. Front yards are dirt brown. The mountains are rock brown. The buildings are more different adobe-brown, except for where they're blue or purple or green or rose. We live in a valley surrounded by our brown mountains, Catalinas to the north that orient us home. 

Tucson is diverse, and siloed.  Anarchists and activists, defense contractors at Raytheon, Air Force members and families on base, refugees and volunteers, headquarters of the biggest Border Patrol sector in the United States, artists and engineers at the U. Tucson can be whatever you are, if you stick to your part of town. Tucson can be bigger than you imagine, if you cross the mental borders of the biggest roads and your usual haunts. Everybody has dated everybody, because the everybody you know is carefully matched set. 

Tucson is raw and polished. Ferocious fighters who block buses and fill court rooms, boutique hotels and young professionals in urban infill districts. 

Tucson is a hunger for water, for recognition, for justice, for independence and every one's right to their own way. 

​I sort of work in education. 

The partners of this program -- other individuals and organizations, the city of Tucson itself, the border, the desert -- bear the lion’s share of the educational work we do together. My part of our shared work is to set up opportunities for the volunteers, and help them process what they experience. I facilitate encounters with new ideas: with the border, the idea of borders, the single harsh permeable boundary between the U.S. and Mexico, the multiple lines in Tucson that separate race and class, the looming presence of the Border Patrol, the volunteers’ own privilege. I ask volunteers to consider, for instance, how it might feel to inhabit a different body and see the green-slashed white trucks creeping around town. I try to coax or push them into recognition of how institutions and policies impact our bodies, our neighbors’ bodies, our neighborhoods, our lives and deaths.

“Border enforcement” is one way to say, “institutions and policies that kill.” “Militarization” is another way. 

Each year, the structure and pace of learning are different. With a new group of people catapulted into this context, I spend the first weeks sussing out what they might be ready to encounter. Some people want to talk during about the harm of white people calling the police during the first week. Others are still struggling with the concept of white privilege in the 10th month. Still others I don’t reach at all, or can’t. 

I wonder, every year, how I can best begin this work of concientizacion, continuing from wherever our volunteers are when they arrive. I know that building rapport is key. If my volunteers don’t trust me to stay with them through what is hard, they won’t let me invite them into hard conversations. And yet, if I work too hard to keep them in a safe place, they will remain insulated from the realities I want them to encounter. It’s a balancing act: how can I discomfort and destabilize my volunteers enough that their worldview becomes porous, without pushing them into defensiveness?

Every year I look for new resources, new tools, new experiences, new ways to reach into the lives that have led the volunteers here and gently ask, “Would you consider this other idea? This other way of life? This other view? Let’s work through it together.” 

Less than 24 hours after I bought it, I had finished The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantu. I devoured this book, this unflinching and profoundly personal story of border life. This is first book I have read that feels like living in the borderlands. A book that helps me to feel -- not just know, but feel -- that I am part of this border paradigm that dehumanizes and destroys beloved human beings. 

Cantu is clear: people are being destroyed on both side of the border and both sides of enforcement. He illustrates some of the complexity of the Border Patrol, without excusing or condoning its violence. Instead, he shares the impact that his time in the Border Patrol had on his own heart and spirit, inviting the reader in to see how supporting a dehumanizing institution is itself dehumanizing. 

I bought this book hoping it would be a good resource to read and discuss with my incoming volunteers. I read Cantu’s descriptions of the historical construction of the border with gratitude, thankful that he offers the past in an accessible way. I read his graphic depictions of violence and death -- the reality that we live in -- with mourning, and misgiving. 

The question I am left with, finishing this vital, luminous, horrifying, heartbreaking, book, is - can my new volunteers handle it? Would it do insuperable harm to our fledgling rapport to introduce this witness to violence? Torn, I wonder: If I protect them from this, if they need protection from this, will they be able to endure these borderlands?

If I protect my volunteers from bearing witness to violence, from having a felt experience of dehumanization, white supremacy, and “moral injury,” am I really protecting them? Or am I protecting their privilege? Where is the line between protection and enabling? How can I begin to disassemble the blinders of citizenship, whiteness, wealth, education, in a way that encourages, nurtures people to reach up and out and begin to peel back for themselves what keeps them blind? What will be too much, what will push them fearfully or angrily back toward ignorance, distance, and comfort? 

I talk about my program as a nest, a safe place where people can reflect, grow, experience, explore. True, we have to build the nest new every year, together. It doesn’t exist just because I say it exists. 

The point of a nest is to leave it. To jump toward the ground. 

We might not read this book in the first month of the program, but it’s too important not to share. We will read it together later in the year, discussing lo dificil y lo duro when my volunteers trust me not to let them fall alone from the nest to the desert floor.

I was honored to write guest blog post for The Presbyterian Outlook, a national Presbyterian magazine. Click through to read the entire post!

"We’re learning all kinds of things on the #walk2divest:

It takes us two hours to walk five miles, with a snack break in the middle.

Ten miles in a day is an easy goal; to finish 15 or more we have to push our pace a little.

As a group, we like flavored potato chips better than plain.

We learn that Casey often breaks out in dance, Ashley often breaks out in song and three people have broken out in poison ivy.

​We learn how to identify poison ivy."

“Goose Creek. Pass it back.”

Rick turned to face forward again and we passed the words back along the line of walkers. Goose Creek. Goose Creek. Goose Creek. I looked down at the muddy water running under our feet as we walked where the road crossed – apparently – Goose Creek. That’s what that bit of water is called, here in occupied Haudenosauneega Confederacy, Miami, Osage, and Shawnee land, in the state of Indiana, in the Ohio River watershed.

Every night in worship we name aloud the people groups who lived here for years before “civilization” arrived with violence, striving to honor them as we face the complicity of Christianity (particularly U.S. Christianity) in the colonization of this land and genocide of its people. In our pursuit of justice, we have to acknowledge how badly we’ve gotten it wrong – the confession of sins en route to the promised assurance of pardon.

In this same confessional ritual we also name the watershed through which we walk. For most of this 150 mile trek, it will be the Ohio River Basin. Walkers leading worship urge us to note the rivers, streams, and rivulets we cross, and to reflect on the precious nature of this water that sustains us.

This is the land flowing with water and sweat. Everything is green, except the grey-brown water and the blacktop road. Coming from Tucson, my eyes still haven’t adjusted. The color is shocking. The ease of just looking down at water underfoot is shocking, too, so far removed from the experience of crossing the dry bed of the Santa Cruz River on my bike. I want to fill my pockets with water, siphon Goose Creek into my backpack, twine honeysuckle vines around my arms and carry all this life back to the desert with me.

In our teach-in tonight, New Jersey State Climatologist Dr. David Robinson gives us a layperson’s intro to the climate system and climate science. He shows us maps of the U.S. with projected climate and precipitation change into 2070, and my eyes go straight to the Southwest: there’s Arizona, headed for even hotter and drier days.

We're walking with hope of a pardon, some kind of reprieve, something world-changing. And/and yet, the truth is that climate change is here. Not coming, come. “We’re not gonna mitigate ourselves out of this,” Dr. Robinson says, “—the train has left the station. We’re gonna have to learn how to adapt.”

I don’t know what that means for my life personally, or even for our populated world over the next decades and centuries. I hope I’ll learn more about that in the coming days, as we continue to walk and to listen. I’m pretty sure, though, that draining other rivers (like we have the Santa Cruz) to water our desert golf courses and cotton fields is not the way to go. The water will have to stay in Goose Creek, and at home we’ll have to continue to learn to function in the desert as it is – and as it changes.
​
21 miles down, is 151 to go.

It’s just because I’m running late today, I tell myself, and my bike has a flat tire.

Of course, my bike tire has been flat for a full month now - a convenient excuse to drive the 2.2 miles to my office instead. 

Bike commuting is important to me, at least in theory. It’s better for the planet, better for my body, better for my wallet, and saves me the hassle of finding a parking spot downtown. Bike commuting is something I promote for the volunteers I coordinate. It’s something I’m proud of, something I believe in. And, nine times out of ten, something I don’t actually do. 

I can blame a flat tire or the desert heat or a hundred other things, but that’s just me pretending that my choice to drive is due to circumstances beyond my control. Really, my comfort, my laziness, my five-more-minutes in bed and now it's too late to bike, are simply more important to me than the health of this planet and the lives of other people.

Or at least, that's what my actions say. 

My car commute is fueled by domination culture as much as by diesel, and harms the world in many ways: through militarism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and the super-exploitation of resources and people, especially in the two-thirds world. Those 2.2 miles a day each way are made possible by the consumption of people as much as the consumption of fuel. Along the way, what comes out of my car is as harmful as what goes into it. The emissions from my trusty station wagon contribute to climate change, help warm the oceans, and make farming harder for people around the world. 

This slice of the world is set up to keep me from having to face those nasty parts of a simple drive. My social location - as a white, middle class, U.S. passport holder - insulates me from what is required (what other people sacrifice and are forced to give up) to make my life easy. I can zip around town, gassing up Vincent at convenient locations on every block without having to face what gives me easy access to fossil fuels. This is true of many systems of domination: white supremacy keeps white people from having to face what white supremacy does. 

I’m thinking about climate change in particular because I am preparing to walk 260 miles, from Louisville, KY to St Louis, MO, as an action for climate justice. I expect it will not be a very comfortable experience. 

The simple story of the action is this: 

The Presbyterian Church USA is a denomination with about 1.5 million members and about $10 billion dollars in investments. Roughly 3% of those investments are in fossil fuels, more than $200 million dollars. 

There's a meeting this summer of the national decision-making body of the PCUSA. Forty Presbyteries (regional councils) across the U.S. have signed on to a proposal asking the denomination to take all of our money out of the fossil fuel industry. To emphasize this request, a group of us are walking from the headquarters of the PCUSA in Louisville to the site of the meeting in St Louis. We’ll be sharing worship and learning from teach-ins along the way. 

We are choosing discomfort together, because we know that comfort will not save us. Comfort is an enemy of change, and justice requires change. 

My bike commute is a small discomfort. It’s a small change that has a relatively small impact on the big, big issue of climate change. But it is something I can do, one way to lessen my participation in this culture of consumption and reduce the harm I do to the world. 

I know that we need big changes too, institutional as well as individual commitments. The change we’re asking for from the PCUSA comes with the discomfort of trying something new and the fear of financial loss -- but it can be a holy discomfort that strips us of the lie of ease without consequence, and fear that pushes us into a deeper life of faith.

Climate justice means recalibrating our priorities, shaking off our comfortable paralysis, and investing in people over profit. It calls us to discomfort, to acting as though we care about this planet and all God’s creatures, not just saying we do. It’s time for us to end our investment in this structure of domination culture, both figuratively and literally. 

And perversely, I am comforted by this: after walking 260 miles, perhaps that 2.2 mile bike ride won’t seem so uncomfortable after all. ​​