A Rude Reminder That All is Not Yet Well in Paradise
 Linda Abbott Trapp - PVNN
| | All went well until we reached the Aduana stop south of Nogales, where officials confiscated all the boxes of shoes and toys. | | |
We've been full-time residents in Nuevo Vallarta for over five years. I enjoy playing keyboard for our downtown church, and Bob is an ecstatic fishing fanatic. I've celebrated the incredible beauty of this corner of Paradise in my book, Ornamental Plants and Flowers of Tropical Mexico, and we've both enjoyed the cultural scene, the good friends, the unexpected adventures.
Last Christmas, Bob spent the day at the city dump with others, distributing food and small gifts to those who have nothing. Towards the end of the day, a mother and her young children approached him. He chatted with the kids about their new toys, and the mother pulled him away, saying "no zapatos," and pointing to the childrens' bare feet. He led them to a truck filled with shoes, and fitted them.
One girl, about 8, received a pair of pink shoes and her shy smile hooked his heart strings. He was a goner! As soon as he returned for Christmas dinner, he began to talk about ways to collect gently used shoes from the states to bring to these deserving kids.
So, all summer, he gave talks, urged donors to go through their closets, and find it in their hearts to help. We'd set up collection boxes at church, talk garage sale proprietors out of their kids' shoes, and generally made pests of ourselves until we had amassed nearly 800 pair of shoes, many of them new, from caring and generous people.
Prior to our return trip, Bob farmed out as many as he could to others coming to Mexico, packed and organized the rest, and built a cartop rack and a trailer hitch rack to hold the remaining boxes, along with a box with a couple of hundred small children's toys for Christmas.
All told, we had about 250 pair loaded on and behind the car, and we took care to keep the rain off and to keep them secure at each stop along the way. We brought along a letter in Spanish from the Salvation Army explaining that the shoes were gifts they would distribute, and asking customs to permit their entry without difficulty.
All went well until we reached the Aduana stop south of Nogales. The officials there ignored our letter, confiscated all the boxes of shoes and toys (except for a few in suitcases they didn't see,) fined us $2,230 pesos, detained us for 4 1/2 hours, roughed up Bob when he asked to leave the shoe boxes in place until the supervisor arrived, and made us sign a confession of smuggling under threat of confiscation of our car, dogs, and everything in the car.
I tried every argument I could think of, and tried the red wall phone used for registering complaints, also. Of course it wasn't working! In the course of the discussion, the agents' explanation of the laws we were supposedly breaking varied considerably, but the upshot was we were not entitled to any exemption at all since we had committed a crime.
I asked them how they could sleep at night, how they could live with themselves after stealing from their countries' poor children, and they simply stopped recognizing my existence. I'm sure by now those shoes are on the feet of the customs agents and their families, and the toys have been given to their children as well.
The losers are the poor children here, the donors who were so kind, we who believed we were on the side of the angels in this short mission, and Mexico itself, which apparently is still run by thieves and blackguards. We will of course pursue all legal means of recourse, but that by itself won't help the kids, who need the shoes to go to school.
 I would like to know, from a customs official, what sense it makes to intimidate, fine, and threaten those who try to help the children?
So here we are, back in Paradise, stunned and bruised, and thinking maybe it will take younger and stronger people to make any difference here at all.
Linda Trapp is the author of Intentional Living: Lessons from the Tree of Life. Preview this and her other new books at: AbbottPub.com. |
Vallarta Weddings
Vallarta Living | October 2008 
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