Church (Sanctuary, Part 1)

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.8 • 27.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the 1980s, Rev. John Fife and his congregation at Southside Presbyterian Church began to help Central American migrants fleeing persecution from US backed dictatorships. Their efforts would mark the beginning of a new — and controversial — social mo...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
0:09.0	In July 1980, a group of Salvadoran migrants crossed the border from Mexico into Arizona.
0:15.0	They walked over an isolated mountain range and halfway across a wide desert valley.
0:20.0	There were more than two dozen of them, people'd left behind lives and jobs to come to the United States
0:26.3	They'd hired some guides to lead them on the journey
0:29.6	Reporting our story this week is Delaney Hall And those guides had brought them to a largely
0:34.4	uninhabited part of the border. It was a vast, empty, and fatally hot
0:39.4	stretch of the Sonoran Desert. The temperature the next day got up to around 112. 115 degrees out there.
0:47.2	Was deadly.
0:48.3	This is John Fife.
0:49.8	He's a Presbyterian minister from Tucson,
0:52.0	which is a couple of hours from where the migrants
0:54.0	crossed.
0:55.2	They were in the middle of the most desolate and deadly area of the desert.
1:02.2	And I think out of the group of 26 12 of them died the first day out.
1:09.0	The survivors were eventually found delirious and suffering from intense dehydration and heat stroke.
1:16.3	Some of them had stripped off their clothes.
1:18.8	Border Patrol agents brought them to a hospital in Tucson, which is where Reverend John Fife met them.
1:25.2	And they asked some of us who were pastors to provide some pastoral care for the survivors
1:30.3	who were traumatized beyond understanding and they began to tell me why they'd fled El Salvador.
1:39.0	At that point Reverend Fife had lived in Tucson for more than 10 years, leading a small congregation at a church called Southside Presbyterian.
1:47.0	He didn't know much about Central America, or what was going on in countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador around this time?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.