Compassion is Water in the Desert

Thursday, February 28, A.D. 2008

I was honored to visit the First Christian Church in Tucson, Arizona last week. Humane Borders is an initiative of the church, responding to the hundreds of people who have died unnecessarily in the Sonoran Desert. In the name of Christ, we are offering water to those who thirst. “Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children face economic disaster in their homelands and migrate to the United States every year. Many of them come across the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. Increasing numbers of them die every year making the attempt. The death toll is the direct result of U.S. border control policy, which ignores the economic forces on both sides of the border driving human beings to make such choices. Humane Borders, motivated by faith, offers humanitarian assistance to those in need through more than 70 emergency water stations on and near the border” (www.humaneborders.org).

As we made our way through the desert last week, taking the same journey so many migrants do, I thought to myself, could I do it? Would I have the courage, the clarity of vision, the drive and the faith to leave the place I know, the people I love, the language I speak, the food I eat, the land I call home? Could I conquer the desert? Would I risk my very life? Could I withstand the elements - the rough, seemingly desolate and unforgiving terrain?

And then I saw her. She looked about my age, perhaps a few years younger. One woman among six men. I could see her face and look into her eyes, but what was her name? What is her story? Who does she love? Where is she hoping to go? What are her dreams? Starving, exhausted, and blistered, she and the others with her had decided to go back. Devouring chips, cookies, grapes and sandwiches we had given her out of the leftovers we had brought along for the day’s trip, she was loaded into the back of the green Border Patrol vehicle – herded like livestock into a space clearly not intended for seven people. What would become of her now? And yet she had made it thus far, still breathing, alive, with her wits and integrity about her…perhaps preparing and praying to risk her life all over again.

We’re not sure that it was the water Humane Borders put in the desert that kept her and the men alive, but when Robin Hoover, founding director of Humane Borders and pastor of First Christian Church in Tucson, told them who we were and that we put water stations all over the desert, there was immediate recognition and gratitude on her face. Water in the desert. Oasis.

One human being dying is one too many. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (I Cor. 12:26) This text provides the biblical foundation for the ministry of Week of Compassion. If even one of God’s children suffers or is in need of any kind, we all are affected.

As Week of Compassion works around the world, around the year, we accompany not only migrants crossing the desert, but also those close to death in the Sahara Desert in Darfur. We are providing water in Darfuri refugee camps - clean, accessible, adequate water - to the hundreds of thousands displaced not only in Darfur but now across the border in Chad. We are putting in wells in southern Sudan. We are helping small farmers in Nicaragua put in irrigation systems and wells so they can water the crops they so desperately need to grow and bear fruit. We are providing cisterns in India to Dalit (the lowest caste) communities. We are supplying families along the Dominican-Haitian border with tanks to farm fish so they can feed themselves, earn an income, and regain their dignity. And we will never forget putting in a water system in a remote Kenyan village and the women of the village seeing water come out of the faucet for the first time, one of them shouting, “Water is Life!”

Compassion is water in the desert. It is life for our brothers and sisters, and for us whose lives have been changed, and therefore we can rejoice.

- by Amy Gopp

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