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NACO, Sonora — Cecile Lumer and Manuel “Sharky” Bayl—n certainly make for an unlikely pair of friends.
Cecile, a 69-year-old Ph.D. and a native New Yorker, is a semi-retired botanist and grandmother of three. After a stint on the faculty at Eastern New Mexico University, she moved in 1995 to Old Bisbee, where she now lives quietly in a bungalow shared with three cats and an assortment of houseplants.
Sharky, 27, is a recovering addict from the mean streets of Ciudad Ju‡rez, Chihuahua, where he says it is just as easy to buy drugs as it is to buy a carton of milk.
 Manuel “Sharky” Bayl—n, of Naco, Son., and Cecile Lumer, of Bisbee, stop to chat across a barbed-wire fence during a water distribution run in the Mexican desert on Monday. The tailgate of the truck in the background is painted to read "water for life." (By Jonathan Clark-Herald/Review) |
Sharky’s head is shaven, with the exception of one long strip of hair that hangs down in back, and his torso is adorned with several tattoos, including a menacing skeleton/dragon motif on his left bicep. About a year-and-a-half ago, Sharky came to Naco and entered the local drug and alcohol rehabilitation center known as CRREDA in hopes of kicking his habit for good.
Yet while their life stories are dramatically different, Cecile and Sharky, now neighbors on opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, have still managed to find some common ground. And they found it through water.
Cecile is a member of the humanitarian aid group Citizens for Border Solutions, which, alarmed by the growing number of migrant deaths in Arizona, began four years ago to set up emergency water stations in the local desert. Last year, the Naco branch of CRREDA started doing the same. Now, the two groups have joined forces to distribute water.
According to Raymundo Pineda, the director of CRREDA’s Naco center, the project offers big benefits for his clients.
“It’s a form of therapy,” he said. “It helps to occupy their minds so they aren’t thinking about using drugs.”
Furthermore, he says, by doing something positive for others, the recovering addicts develop a better sense of self-esteem and responsibility.
The alliance with CRREDA has also been advantageous for Citizens for Border Solutions, or CBS. When it put out water for migrants on the U.S. side of the border, its aid stations were routinely vandalized. Now with their water stations on the Mexican side of the border, the vandalism has stopped.
There has been another benefit as well: the program has created new cross-border personal relationships.
When she goes out to help restock water stations, Cecile says she looks forward as much to seeing friends like Sharky as she does to providing migrant aid.
Finding a common language
At a few minutes past 10 a.m. on Monday, Cecile, Sharky, Pineda and three other crew members piled into a well-worn 1993 Ford F-150 pickup, donated by the Frontera de Cristo Presbyterian ministry in Douglas and outfitted with a massive plastic water tank.
After a brief pit stop at the Naco public works headquarters to fill the tank with water donated by the city, the truck rumbled west out of town and into the desert.
The CRREDA group currently maintains eight water stations along a path stretching to a point about two miles east of the San Pedro River.
At the first station, some three miles out of Naco, Sharky jumped from the truck, opened the tap and tasted the water.
“Is it clean?” Cecile asked him. “Last week, it was full of green slime.”
Sharky nodded his head as he drank: it’s clean.
Cecile and Sharky have an unusual way of communicating. Cecile speaks to Sharky in English, while Sharky, who knows a fair amount of English himself, responds mostly in Spanish or Spanglish.
Though not much of a speaker, Cecile says she understands a bit of Spanish, and the two get along fine.
The 50-gallon tank at station number one was down about 15 gallons of water, and so Sharky grabbed the hose stretching from the bottom of the black tank and began to draw on the open end.
Water quickly began to flow, and Sharky topped off the tank. The generator that CRREDA once used to power a portable pump is broken, and so the group now relies on siphoning.
Back on the hot and dusty border road, the truck passed by the decaying corpse of a cow. “There are some ranchers on this side that think the same way as the Minutemen,” Sharky said. “They don’t like the migrants because they leave trash on their land and the cows eat it and die.”
Still, a number of Mexican ranchers have allowed CRREDA and CBS to put water stations on their land. Others sit on government property with official blessing.
Someone to count on
In addition to their work together on the water stations, Cecile has been teaching Sharky how to use e-mail. In between their once-a-week water runs — CRREDA goes out twice each week, but Cecile and another CBS member are currently alternating trips — the two stay in touch via the Internet.
Sharky admits that his friendship with Cecile surprises him, but he says she arrived “like an angel” in his life.“Everyone needs that person who they can count on for support,” he said.
Cecile gets on his case at times about working too much — Sharky also puts in long hours at a Naco tortilleria - but he says it makes him feel good to know she cares.
“She has become someone who really inspires me to stay away from drugs,” he says. “If I were to go back to drugs, I would feel like I let her down.”
Cecile says she gets a kick out of seeing all of the CRREDA crew take an interest in the water station program. But it’s no secret that Sharky is the apple of her eye.
“I think Sharky is a pretty special person,” she said. “He’s strong and he’s exceptionally smart, but he’s in a difficult situation.”
After the group finished its water station run and the truck pulled back into the CRREDA center, the guys made a quick dash for the shade of the building’s interior. Sharky, however, lingered behind.
“Come here and give me a hug,” Cecile told him after the two had exchanged good-byes. Sharky, wearing the expression of a kid being forced to hug his mom after being dropped off at school, reluctantly obeyed.
Still, as he hugged, he couldn’t help but grin just a little.
herald/review reporter Jonathan Clark can be reached at 515-4693 or at jonathan.clark@bisbeereview.net.
Joe Hicks wrote on Oct 8, 2007 2:22 PM: