In the spring of 1983, after I was back in Buffalo a little over a year, I made my first trip to Mexico City to preach at one of the largest evangelical churches in Latin America, Centro de Fe, Esperanza y Amor—the Center of Faith, Hope & Love. I had been invited by Danny Ost—a larger-than-life missionary. He had literally blanketed Mexico with the evangelical gospel message over a ten-year period from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies by crisscrossing the country in his Cesna 182 single-engine airplane, dropping millions of pamphlets to the cities, towns, and hamlets below. In 1971, Ost had opened his first center in the northern city of Monterrey. By the time I got there, 250 such centers were scattered throughout the country. The largest, a converted warehouse, was located in the capital. The first Sunday I was there, I preached nine services beginning at nine in the morning and ending at nine at night—all to packed houses.
The next morning I was met at my hotel by Reverend Freddy Gonzales, another American missionary I knew from my old Teen Challenge days. Freddy was one of our star graduates who had not only conquered his addiction to heroin but went on to complete Bible college and become ordained and commissioned as a missionary pastor. He always called me Roberto, which warmed my heart. That morning Freddy invited me to join him on what he referred to as “a tour of hell.”
We jumped in a rickety old station wagon and began a dizzying trip north until we reached Cuautitlán; it was a separate municipality, but without any clear boundary, it became part of the urban sprawl of Mexico City. As Freddy chattered about the unique challenges of ministry in this part of the world—dealing with massive poverty and illiteracy, corrupt politicians and police officials—he abruptly turned the car off the road and onto an unpaved dirt path marked by cavernous potholes. We were jostled so violently I had to hold on to keep my head from hitting the side window.
This, he told me, was the road to hell.
Within a few minutes we pulled up over a bern, and Freddy brought us to a sudden, angled stop. I looked out over a landscape unlike any I had seen before. A massive expanse of garbage extended from one end of the horizon to the other, a rainbow of rotting food, paper, twisted metal, bottles, cans, glasses, cloth, and anything else that could possibly be discarded by human beings. Freddy told me to get out of the car and when I did, the full effect of the place hit me. A wall of stench triggered my gag reflex. Flies buzzed around our faces and landed in our hair, on our brows and lips.
Freddy said that we were in “the land of Baal-zebub,” referring to the Philistine idol mentioned in the Bible and known as “Lord of the Flies,” often used interchangeably with Satan. Freddy led me down a perilous hill of loose trash, my footing giving way every few steps. At one point I fell, and got up to find myself plastered with an oozing, fetid cream of some kind. I wondered why he had brought me here. When I sheepishly asked, he pointed into the distance.
I could barely make out the signs of other human beings in the ruined, rotting landscape. But I could see dozens of battered trucks, like a well-ordered assembly line, dumping their loads before making a U-turn to go back down one of the makeshift roads. As the vehicles moved, they revealed small clusters of men, women, and mostly children, bent over and picking through the mountains of refuse as if they were harvesting crops. Freddy told me they were known as the pepenadores. They lived there and worked the piles during the day like slaves. Nightfall brought new horrors from the men who paid the bosses of the pepenadores to sexually abuse the women and children.
My mind reeled. There was nothing to say. I stood with Freddy and stared into this abyss of human suffering. He had told me it was hell, and he was right. I was standing in the middle of massive, seething, human-generated wreckage and waste. There were no flames, but there was smoke, from what I later learned were subterranean fires fueled by methane gas. It brought to my mind the Lake of Fire in the book of Revelation. Freddy persisted and told me I could not walk away from this scene of anguish without doing something about it.
I thought I had seen poverty among the homeless in New York, but that day my entire frame of reference shifted when I faced the shocking destitution in Mexico. I was reminded of the proverb “Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is in your power to act. Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Come back later, I’ll give it to you tomorrow,’ when you now have it with you.” Desperate as I was to flee, Freddy was right. I couldn’t walk away from this.
The pepenadores are the untouchables of Mexican society. Some are simply homeless; others are fugitives from the law. For them, the garbage is their whole ecosystem; they live in, on, and off the trash. They make their homes out of it, scavenge for food in it, unearth their clothing from it, and make money by sorting it for los jefes, the bosses, who run the syndicates that control the waste-processing industry. Tens of millions of pesos from the value of recycled materials are at stake, most of it ending up in the pockets of politicians.
It seemed at first too big a problem to tackle, but Freddy had a vision: These people could never escape from their lives in the dumps, so it was up to us to bring some measure of civilization to them. He knew that he could build a school, a clinic, and, of course, a church, but he needed my help.
When I left Mexico after that visit and returned to our comfortable home in our quiet suburban neighborhood, I couldn’t shake the memory of the people in the dumps. They would invade my thoughts at every turn—when I got a whiff of day-old trash, when I saw one of my children reaching to the ground to pick up a ball, when a garbage truck barreled by our house. I would go to sleep at night imagining the soiled face of a toddler, in a stained and threadbare dress, with no shoes on her feet, or a pregnant woman carrying a backbreaking load of cans and glasses on her shoulders.
My first job was to figure out a way to build a mission church in the garbage dumps, just as we would have done in any remote community that did not have a place to worship. That the location was not the streets of New York, or the bush in Africa, but atop piles of rotting refuse didn’t matter. The presence of God is everywhere. Freddy proposed a combination church, school, and food distribution center he and his compatriots wanted to call La Casa de Pan, the House of Bread. I began recruiting cash, supplies, and volunteers from our community. Within a few months I was back in the garbage piles as our team of gringos cristianos laid a cinder-block foundation while breathing the putrid air of the basurero.
I knew God had brought me there to challenge my faith and to offer me a beautiful opportunity to act on it. In Mexico, God’s work and His will seemed to offer constant and often unexpected gifts. I felt especially close to Christ while working in these forgotten and ignored places of human suffering. Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” These people were literally and figuratively very sick. They needed our care. I was also mindful of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, when he told the story of how the king would sit on his throne and invite into heaven all those who gave him food when he was hungry, drink when he was thirsty, and clothing to cover his nakedness. When his subjects asked quizzically when they had done that for him, he answered, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Then he warned the others who had failed to take care of the needy, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” The work we were doing among the pepenadores was serious ministry with consequences that would endure into eternity.
Over the next five years, I expanded our enlistment of volunteers from all over the United States and Canada. We began small, sending a doctor, a dentist, and a nurse, but within a few years, we dispatched dozens of medical, dental, health, and hygiene professionals to La Casa de Pan and many similar sites around the metropolitan area. We deployed mobile medical units, worked with Mexican congregations that adopted abandoned children from the dumps, and eventually opened a local office and hired Mexican staff to maintain the program between visits from U.S.-based personnel.
These were the most fulfilling years of my missionary work. I felt I was really making a difference in the world not just spiritually, as souls were saved, but in every other way, too. We helped people to find freedom from their indentured servitude, brought scrutiny to bear on a horribly corrupt system, and mobilized civil society in a place that desperately needed the kind of perpetual help that only locals could ultimately provide. I often think I should have spent the rest of my life doing this kind of Christian humanitarian work. Back then, it seemed, God had other plans.