(the Lord), and he cleaned my legal record of all my cases!
Fidgeting in his seat, Juan whispered an offer to show me the grounds. We exited onto a grove of banana trees. “Have you ever seen this?” Juan asked. He moved the petals of a fist-sized purple blossom to uncover miniature green bananas inside.
We continued on a dirt path behind the chapel, passing a hardwood tree. The tree was missing most of its leaves, and shadow covered its cracked bark. Suddenly, a chill took me over. I stood on the path, speechless; I had a visceral urge to avoid the tree. Juan broke the silence in a harsh tone.
See this tree? So dry. This is an ugly tree. The other tree next to it, it gets the same water, when it rains both of them get rain, and it looks beautiful. Why this one look like that? I’m gonna tell you a story. When I first got here I was passing this tree late at night with two people and all of a sudden I felt like God was hugging me and pulling me down. I fell on the floor. The guy ahead of me called for help. As he was helping me up we both saw demons in the tree. He started to pray, to pray. He said “God casts you out of here!” I used to be scared of things like that, but now I’m not. I know God protects me . . . when you look at this tree, what do you see?
I looked up and hesitated. “I feel cold,” I said. “And I don’t know if I should mention this, but when we first walked up that vine looked like a noose.”
“What’s a noose?” Juan asked.
“A rope to hang someone.” I answered. Juan shook his head and told me there was a lot I could not see because I was at a different spiritual level.
We walked past the laundry building and the basketball court where Juan said he often slept in order to see the stars. I looked up and caught sight of Orion and the Big Dipper.
I love it! I pray, I hear God. I think about the people on the streets that night, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep. I say, please God, help the people, give them something to eat. I know he hears me.
We looked to the detoxification room adjacent to the court, where four men lay motionless on cots. Christian rock music piped in at high volume. Juan told me he had to bolt the speakers to the wall. “They don’t know what they’re doing when they’re in detox,” he said. “They just tear out the speakers.”
As we walked back to the chapel, culto was letting out, and two men ran up to us: “Juan, Juan, they’re calling you!” Juan entered the chapel and talked with the pastor and two assistants while I stayed outside. Though I couldn’t see into the chapel, I heard the ebb and flow of loud group prayer for several minutes.
Suddenly Juan ran out of the chapel door with tear stains on his cheeks, his eyes round and bright. “I don’t know how to explain to you what just happened. I had something in my heart that God didn’t like, and he just took it out! I feel light as a—what you call what you see on birds?” He made a hand motion imitating a feather floating to the ground. Juan then explained further.
That man that came with the pastor, that preached, I never seen him before. Last night he had a dream about me, he knew my name. In the dream I came to his house, I asked him for clothes, for shelter, to feed me. He gave me these things but I ran away. He said that meant I had something in my heart God didn’t like. When they prayed for me [just now in the chapel] I felt this heat all through my body, it went up to my head, I felt like it would explode! But when I woke up I felt great. I had had a headache all night long and it was gone. ¡Gloria a Dios!
I told him how glad I was that God helped him, because I’d noticed that he was not as happy as usual. He interrupted me, pointing to the sky behind me, “See that? There, again!” He was seeing flashes of light from his guardian angel.
Juan had been sullen that week. The pastor and guest preacher must have sensed his need for renewal. In Juan’s words, it was the Holy Spirit working through them, reminding Juan of his privileged relationship with the Spirit.
Juan looked at me standing next to my car and said:
Okay, go home, because otherwise you’ll be here all night. But you’ll be safe. It will be as if the car was driving itself, and you’ll end up right at home without knowing how you got there. And don’t worry, your family will be safe, God has you all in his hands.
I seated myself in my station wagon and indeed, floated around the pitch-black bends of the roads leading to my house. Putting a cassette of Christian music that Juan had given me into the tape deck, I exhaled into my seat, and tried to hear the beauty that Juan found in the music. What was my spiritual ear and eye, and how did I know when I was using them? Was it as simple as noticing a banana blossom or catching a view of Orion and the Big Dipper? I knew that Juan would answer, “No.”
He would point me toward the two trees we saw behind the chapel, to the forces that kept one tree green and thriving, and the other dried and cracked on the brink of death, despite that to my eyes they shared the same soil and water. He would remind me of the gray-shirted man who gave testimony that night, to whom God spoke through the television, and of the young man who gave testimony that he was shaken from his spiritual slumber while in solitary confinement, from the brink of a twenty-year prison term. He would cite the new recruits that he had shown me in the withdrawal room, whose heads were so full of malignant craving that they tore the speakers from their wall-mounts to silence the word of Christ.
IMMERSION
Evangelists had been a welcome sight in the decaying neighborhoods where I worked on HIV projects just after college. Evangelists exuded privileged knowledge, and their gaze was fixed above the decay, on an alternate reality. But I did not get to learn more about them until I was in my last year of medical school. With referrals from street ministries in Newark and Hartford to their branches on the island, I left for Puerto Rico—the epicenter of Pentecostal street ministries—for what stretched into a year, and then two additional years of follow-up visits.
From the beginning, I faced a methodological dilemma. Street ministries were gender segregated and the majority were for men. As a married woman with an infant, I could not live at a facility long term to get an intimate view of their cultural logics and practices. Reasoning that I needed to survey local ministries before taking root in one for participant observation, I rented a unit in the shadow of the Ponce cement factory with my husband and one-year-old daughter, next to a friend who worked for the Puerto Rican mental health worker’s union. Ponce was a center of both drug trade and addiction ministries, and the cement factory was a reminder of Ponce’s thriving industrial past, just one mile north of the abandoned Schering-Plough pharmaceutical plant that had anchored its once thriving manufacturing industry.
I enrolled my daughter in the local daycare, bought an aging Ford Escort, and (between its breakdowns) drove to every street ministry in Southwest Puerto Rico—from Añasco to Ponce—that I could identify by asking health administrators, addiction programs, and the programs’ clients for referrals.
In the end, I visited thirteen ministries and interviewed their directors about their history, structure, treatment philosophy, curriculum, and clientele. The directors of Restoration House and Victory Academy2 were especially welcoming and invited me to participate with, observe, and interview their residents for the year. The two ministries provided contrasts: one accepted government funds and hired state-licensed professionals; the other more radically evangelical ministry did not. These represented two poles of evangelical addiction treatment: one radically evangelical, which rejected the pre-conversion world in favor of a lifelong mission, the other a hybrid of clinical and evangelical techniques designed to produce Christian citizens that could re-enter everyday Puerto Rican society.
Neither program referred to its residents
