Meet a Flinn Scholar: Anne Marie Norgren

By Matt Ellsworth
Flinn Foundation

The thirteen children were cooling off in a huge basin of water, splashing each other, shouting, and having a great time. It was just what you'd expect from any group of kids on a hot summer day.

It was almost painful for Anne Marie Norgren to witness.

Norgren, a 2006 Flinn Scholar, was spending a month of her summer on a project in Chiapas, the southernmost Mexican state, to install a potable-water system for a poor community. The children she was watching were frolicking in their families' only water source, the same water they had to use for bathing, cooking, and drinking.

Not for the first time since she had arrived in the city of Tapachula, a few miles north of the Guatemalan border, Norgren was seeing up close the crucial part education had to play in any humanitarian outreach that aspired to make a lasting impact. And she understood what her most valuable contribution would be.

"People weren't able to connect their health problems to the contamination problems with their water," Norgren says. "Because I could speak Spanish, my role on the trip became educating people about how to use purified water."

John Mather, director of the Peace and Justice Center, the Phoenix-based nonprofit organization that sponsored the project, recognized the initiative and language skills that Norgren - at 19, the youngest team member by more than 30 years - was prepared to contribute to the project, and he encouraged her to embrace her new responsibilities. "Anne Marie provided tremendous help in translation for those of us who don't speak Spanish," he says.

That she has developed such proficiency in the Spanish language and has become so attuned to the cultures of Latin America is somewhat mystifying to Norgren herself. "I was born in Arizona, and my dad has lived here for his entire life," she says. "I've always felt connected to the landscape of the Southwest, and to the Latino influence here. But I have no Latino heritage myself." She adds, "I guess I don't really have any culture of my own, but I've still felt I could somehow fit in with the Latino culture."

The connection Norgren feels was emerging by the time she entered junior high, when she began studying Spanish. In the summer before her senior year at Mesa's Mountain View High School, she traveled alone to central Mexico for a month-long language and immersion experience. "It was my first real travel experience," she says. "I was thrown into the culture and hit on all sides by its beauty."

Upon her return to the United States, Norgren began working more intensively on her Spanish, and through her church became a regular participant in poverty-relief work both in the Phoenix metropolitan area and in Nogales and Agua Prieta, Sonora. In Nogales, she served at Casa de La Misericordia, a community center providing daycare to children, free meals, and a range of educational and social programs. Now at Arizona State University, she has continued involvement in those activities, and has started tutoring fellow students who speak English but would rather receive help in their native Spanish.

Given how compelled Norgren felt to strengthen her ties to the cultures of Latin America, her introduction to Mather's work came at an ideal juncture. A year ago, Norgren opted to participate in a year-long public-policy seminar for Flinn Scholars. The seminar, which enables Scholars to examine in depth one public-policy issue of key importance in Arizona, focused last year on immigration.

In October 2006, Norgren and other participating Flinn Scholars met for a panel discussion with representatives of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Border Patrol, the co-founder of No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid organization, and southern-Arizona rancher William McDonald, founder of the Malpai Borderlands Group, a bi-national land management and environmental consortium.

In March 2007, Mather served as the Scholars' guide as the seminar moved for a weekend trip southeast of Sierra Vista, Ariz., to Naco, Sonora. There students visited health clinics with which Mather is affiliated; met with representatives of Agua Para La Vida, a humanitarian aid organization; toured a processing facility for Just Coffee, a fair-trade coffee cooperative; and shared a meal and conversation with volunteers at CAME, a respite center for immigrants repatriated to Mexico after arrest in the United States.

Although she already had a solid grasp of immigration-related issues, Norgren says the seminar, and particularly Mather's facilitation of their visit to Naco, stripped away preconceptions about people on all sides of the issues. "When you speak with people face to face, you realize that they're all normal people" she says. "The border patrol officer we met was a normal guy going to work every day. The villager who had gone to Kentucky for five years was going home to Chiapas because his wife and kids missed him."

Norgren wanted to learn more about Mather's work in Mexico, and he welcomed her onto the team of volunteers heading to Chiapas a few months later. The timing was just right, although it made for a whirlwind summer: She had no sooner returned from the Flinn Scholars program's three-week seminar in Hungary and Romania than she was on a plane bound for Tapachula.

Spending a full month in Chiapas with Mather's team of volunteers allowed a still-deeper understanding of Mexican culture and the forces of immigration. After working on the water purification system, Norgren received introductions to two other projects in which Mather has long-term involvement. One was the center of operations for Just Coffee, the fair-trade coffee-grower cooperative based in Salvador Urbina, a few miles north of Tapachula on the slopes of Tacana, a 13,000-foot volcano. The second project was Mision Mexico, an orphanage and school in Tapachula.

Encountering multiple facets of Chiapan culture was revelatory for Norgren. "For sure, it was the most in-your-face travel experience I've ever had; the level of poverty was incredible," she says. "Down there, every day mattered. What hit me hardest about the whole trip was the use of water, and how essential it is to use water carefully. The worldwide fragility of that resource is so hard to understand in our culture, where having purified water is taken for granted."

Even though she had visited the Arizona-Sonora border many times, Norgren says her time in Chiapas cast immigration into a new light as well. "I wish more people could see it up close," she says. "It takes you out of your bubble and lets you see past the politics of the issue." She says that the communities of southern Chiapas where she spent time are confronting complex challenges not unlike those at the heart of contentious debate in Arizona.

Here in Arizona, "we live on the border between first- and third-world countries, a situation that doesn't exist very many places," Norgren says. One can learn a great deal, she argues, by observing immigration in the United States from a less political and more anthropological perspective, and studying situations along the United States-Mexico border in light of life along the Mexico-Guatemala border can be a step toward that shift in perspective.

Though many residents of Tapachula, Salvador Urbina, and surrounding towns are desperately poor, conditions to the south are even more severe. Consequently, Norgren says, "Guatemalans are doing the physical-labor and service jobs that Mexicans don't have time for," and most Guatemalans are working without legal status. Simultaneously, many more Central American immigrants are traveling further north into Mexico in search of work, with a large share continuing to the United States. And as in Arizona, local officials must grapple with the destabilizing influences of cross-border drug trafficking.

"The whole trip allowed me to think about whether I was doing the right things with my life," Norgren says. "I've always felt drawn to humanitarian and nonprofit work, and water is one of those worldwide problems I feel I should target. Also, I've always been interested in working with kids and education." She says her future may well be wrapped up in educating young people about how to develop good habits as stewards of their communities' water supplies.

Now that the fall semester has begun, Norgren is plunging back into life as a busy university student. She is majoring in mathematics, which she says she enjoys a great deal, though she isn't sure it is the one thing she wants to do the rest of her life. (She already has a strong record of success across disciplines; among her achievements in high school was recording Arizona's overall highest score in the state's Academic Decathlon competition.)

Norgren devotes much of her out-of-class time to leading Camp Sparky, a student-initiated organization that brings groups of ASU students into the classrooms of at-risk fifth graders for "day camps" intended to stimulate the children's interest in post-secondary education.

"What drew me in to Camp Sparky was the opportunity to talk to kids about going to college," Norgren says. "A lot of them don't have siblings who have ever gone to college. Everyone has something to offer, in terms of their own talents, and some of them don't realize."

By assuming the presidency of Camp Sparky, Norgren has quickly become acquainted with the administrative responsibilities that may await her if she pursues her interest in nonprofit leadership. In the spring earlier this year, Norgren and 10 other volunteers spent many hours making phone calls and writing letters as they organized a charity golf tournament and silent auction to benefit Camp Sparky's activities.

"It was an amazing experience to learn how to fundraise," she says. As important as raising money, she adds, "it also gave us confidence that we could do something new. Our leadership is young this year, which means we have the chance to get some different things going."

Meanwhile, Norgren is hatching a plan with other ASU Flinn Scholars for a cultural and service plunge to New Orleans, and at the same time she is laying the groundwork for her next round of international travel.

It should come as no surprise that she will be returning to Latin America. Next summer she is hoping to briefly return to Tapachula for graduation at Mision Mexico's school; by custom at the orphanage, graduates walk up to receive their diplomas with self-selected godparents accompanying them. A 15 year-old boy with whom Norgren worked has asked her to be his godmother for the ceremony.

From Tapachula, Norgren hopes to continue her journey into a fuller understanding of Latin America. "I'd like to bus from Mexico to Peru or Chile. I want to make my Spanish as good as it can be," she says. "And I've never been to South America."