Which Way Home?

It’s been two and a half weeks since I’ve written here. Today, I have many things on my mind, but what I’ve been revisiting this past week, is the plight of some Mexican and Central American children portrayed on a documentary we watched Sunday evening.   The film “Which Way Home?” documents the dangerous and troubling trip that many of these children endure. Their transports are freight trains upon which they climb after the trains have departed.  Though the practice is illegal, the numbers of riders (children primarily, but some adults) make it nearly impossible to enforce.  Their destination?  “Los Estados Unidos.”

Many of these children are adolescent boys, impatient and angry with their lives of no hope.  Others are orphans, abandoned by parents who’ve gone up north to find that life themselves. It’s a pipedream because the majority of these children will never make it.  Some die or are injured from falling off the trains.  Some are returned by social service authorities to their home towns and families.  If they make it as far north as the border, they struggle for survival as they traverse the desert or swim across the unforgiving Rio Grande. Surviving either requires gambling against extreme odds. 

What drives a child of 9 or 10 to undertake such journey?  As the interviewer questioned different children along the way, two common themes emerged.  One theme:  extreme desperation. Their lives are fraught with continuous hunger, lack of dignity and often violence. The other theme: hope.  That’s it! Hope, much of it innocent and unrealistic. The hope of escaping a life of relentless poverty drives them to make a dangerous trek that most will not complete.  The dream is worth the risk, for what they are leaving behind promises nothing better.  The film was “enlightening” only in the sense that I am now aware of the extreme cost that many immigrants, particularly the children, bear in an effort to take part in that “American dream” they’ve heard about from the beginning of their lives. It leaves a hole in my heart…an emptiness and guilt for having the good fortune of being born north of the Rio Grande.  There but by the grace of God go I; goes my own daughter; goes our grandchildren.

Here's a poem about a child in a different time, in a different place, an ode to the innocence I wish all children could have.

Once she was a nine-year-old 

She was fearless back then. Ready

to welcome whatever the world set before her.

She played football with the boys in the backyard

and created adventures with dolls in her bedroom.

And patiently endured the four-year-old next door,

because it was wonderful being worshipped.

She wept a little, but laughed more.

And once while playing hopscotch 

with the boy across the street, she fell in love. 

Always loved by those she loved,

she knew the way of happy endings. 

She had no reason to suspect

that it could be otherwise.