Living Life on the Line

Sunday, 03 May 2009 00:00

Nobody knows more about living life on the line than Christopher “Kit” Causey, who has spent most of his life working in social services and helping the communities of the Southwest.

From finding dead migrants out in the desert, to savoring the beautiful Mexican culture, Causey has seen both the horrors and the splendor of the area.

Speaking over the phone from a candlelit apartment in Nogales, Ariz., with no gas or electricity, Causey is “just trying to get by” since he was laid off from the Family Intervention Services of Child and Family Resources in February 2009 due to budget cuts.

“I've had lots of experiences in the third world. I've lived with next to nothing,” he said. “So when it gets dark, it gets dark. I light a candle."

A University of Arizona alumnus and former Peace Corps volunteer, Causey worked to provide in-home services to prevent domestic violence and monitor the abuse, neglect and exploitation of children.

“It's pretty much 24/7. When I was a program therapist I'd have to leave the phone on all night. I'd get calls at 2 and 3 in the morning. If they were severe enough I would literally have to get up and go and try to facilitate some resolutions,” Causey said. “Some pretty nasty cases I worked with.”

He said depending on what he found, he would sometimes have to remove the children from the house right away. Other times, the family would choose to participate in the in-home services to work out their problems. Causey would spend months visiting families and trying to stabilize them so the children didn't have to be taken away from their parents.

His entire program was discontinued due to budget cuts by the State of Arizona Department of Economic Security. With the dismantling of this office, Child Protective Services no longer had the ability to send therapists out to the cases Causey used to work with.

“The proactivity for the children in Arizona has gone to shit,” he said “There's much more potential for abuse and hiding abuse.”

Causey said since Janet Napolitano left the state for her new Washington promotion, the Arizona government is no longer social services friendly, leaving many Arizona families in a dangerous situation.

“They just drew the lines through a lot of this stuff and now we're at where we're at,” he said. “Well, ‘something needs to be done.' So you'll see congressmen come down here and they'll meet with the officials and they'll get their photo ops, and then they get back in their helicopters and fly away and everything is the same.”

Causey is also living in a city that is gaining national and international attention for street violence and narcotics trafficking.

“People are sometimes sleeping in their living rooms because they don't know when the automatic weapons are going to go off -- and these are communities that used to be safe and stable,” he said.

Causey said the drug cartel activity in Nogales, Sonora has reached extremes that he has never seen before.

“They'll do anything they can to get the harder drugs across. They'll go as far as to try to hide it in the diapers of the babies. Or insert the baggies in (the babies') vaginas, things like that,” he said. “We have narco-trafficking going on which has hit the national level.”

But is Causey scared? No.

“I've just been around too long. I could get a bullet on the other side or I could get hit in front of my house,” he said. “When your number comes up, your number comes up.”

What Causey hopes for is a little bit of cultural understanding and hopes to build bridges instead of walls.

“They've built what they think is a better wall, but sometimes in one week they'll discover three tunnels.” he laughed. “I tell people ‘cultures are dynamic.' We're just barely waking up to the point that the Southwest is being 're-Mexicanized.'"

All of the social work Causey has done in his career has made him an advocate for open borders and for a peaceful and accepting community, free of racism.

“Most of all of this is horseshit. We should all be able to live together,” he said. “Make it a simple path to cross and remove the bureaucracy.”

Written by Cody Calamaio