When I read about the shooting of missionary Nancy Davis in Mexico last week, I tried to visualize her husband’s desperate rush toward the border.
I could see again the lines of cars, trucks and tractor-trailers inching forward on the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge — more than 3 miles long — as border officials question drivers vehicle by vehicle, and pull some aside to search.
Miles south of the bridge and the border city of Reynosa, Sam and Nancy Davis had refused to stop their pickup at an drug cartel checkpoint. Authorities speculate cartel gunmen wanted the missionaries’ pickup. As the Davises crashed through the roadblock, the gunmen opened fire, and Nancy was hit.
Sam sped north, his wife bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. She would easily bleed to death before he made it halfway across the bridge in the slow-moving northbound lanes. So he drove against traffic on the other side in a desperate dash to safety.
The daring move was in vain. After 30 years of missionary trips into Mexico, 59-year-old Nancy Davis had completed her work. She died Wednesday at a McAllen, Texas, hospital.
This story won’t mean much to people who have not traveled to Mexico or cared about the people who live there. But to those who do care — those who have taken missionary trips to Mexico or who have family there — the violence that has gripped the country is shocking.
Countless North Carolinians have sat in the border’s long lines of traffic after completing missionary trips into Mexico. The dusty colonias where the region’s poorest people live are dotted with houses, churches and clinics U.S. groups have built.
On the journeys many in Salisbury made with First Presbyterian’s Teens With a Mission, we approached the border with trepidation. After a week of mixing concrete, laying block and singing hymns in English and Spanish — hand-in-hand with the people of the colonias — we were ready to get back to the United States.
But the crossing made us anxious.
Take off your sunglasses and put away the iPods, we told the kids. Be polite and attentive. No joking around. Answer the questions you are asked and say no more.
We wanted to get across without any of our vans being searched — not because we had anything to hide, but because we wanted to get through as quickly as possible. The wait to get across seemed interminable.
When we were on U.S. soil again, the tension lifted.
And that was before the Zetas and the Gulf cartel carried their war to the border area.
Teens With a Mission hasn’t been to Mexico since 2008. Cartel violence shifted to the border area where we worked, making return too risky.
The group has found other mission fields to explore in Kentucky, Jamaica and here in Rowan. But I wonder about the people of Reynosa we came to know through the years.
On my first trip, I befriended a 10-year-old named Renaldo whose family lived near the compound where we stayed. He winced when I failed to roll the R in his name, but he was one of the more engaged older boys at Bible school each day.
R-r-r-renaldo should be about 18 now. Does he hide behind shuttered windows when street fights break out, guns blasting? Could he be firing one of those guns? Is he still alive?
And what about the families — the women and men who shed tears of gratitude for the tiny cinderblock homes we built. Do they live in fear, or are media reports overblown?
More likely the violence is worse than we know. Under pressure from the cartels, local journalists have stopped reporting on the drug violence in Reynosa almost entirely, the U.S. media report. Violence and corruption have taken the lives of more than 30 journalists in Mexico, and no one is eager to join them.
This is a form of terrorism, right over our border. Innocent people are murdered. Fear empties the streets at night. Even the media is intimidated into silence.
And poverty deepens as tourists and short-term mission groups stay away.
The amazing thing is that missionaries like Nancy and Sam Davis continue visiting Mexico to shed light in the darkness. Most of us are like that line of traffic headed north on the Pharr bridge — slow, dense and eager to set our sights somewhere else. Our neighbors are under seige, and all we can do is shake our heads and look away.
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Elizabeth Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post.