Building a Future on a Dusty Plateau : Poor: A Tijuana pastor battled his own desperation; now he helps others battle their despair.

Pastor Guillermo Ortega stands on the dirt floor of his roofless chapel in Tijuana’s fastest-growing shantytown and pulls up his sleeve to reveal a bulging vein--testament to five years of heroin use north of the border.

After spending a decade in the Los Angeles area--sleeping under cars, running from police and watching his health degenerate as he slipped deeper into addiction--the lanky, Tijuana-born Ortega returned to Mexico to battle a different desperation.

Ortega, ordained an Evangelical minister in August after four years of study, is tapping his own troubled past to bring a message of renewal to Pipila, a collection of barren plateaus 12 miles east of Tijuana that has become home to thousands of families from Mexico’s interior who are seeking a new start.

He mentions that day in early 1988, when his transformation took place.

“I was in East L.A., walking past a church with some drugs in my mouth, to keep them from police, and I heard some music that gave me a feeling of peace. I hadn’t felt that in such a long time,” Ortega said.

The music had somehow touched him, drawing him inside the church, where a sermon about drug use suddenly began.

“It was a message of salvation. I felt that everything the pastor was saying was about me,” Ortega said. “And I broke down and cried for hours. While I was crying, I made a promise to God that if he cured me, I would serve these people.”

Now he is keeping that faith in Tijuana’s newest colonia, where the lure of a better border economy has enticed a stream of poor families who wait and hope for opportunity. Most families huddle in cardboard lean-tos without floors or roofs, protected only by plastic tarps overhead and tar paper walls.

There is limited electricity and no running water, and on a recent Saturday almost all the neighborhood children were plagued by skin rashes.

Pipila’s residents are mostly women and children. The men head north into California in search of work and often don’t return, Ortega said, while others come back only sporadically. Many of the women left behind are too unskilled to secure work in the region’s U.S.- and Japanese-owned factories , and young children either turn to street vending or stay home to care for younger siblings.

But the quiet addict-turned-evangelist is hoping to improve their chances of escape from chronic poverty.

Since he arrived in Pipila six months ago, Ortega has helped build homes, a church and a school in the neighborhood. He is also developing a home schooling program for the children confined to their shanties as baby-sitters.

Adult education and English classes for Pipila’s residents are also high priorities for Ortega, whose construction efforts have been largely financed by the donated supplies and muscle of a group of San Diego County volunteers led by Poway housewife Paula Claussen.

“When you go to the maquilas (factories ) , they are going to ask you if you speak English,” Ortega explained to a group of women who clustered around him to ask for donated goods. Education, he told them, is crucial, and when you come by the church, you might as well stop in to hear “the word of God.”

But Ortega, 33, offers more than a good sermon.

With his guidance, the help of Claussen’s crews and supplies paid for by garage sales and donations north of the border, the most precarious Pipila shanties are being replaced by stable wooden dwellings, complete with raised floors, roofs and even curtained windows.

Recently, neighborhood children clustered around what will be their new schoolhouse, as Claussen unloaded beds and got to work hammering together houses for the families selected as the most needy.

Ortega, equipped with pen and pad, made the rounds of the neighborhood’s unmarked dirt roads inside Claussen’s loaded van, taking names and lot numbers of the countless women who approached him in search of help: a single mother and her baby seeking a room to rent; another family of 15 newly arrived from Michoacan, asking for anything at all--a bed, a cook stove or a pillow, and dozens more in search of bread or a secondhand sweater.

Armed with the wish lists, Claussen returns to the United States to gather more goods for her next visit. But Claussen and Ortega are selective.

“A lot of people come to ask for things, and some of the people don’t really need them,” Ortega said. “Those who really need the most are sitting in their homes with their mouths shut. But I never say no. There is always some way to help them, with clothes or something.”

While Ortega is grateful for the help he receives from Claussen’s group--dubbed Project of Mercy--he’s more deeply committed to the school he is building, one he hopes will someday have a landscaped playground for the neighborhood children but that for now is perched on a dusty mound.

“I’m speaking to the parents, explaining the program,” Ortega said. “Our schedule will be flexible. And we can bring the books to their homes.”

While Mexico’s federal government has a self-schooling program for adults, the countless children who work as street vendors or take care of brothers and sisters go unassisted.

Ortega’s makeshift school has its own problems.

“Many don’t come to school now because it’s too windy,” Ortega said of his exposed classrooms.

The classroom used for the past three months, a chapped 16-by-16-foot wood enclosure with no roof and rickety benches, was crammed with about 16 students, but it is no longer big enough for the groups of children eager to participate.

Maria del Rosario arrived in Pipila three months ago from the state of Sinaloa with her husband and seven children. They erected a tar paper shack across the street from Ortega’s small church and school, but her eldest son, 14, had to sleep outside for lack of space.

But recently, Claussen’s group built Del Rosario a two-room house with several beds, and her 8-year-old daughter, Maria del Lourdes, can’t get enough of the little classroom and sanctuary across the rutted road.

“Now I feel like a millionaire in my house,” she said. “We’re very grateful to everybody.”

Ortega has erected his dust-covered conglomeration of half-built structures from nothing.

The church is nothing but four walls with a homemade cross, old metal chairs and wobbly benches. But it has served Pipila well. Now, along with Claussen’s group, he can look forward to a church protected from rain.

Ortega met Claussen and her volunteers when he was building a church and school in the nearby colonia of Mariano Matamoros, where he still returns each Saturday to offer services. Claussen was building additions to people’s run-down shacks, and she agreed to come to Pipila and work.

But while Claussen returns to the comforts of her suburban home in Poway after long days in Pipila, Ortega has made the dusty sprawl his home.

At age 19, Ortega left Tijuana for the Los Angeles area in search of schooling, and spent several years as an apprentice to an auto mechanic. But slowly, his life unraveled.

He moved to the Echo Park area, started mixing with gangs and doing drugs while he continued to repair cars to pay for his habit, he said.

“All the money I earned went to drugs. I thought that was my life--to work and use,” Ortega said. “The police were looking for me. My life had totally gone to the streets.”

After his transformation, he returned to Tijuana and attempted to enter the Life Bible College in Colonia Libertad . At first, Ortega said, the school wouldn’t have him, but after he proved his dedication by helping to build churches, he was finally ordained.

When Ortega arrived in Pipila six months ago, the hill he now calls home was marked only by bulldozed roads.

But the collection of plateaus has evolved into the region’s fastest-growing neighborhood, and the rutted roads are now lined with cardboard shacks in a settlement that is now estimated to have several thousand inhabitants.

Pipila was formerly an ejido , part of a system of federal land grants used by small communities of farmers. That system has been dismantled, and, piece by piece, tiny plots of earth are being sold off to homesteaders or taken over by squatters.

“There are no lights and no running water here, and the government says they won’t be providing any services,” Ortega said.

Meanwhile, he will make do with the services of outsiders, like Claussen and the two young Canadian evangelists who will soon come to Pipila to teach English and elementary school.

The religious message comes with the sense of community he is creating, although he has encountered some resistance.

“Mexicans have a tendency to Catholic churches. If there isn’t a figure in front, they don’t want to go in. But if you start to teach them, to show them kindness, they begin to accept it. Besides, there aren’t any Catholic churches around here,” Ortega said, his eyes scanning the hills dotted with shacks.

Ortega says the goal of his church is to provide services to those in need, and inspire them to better themselves.

“We don’t teach doctrines, or traditions, tell people how they should dress or eat,” he said. “We teach that everyone has individual freedom, to develop their own relationship with God.”