4/3/01 - Santa Barbara News-Press

DISPATCH FROM MEXICO, PART 3

Building bit of hope through housing

By LESLEE ALCANTARA
NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
e-mail: citydesk@newspress.com

Since it began 23 years ago, Westmont College's Potter's Clay has given medical and dental care to thousands of people, organized scores of soccer games and prison visits and built more than 150 homes for Ensenada's poorest families. "Potter's Clay is the most important housing development project in Ensenada," said Patty Cota, the associate president of Desarollo Integral de la Familia, Ensenada's social welfare agency, "and I believe that housing is the most important positive influence we can make in the lives of the poor."

Although Cota says that counseling and medical care are important, decent housing changes how people view themselves, their worth, their possibilities, their ability to control their future. "In Mexico, poverty has existed for so many generations that many people don't have any hope of change," she said. "They are fatalistic about their lives. But from the moment a family learns that they have been selected to receive a house from Potter's Clay, their whole reality changes. They have security, stability. They can't be evicted. Now they are somebody. The mothers start pushing their children to study, to stay in school. Their expectancy rises. The self-esteem of the children rises. The family has hope."

Cota said that providing housing aids the entire community. Creating opportunities in Mexico is extremely important for stopping the exodus of Mexicans into the United States. "People leave Mexico looking for a better life," she said. "But that life comes at great cost, including, very often, the destruction of the family that is left behind. One of the benefits of Potter's Clay is that people see that they don't have to leave Mexico to have a better life, that a better life is possible here, with their own families, within their own country and culture."

Potter's Clay's impact on the people of Ensenada has earned official recognition in Mexico. Last year, the organization was publicly commended on local television, and its leaders were given the keys to the city. "This was a huge admission of the good that Potter's Clay does," said Allyson Searway, co-director of Rancho Agua Viva, a Christian camp on the outskirts of Ensenada, here Potter's Clay pitches its tents each year.

Ruben Castaneda, a pastor and member of the Mexico core team for Potter's Clay, says that Potter's Clay has earned a different reception than other ministry groups receive. The government waives the taxes it normally charges groups that enter the country bringing the kinds of supplies and equipment Potter's Clay brings each year. "Potter's Clay has earned that reception by building relationships with people here," Castaneda says. "I often tell people it's not just what Potter's Clay does that makes such an impact, it's how they do it."

That moral support is a tremendous boon to the several dozen Protestant pastors who minister to the poor of his city, Castaneda continues. "Their arrival each year brings an injection of joy and enthusiasm in our congregations," he says. "This is not only in anticipation of the construction and medical work, because not every congregation benefits from that each year. The people respond to the Potter's Clay students themselves, to their joy in being with us, in staying in our houses, in playing with our children."

Longtime observers of Ensenada say that the Potter's Clay attitude of giving is beginning to spread. Searway notes that, "When we first came to Ensenada, in the early 1980s, people were fatalistic. Even missionaries felt as if they had to wait for outside assistance. But in the last 20 years there has been a tremendous change. We don't see ourselves as just recipients anymore. We see ourselves as capable of doing Potter's Clay type projects in other parts of Mexico, Latin America, and the world."

Castaneda's church has undertaken five missions of its own, although it is located in one of the most remote and neglected parts of the city. His congregation provides transportation and before- and after-school care for 30 Mixteco Indian children, supports three students attending college, aids a drug rehabilitation center, ministers to the deaf and mute, and supports a young church in a new "colonia."

-Reprinted with permission from the Santa Barbara News-Press.
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