NEAR NUEVA JERUSALEM, THE FIRST CIRCLE OF HELL

By Juan Montoya
Oralia and Jim Womack have been doing missionary work among the poor in Matamoros' favelas for years.
Out there on the fringes of civilization, where the electric-power service ends and people are scraping a living doing everything from collecting scrap glass and metal to selling fruit on street corners in the city, life is hard.
So the Womacks' missionary work in building simple one-room wooden structures to replace the cardboard and corrugated-metal shelters used by the colonia's dwellers are, well, a godsend.
"You wouldn't think that just a few miles from the border with the United States you'd have people living like this," said Jim, a medical computer analyst. "But just like the rest of us, they have souls and are hungry for spiritual bread."
Until recently, the colonia dwellers were far removed from the turmoil erupting between armed groups and the military. The drug runners and police basically left the everyday people alone. After all, what could these humble people give them that they didn't already have?
But this weekend, the turmoil crept even closer.
'We stayed overnight a couple of days and late at night we heard a lot of gunfire at the far end of afield at the edge of the colonia," said Oralia. "In the morning we asked some of the residents what had happened and they told us that the armed groups were just practising with their weapons. They said this happened periodically."
A companion of the Womacks said that on the way back to Brownsville, they came across military vehicles chasing cars full of armed men along the road from Cuidad Victoria to Matamoros.
"Two of the cars had crashed or were fired upon and were smoking on the side of the road," she said. "One of the occupants was in handcuffs and the soldiers were chasing the others. We knew they were with the military because they had uniforms and wore ski masks over their faces."
So far, the Womacks report that the armed groups and the soldiers have not bothered the residents of the colonia where they do their missionary work. But as the situation grows ever more desperate, will the chaos respect even these, the most humble of the humble?
"We pray it does," Jim replied.