Ciudad Juarez: 'A Center of Human Recycling' for the Down and Out Myles Estey - Toronto Star
go to original April 14, 2012

Josue Rosales uses a walkie-talkie to coordinate a meal at the Vision en Accion, a shelter for the mentally ill outside Ciudad Juarez. (Myles Estey/Toronto Star)

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, MEXICO — There is a video of how Josué ended up out here in the desert surrounding this gritty border city.

It shows a bearded, dishevelled man being hauled from a car onto a mattress outside Vision en Acción, a refuge for the mentally ill and the forgotten. A swollen arm protrudes from this seemingly destroyed human being; he shows limited signs of life. A small group from the refuge gathers to help.

Six years later, Josué recalls the first time he watched the video: “I didn’t even recognize myself.” He shakes his head and falls silent, smiling.

In the cool afternoon light, he rolls up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Immense scars trace up to his left bicep, the result of injection-related infections.

Josué lay in one of the plain concrete rooms at Vision en Acción for 11 months, hands at his side, unable — or unwilling — to move, memories blurring into each other. At one point, as his two pinkies turned black with gangrene, he just ripped them off.

Then one day he got up and walked around. He started to help with chores. At some point, he made the transition from patient to staff member. Today, he shares responsibilities for daily operations, including caring for the 100 patients they house at any given time.

Laughing as he holds up the stumps of his fingers, Josué, 53, slips back into Chicano English to recount certain parts of his life.

He was born Josué Rosales Garay to a large working-class family in Ciudad Juárez. He headed across the border after he finished high school in the ’80s and hooked up with an L.A.-based gang.

“I was a homey, man, with the Southsiders,” he says, making no excuses for selling and using drugs or rolling with gangs. “The black sheep of the family, man.”

He speaks calmly of time spent in California prisons — San Quentin and Folsom — and of what has become an all-too-common story in northern Mexico. In 2000, once he had done his time, U.S. immigration personnel took him to a border crossing in Texas and pushed him into a country he hadn’t seen for two decades.

He headed overland to Juarez, where he worked briefly for the municipal government. Then, lost, he fell into drugs again. It was a few years later that the broken version of Josué was left outside Vision en Acción.

“When I saw him, I thought, ‘Only God can save this man,’” says Father Jose Antonio Galvan, founder of the shelter. “Otherwise, I thought, ‘He’s gonna die.’”

Like Josué, Galvan once saw drugs steer his life off course. But he found God and began to preach on the streets. Seventeen years ago, as part of a quest to help those who, like him, had reached bottom, the pastor opened Vision en Acción.

He believes his experience of the down and out helps his approach to some of those who have fallen through the cracks in one of the world’s roughest cities.

“The difference at Vision en Acción is that we are crazy people helping crazy people. It’s an amazing thing!” he says with an endearing burst of laughter.

After the afternoon meal, cooked and served by patients, Josué begins to direct chores. Some patients help him and Beto, his co-worker and former caregiver. Others gather up dishes. A small team is starting to clean. A few of the more experienced will help Josué bathe patients, change diapers and clean bathrooms.

Josué has not forgotten that he was once one of them. Despite his new role, he still lives in a room directly above the patients. This, he emphasizes, is home for him.

“If I wasn’t brought here, I’d be long dead.”

He credits Galvan for this and for the unusual method of caregiving he passed on to Josué.

“I’m not a doctor and I’m not a psychiatrist,” Galvan emphasizes. “But I got what most of those kinds of people don’t: I’ve got passion to care for their souls, for the sick. I have the passion to extend a hand to their lives, which have been totally forgotten, tossed in the street like it was garbage.”

He calls Vision en Acción “a centre of human recycling” serving a troubled city where, he believes, up to 30 per cent of citizens, traumatized by the widespread drug violence, have some sort of mental illness. Each year 150 people pass through the centre’s 100 beds; some stay for a year or two.

Galvan laments that most get here too late, and the shelter doesn’t have enough space to fill the need. Josué, too, ponders how many hundreds of people like his former self there still are in Juarez, needing help.

As I go to leave, a man in his 20s runs up and screams something through a huge smile. He shakes our hands, grabs my pen to scribble a doodle in my notebook, picks up a fallen wrapper, then runs back into the shelter, waving.

“He’s an incredibly smart guy,” Josué says. “It’s just that no one will ever give him credit for it.”

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