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An American minister is operating a unique crusade to bring hope and relief to Mexico's poorest people.

Children and women with plastic barrels compete with dusty pigs searching for scraps of food in the garbage dumps of Santa Fe, one of Mexico City's poorest neighborhoods. A thin gray haze of pollution stings the eyes and makes you cough.

A white bus crawls along a bumpy dirt road in a garbage dump near the new university area in Santa Fe. The driver bangs on the horn, breaking the lazy Saturday-afternoon quiet.

A woman looks up from washing clothes in a pan on top of a rusty oil drum. Children run out of shacks made of milk-carton walls and corrugated roofs held down with rocks. The landscape is carpeted with raw garbage, abandoned car wrecks, plastic bottles, rags, paper, and scrap metal. Packs of dogs wander along the dirt paths. Dead rats lie baking in the hot sun, covered with attacking flies. The Mexican government is slowly trying to bulldoze the shacks into the ground. With no place to go, the people will no doubt find another dump to live in.

The bus stops in an open area, and workers from Christian Advance International (CAI) quickly convert one side into an outdoor stage and lay out a large cloth on the ground. Children attracted by ' the noise rush to sit down. A CAI staff worker offers a prayer for the Mexican government and then begins a lively chorus accompanied by a guitar. She encourages the children to join in and clap their hands. She asks them if they love Jesus (or "hey-soos" as pronounced in Spanish). Hands shoot up!

Word games and a tug of war follow, along with a Bible story and such prizes as candy and food. A boy grins at winning two oranges and some small loaves of bread and clutches them to his chest. His friends cheer.

Headed by the 32-year old Rev. Chris Jones, CAI reaches more than 20,000 children weekly through an unusual sidewalk-Sunday-school program. Using four buses and a former New York City mail truck, CAI staffers go into neighborhoods that few outsiders ever see.

The staff of 22 conducts 103 Sunday schools in the poorest areas of Mexico City, the Obregon and Iztapalapa districts or delegations, as they are called. These areas of harsh poverty are only a 20-minute cab ride from the city's downtown parks, expensive boutiques, and historic monuments.

The CAI program runs from 11:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Children are always around because city schools must operate for three sessions to accommodate the overwhelming population.

Jones says: " We came here because of the need and because of the youth population. I'm convinced that if this city is to be taken for God, it's going to be by reaching the youth." Mexico City is growing at a frantic pace; half the population is under age 18. By the year 2000 the city could be home to more than 30 million people. Right now its 20 million people make Mexico City the world's largest metropolitan area.

In addition to having a heavy dose of social and economic problems, Mexico City can be hazardous to the health. Infants and children suffer from such serious pollution-related illnesses as bronchitis, chronic coughs, asthma, and conjunctivitis. An estimated 100,000 children die annually because of pollution, and perhaps 1 million or more have dangerous levels of lead in their blood. Each year 2.5 million vehicles and 35,000 industrial plants spew out 5 million tons of air pollutants.

Doctors have even identified a new pollutionrelated disease called "chilango neurosis." Its victims experience dramatic mood swings, from elation to depression, for no apparent reason. They lose interest in life, and some try to escape by using drugs or alcohol, or by attempting suicide.

Alfonso Cipre's Villarreal, a leader of the Mexican ecological movement, says Mexico City residents are accumulating so much lead in their bodies and passing it on to their children"we are in danger of forming a generation of idiots."

Dr. Norberto Moran Sanchez, a septuagenarian still practicing medicine in Mexico City, deals with respiratory diseases and stomach infections he relates to pollution and water problems.

Chris Jones and his wife, Laura, arrived in Mexico City with their two girls in the summer of 1985, after working in a ghetto Sunday-school program in Brooklyn, New York. The Joneses started with a homeBible-study group in Santa Fe. Out of that one group others developed, along with the idea for the sidewalk Sunday school.

From this modest start,, average weekly attendance in the program now exceeds 20,000. He says, "Our five-year goal is 50,000. We feel that is a very practical goal."

Not even scratching the surface because of funding limitations, CAI trys to feed 500 kids each week at three dump locations with bread, juice, apples, oranges, yogurt, tortillas, or whatever else Laura Jones can buy at the time"We want to expand the food ministry," Chris Jones remarks.

CAI also runs 24 family worship centers or home churches. Chris Jones says: "The sidewalk Sunday schools feed into the family worship centers, exposing Christianity and Christ out in the streets to the crowds we're able to attract. Adults and teenagers come out, so we are able to pass out literature and tell them about the family worship centers."

Every Saturday night, Eulalia Ramirez's threeroom cement-brick home on a cliff in the Jalalpa section of Santa Fe becomes a home church. Twenty-seven adults and children crowd into her tiny kitchen and living room. To the beat of a tambourine, they stand clapping and singing, "This is the day that the Lord has made." Outside, squeaking pigs and barking dogs try to interrupt the joyous singing.

Gerardo Venegas, a co-pastor with CAI, stands up to preach a short sermon to the group. He says, "We need to accept Jesus into our hearts. He not only died for us, but in three days he was resurrected! We have life in Christ." Venegas is articulate in his preaching and friendly; it is hard to believe that he was once a member of a street gang and a regular user of drugs. "I was very aggressive and liked to fight," he says.

After more hymns and prayer, Mrs. Ramirez passes around plates of cookies and mugs of a hot rice-milk drink called atole. Mrs. Ramirez became a born-again Christian as a result of a sidewalk Sunday school she passed with her daughter on the way to the market. About opening her home she says, "It's a blessing. It's a joy. I'm so excited to know that my home can be used for the glory of God." In the past two years many persons have found peace and hope in her home.

The poverty of Mexico City festers like an open wound. At 7,300 feet above sea level, the steep hills and valleys of the poorer sections are covered with flat-roofed one- and two-level concrete-block houses and flimsy shacks that appear ready to tumble down at the slightest push. The cement houses remain a faded gray because paint is too expensive. Trees stand almost naked, holding small clusters of puny leaves. The countryside has no color-it looks like an old movie shot in black and white.

Families live without water, heat, or glass windows. Toilets are just holes in the ground. Drinking water comes ftom a community pipe sticking out of a nearby dirt path. The dump people occasionally get 55gallon drums of water trucked in to them.

A family of four or five exists in a one-room shack with a dirt floor and a lonely lightbulb dangling from a corrugated metal roof. At night they huddle on one mattress under a wrinkled blanket. What few clothes they have are kept in cardboard boxes. Welfare is unheard of.

Dogs are everywhere: filthy and sprawled out in the dirt with protruding ribs, fighting for scarce bits of food, traveling in gangs, or barking at chickens on flat shack roofs.

The Mexican people are not lazy. They try to find work, even at meager wages of less than $4 a day. Women sell vegetables or dried pigskin on the street. Boys shine shoes. Many families keep pigs as a cheap source of meat. There is always a plentiful supply of open garbage for the pigs to feast on,

Yet despite this dire poverty, the ordinary mother strives to keep her little ones clean. She can be seen washing clothes in a bucket in the open air. When a stranger comes into a home, no matter how simple, he or she is offered green tortillas made from cactus or goat cheese, or fruit. Mexicans are generous.