The swirling, wind-driven dust stains the sky like a sallow bruise. Yet Aaron"Rudy" Fraire seems oblivious to the coarse, overwhelming pall, humming thetune of a song he penned while he works alongside a group of men who, forthe most part, are strangers.

"I feel honored having all my brothers here," the evangelist and pastor says,standing in a narrow hallway inside a Lutheran orphanage.

He then peers out the doorway across the rutted dirt roads of the squattervillage of Anapra on the fringes of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and says: "Weare united in Christ. We all swallow the same dust and dig it out of ourears. But I am honored because my fellow workers all have a giving heartthat motivates me to continue moving forward."

Smiling, he turns to the group of men bowing their heads as a Spanish-speakingpastor blesses an unlikely meal of Mexican rice, beans, corn tortillas, tunacasserole, punch, and chocolate SnackWells spread out across four eight-footfolding tables.

Linking congregations
In this tense Southwest border region, Fraire is among a growing number ofLatino and Anglo pastors who are keenly aware that political and economicboundaries between Mexico and the United States are undercutting the workof the church. A new organization, Casas por Cristo, based in El Paso, hasdeveloped a program to link Latino and Anglo congregations through buildinghouses for the poor around Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso.

As their noontime meal begins, silence passes quickly as 12 pastors or religiousadministrators from El Paso and six pastors from Juarez, all of variousdenominations, begin to communicate.

Some of the men speak in broken, little-used phrases of high-school Spanish,and the others in English learned mainly from American ...