Starting Over : Heroin Addict Turned Minister Helps Poorest of Tijuana’s Poor

Pastor Guillermo Ortega stood recently on the dirt floor of his roofless chapel in Tijuana’s fastest-growing shantytown and pulled 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 in his 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 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 impoverished families from Mexico’s interior seeking a new start.

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

He mentioned 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 somehow touched him, drawing him inside the church where a sermon about drug use began.

“It was a message of salvation. I felt that everything the pastor was saying was about me. 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,” he said.

Now, he is keeping that faith in Tijuana’s newest colonia, where the lure of the 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. On a recent Saturday, most of the neighborhood children were plagued by skin rashes.

Pipila’s residents are mostly women and children. Men head into California in search of work and often do not return, Ortega said, while others come back sporadically. Many women left behind are too unskilled to secure work in the region’s foreign-owned factories, and young children either turn to street vending or stay home to care for younger siblings.

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

Adult education and English classes for Pipila’s residents are 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.

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

He met Claussen and her volunteers when he was building a church and school in the nearby colonia of Mariano Matamoros, where Claussen’s crew was helping construct additions to people’s shacks.

“When you go to the maquiladoras (factories) , they are going to ask you if you speak English,” Ortega said to a group of women who clustered around him 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 with raised floors, roofs and curtained windows.

Recently, 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 woman and her baby seeking a room to rent; a 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.”

Ortega is committed to the school he is building--one that he hopes will someday have a landscaped playground, but for now is perched on a dust mound.

The classroom used for the past three months, a weathered 16-foot-by-16-foot wood enclosure with no roof and rickety benches, was crammed with about 16 students, but is not big enough for all the children who want 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 church and school, but her eldest son, 14, had to sleep outside.

Claussen’s group, Project of Mercy, recently built Del Rosario a two-room house with several beds, and her 8-year-old daughter, Maria del Lourdes, cannot 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 said 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. We teach that everyone has individual freedom, to develop their own relationship with God,” Ortega said.