Tag: Mexico

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Entrepreneurs Features Giving Back Kindness in Action

‘Don’t Forget the Poor’

Children play outside their house in Colonia de Carton in Piedras Negras, Mexico, on July 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Sky Cross is a nonprofit, strictly volunteer-led charity organization that operates along the Texas–Mexico border. Its mission is to provide food, clothing, medicine, and first-aid supplies to impoverished children, families, and orphanages. The organization works closely with missionaries of various denominations who offer education to the poor, primarily in Mexico, in substandard villages called colonias, which lack basic living conditions such as running water, sewers, and electricity.

The organization was founded in 1995 by retired U.S. Air Force Col. Terry Bliquez and his wife, Kathy. David Young serves as the current president, having been a board member and mission pilot since 1998. Before that, Young worked for the Civil Air Patrol (part of the U.S. Air Force), another nonprofit organization, which performs search-and-rescue missions.

When Bliquez first discussed Sky Cross’s mission with Young, it sparked a keen interest. Young would often accompany Bliquez on aid missions to the U.S.–Mexico border to deliver clothing, medicine, and nonperishable food to the needy. Together, they flew multiple times to migrant centers and orphanages, such as those in Nuevo Progreso, Mexico, and Matamoros, which is across the river from Brownsville, Texas.

Young said Sky Cross used to dispense secondhand clothing as well, but those deliveries have slowed down exponentially due to the pandemic. The organization has, however, distributed about 15,000 masks and more than 600 gallons of hand sanitizer across the migrant communities it serves.

The Importance of Helping the Needy

David Young, president of Sky Cross, unloads boxes of masks from his aircraft in Eagle Pass, Texas, on July 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

“The primary purpose of Sky Cross is to help provide food for the needy people, the poor on the other side of the border—they’re very, very poor. Many of them come up to the border hoping to be able to come across, and they end up being in the colonias on the border, such as the one in Matamoros,” Young said.

Years ago, people in colonias such as Matamoros would dig holes in the ground, scavenge coverings for the holes, and live in the burrows. Young remembers “being over there one time and looking at what they had on a grill that they were cooking outside—it was fish heads that they had scrounged for,” he said. “I was amazed that people could even survive with that type of food.”

Sky Cross delivers nonperishable food in the form of beans, rice, cornflour, noodles, and more. “I feel like God has placed in my heart a love for the poor and for their plight,” Young said, after being asked why the mission at Sky Cross resonated with him so deeply. “It’s such a blessing to me personally to go out and be amongst these people and, with my resources, be able to help them live a better life.”

Young said that when he was growing up, his parents instilled in him a deep desire to dedicate time and effort to helping those in need. “My dad was a homebuilder, and he would donate his time to work around the church. He had me help paint the back end of a church building one time—it demanded stacking scaffolding because it was so tall. He and I donated our time and efforts to that when I was just a 14- or 15-year-old boy. My father enjoyed giving himself to the community, and that carried over to me.”

Making a Difference in the Lives of the Poor

Children play outside their home in Colonia de Carton in Piedras Negras, Mexico, on July 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Through donations, Sky Cross also helped the Matamoros colonia develop to a point when residents could build a school. To support efforts like this, the Mexican government will provide water and electricity once a school is built, in turn helping the colonia become a sustainable community.

Many children in poverty-stricken communities such as Matamoros suffer from malnutrition. According to Young, children’s hair will often show signs of this. “Normally it would be black, but they would have red streaks in their hair, which was showing that they were not getting good nutrition. With time, those red streaks went away,” he said. “It’s a blessing to be able to do that and witness that as time goes on.” For Young, results like these are important, highlighting the difference Sky Cross makes in the lives of needy children.

Young said that his time at the organization is completely voluntary. Nobody who works there is a paid staff member, and 100 percent of the donations go straight to helping the poor. Young’s personal assets, including airplanes, fuel, and other equipment, are also put to charitable use for the organization, transporting volunteers to the border.

Aside from filling his role as president at Sky Cross, Young serves as a board member for a school in northwestern Peru that has 200 students. Together with his wife and family, he also helps more than a dozen children at any given time along the Texas–Mexico border. The Youngs provide money each month to keep those children in school rather than out scavenging the dangerous fields in search of food and money.

“We sent a couple on to the university; one of them became a dentist and came back. They are now practicing within one of the colonias there in Mexico,” Young said.

Sky Cross helps upwards of 30,000 people each year. It has supported six orphanages and helped build clinics in several Mexican colonias along the Texas border, providing quick access to medical care for families in need. “We’ve built a school in Nuevo Progreso where they would train the women to sew and work on computers. We have seen the results of that, to where the people will get out of the cycle of poverty and actually begin to have the skills to go out and earn a living,” Young said.

Physically Poor but Spiritually Rich

Through his time volunteering for Sky Cross, Young has learned many important life lessons—especially about how the needy can find happiness in the midst of their poverty. “The children are especially amazing to me. They can take a simple ball and have fun with that and laugh and enjoy life because they don’t want anything else. And what spoke to me is that some of the things we take for granted in our own society are more precious to them,” Young said.

“What I have learned in doing what I do is that the poor will find joy, and have more faith in their poverty than a lot of people that have all the things they would want in life. We in America need to understand that even the poorest of us are probably richer than 95 percent of the world. We place too much emphasis on the material things in life and not enough on the spiritual.”

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History

William Becknell and the Santa Fe Trail

A wagon train forms a defensive circle at Camp Comanche, a traders' camp on the Santa Fe Trail, between the North Fork River and the Canadian River. A line of soldiers guards the encampment from attack. (An 1839 engraving by Lossing from Josiah Gregg's "Commerce of the Prairies: or the Journal of a Santa Fe Trader"/Getty Images)

When a young U.S. Army lieutenant named Zebulon Pike set out to explore the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains in 1806, he was unceremoniously arrested by Spanish troops in modern-day Colorado. The Spaniards marched him at gunpoint through northern Mexico (including today’s New Mexico and Texas) before deporting him to Louisiana. Isolationist Spanish authorities thus jealously guarded their frontiers against perceived American incursions.

Only a few years after Pike’s journey, however, Mexico erupted into revolution. What this development might mean for American traders, no one could say. Regardless, a vast, largely uncharted buffer territory yet separated Mexico proper from the United States. From the Missouri border, hundreds of miles of plains—inhabited by bands of highly mobile and often hostile American Indians—ran up against hundreds of miles of desert and mountains. All of this must be traversed before one could ever catch a glimpse of Santa Fe.

Enter William Becknell. Becknell had lived in Missouri for around a decade, making his way further and further west until finally setting himself up on the Missouri River—the state’s western border. A veteran of the War of 1812, Becknell worked a farm, traded horses, and operated a ferry across the Missouri at Arrow Rock. Later, he tried his hand at salt mining, and he speculated in land, too. To carry out his various enterprises, Becknell borrowed a sizable amount of money.

Spurred by Debts

Then came the Panic of 1819. Monetary inflation, much of it in the form of unredeemable paper money, drove gold and silver coin into the hoarder’s cache. Businesses shuttered. Banks collapsed. Loans were called in and credit contracted—and Becknell’s creditors demanded payment in gold or silver. How would he come up with the money?

The standard hard-money unit circulating in the United States at the time was the Spanish dollar. Due to the Panic, these were now in very short supply. Becknell determined, then, to head west, deep into Spanish-controlled territory, to see if he could trade for silver coin. In August 1821, he placed an advertisement in the local newspaper. “W. BECKNELL” was captaining “[a] Company of 17 men … destined to the westward,” the notice read. The party hoped to increase its ranks to 30. “On the first day of September the company will cross the Missouri at the Arrow Rock,” the notice informed its readers. Any who wished to join were instructed on where and when to meet.

But when the prearranged day arrived, only a handful of men—perhaps five—showed up prepared for the journey. Including Becknell himself, then, the company may have numbered a mere six.

The Santa Fe Trail with its branches and present-day state boundaries. (National Park Service)

Moving in a southwesterly direction, Becknell’s company crossed the plains of Kansas—meeting virtually no natives along the way—to the Arkansas River. Continuing west along the Arkansas, Becknell turned southwest again at the much smaller Purgatoire River (thereby missing Pike’s Peak by about 160 miles). The stream led them to an offshoot of the Rockies. The journey through these mountains was difficult, but on the other side, Becknell and his company were greeted by a fantastical landscape of desert mesas, buttes, and canyons.

Reception by the Mexicans

Continuing southwest about 100 miles, the men suddenly encountered a contingent of 400 Mexican soldiers traveling in formation. They were led by a captain named Pedro Ignacio Gallego.

This was the moment of truth. Would this agent of the state, with a veritable army at his back, confiscate the Americans’ goods, deport them, or imprison them—as had been done to explorers and would-be American traders in the past?

As it turns out, Gallego had been sent on patrol not to seek out trespassing Americans, but rather to counter a recent wave of violent raids by the Navajo and the Comanche against Mexican settlements in the area. Indeed, Gallego at that very moment had been tracking a marauding band of Comanches when he’d spotted Becknell and his company. In his diary (translated here from the original Spanish), Gallego later described the meeting with Becknell:

“About 3:30 p.m. encountered six Americans at the Puertocito de la Piedra Lumbre. They parleyed with me and at about 4 p.m. we halted at the stream at Piedra Lumbre. Not understanding their words nor any of the signs they made, I decided to return to El Vado.”

Becknell’s own account of the meeting adds more detail:

“On Tuesday morning the 13th, we had the satisfaction of meeting with a party of Spanish troops. Although the difference of our language would not admit of conversation, yet the circumstances attending their reception of us, fully convinced us of their hospitable disposition and friendly feelings.”

The meeting was thus an amicable one, despite the language barrier, and Becknell came away convinced of the Mexicans’ “manifestations of kindness.” The two groups camped together that night, and the next day traveled together, too. Entering a town, a “grateful” Becknell noted that its inhabitants exhibited “civility and welcome.” It is likely that Becknell then learned of Mexican victory over the Spanish in their revolution. Mexico was independent. From here, the Americans were allowed to continue their journey on their own.

Trading in Santa Fe

In the middle of November, some 77 days after departing Missouri, Becknell and his men finally entered the town of Santa Fe. The new governor of New Mexico, Facundo Melgares, who had also been the old governor of Spanish New Mexico, was the same man who had arrested Pike 15 years earlier! Melgares personally welcomed Becknell and his men, informing them that Mexico was open for business.

Becknell spent several weeks trading with the highly receptive inhabitants of Santa Fe, offering calico cloth and other items from the States for Spanish dollars. On the way home to the United States, he traveled in a direct northeasterly direction (rather than following east-west or north-south river trails), which avoided mountains altogether in favor of a mostly flat, level path: the imposingly dry Cimarron Desert. Fortunately, the Cimarron River provided something of a watery path through this otherwise sand-sage country, though the river sometimes dried up completely.

Five months after his initial departure from “the Arrow Rock,” Becknell crossed back into Missouri, his saddlebags filled with Spanish silver. A few hundred dollars’ worth of trade goods had been swapped for around 6,000 dollars in hard coin. His debts could now surely be paid—indeed, several times over!—with money to spare.

But Becknell wasn’t finished. The next year, he returned to Santa Fe—this time, of course, opting for the Cimarron route. Crucially, he brought with him several covered wagons, the first ever to cross this territory. The trip took just 48 days, and apart from an ordeal involving the Osage Indians—who kidnapped three of Becknell’s party and tortured them before the Missourian managed to get them back—it appears to have been uneventful. Later accounts that Becknell and his men at one point almost died of thirst, only surviving by sucking the liquid contents out of crudely removed animal stomachs, are of questionable authenticity. In any case, Becknell and company returned home from this second trip having earned 3,000 percent profits.

Becknell had blazed the Santa Fe Trail. Later, he would help map it as a surveyor and guide. And for the next 60 years, it was some variation of Becknell’s wagon trail upon which countless travelers and traders moved goods between New Mexico and the East.

Dr. Jackson, who teaches Western, Islamic, American, Asian, and world histories at the university level, is also known on YouTube as “The Nomadic Professor.” You can follow his work, including entire online history courses featuring his signature on-location videos filmed the world over, at NomadicProfessor.com.