Mission, TX: welcome back

I'm back in Mission, Texas, home of cancer victims, the physically deformed and the all-around chemically contaminated. If you kept up
with Voluntour 1951, you'll remember that I spent a couple of weeks
here in the superfund, i.e. a site so polluted by chemical shipping
and manufacturing companies that the government has put major moneys
into remediation. Unfortunately for Missionaries, remediation means
soils transfers, asphalt caps and partial reconstructions.
Missionaries would prefer to have enough money to move and get the
hell out of there.

I saw two of my buddies, both with huge plum-sized bumps in their arms. The bumps house pumps, and the pumps circulate blood through their bodies that their failed kidneys--they're on dialysis, of course--cannot.

Friend number one used to be a top-notch balet folklorico dancer. He can't dance anymore, much less work. The man sells dishes--plates of food--for a living because he can't really leave his house. His body
has already rejected three kidneys. He's thirty-one.

Friend number two is twenty-four. My age. Her dad left years ago,
her mom's sick, she hasn't finished college, she can't get a job,
she's on welfare, she's just scraping by, and she's playing mom to her
two younger brothers. One of them gave the other a black eye the
other day. You can imagine how well things are going for them.

Here's where things get really good: a group from Bhopal, India just recently
came to Mission. it seems that Dow chemical, after being forced out
of Mission, traveled to India to reestablish their operations.
Apparently toxifying one community wasn't enough. They almost
completely eradicated another overnight.

One night while the villagers were sleeping, gas started to leak out through a faulty safety system. No one attended to the spill until the
next day--call this an extremely untimely case of sleeping on the
job. To make a long story short, 3,000 people died that night and 20,000 died in days to come. 20,000. Think Casa Grande, Arizona. 20,000 people. If they were
really lucky, they died in their sleep. If they weren't so lucky, they
gagged to death, unable to breathe through throats and lungs
undergoing rapid and exponential decay.

Think of what a happy meeting that might have been! Numbers one and two, meet numbers 20,001 through 20,006.

Greetings from Mission!