Along the U.S.–Mexico border in California’s Imperial Valley, missioner Rick Dixon describes how the human cost of immigration policy is devastatingly clear. Here, steel barriers and irrigation canals claim the lives of those simply trying to survive. Just miles away, in an unmarked field behind a small-town cemetery, the bodies of the unnamed lie buried behind NO TRESPASSING signs. Here, grief meets witness.
The inaugural event of the newly formed Maryknoll Monarch Initiative was the “Hope & Resilience at the Border” workshop on March 18. Its mission is the empowerment of individuals and communities through education, advocacy, and transformative experience.
A library is blossoming in the Colorado Desert, bridging Spanish and English, children and parents, imagination and possibility. Thanks to generous donations, says missioner Rick Dixon, families in Mexicali, Mexico are gathering to read, learn, and dream together—finding in books a path to peace, justice, and a brighter future.
While missioner Rick Dixon in Mexicali, Mexico considered how the U.S. presidential election will affect asylum seekers, he was drawn to meditate on the words of German Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “God is the beyond in the midst of our lives.”
