‘hear’ and ‘here’

from trevor’s encyclopedia

#WeChooseWelcome

Paola was a first-grader from El Salvador who lived in a small apartment with her grandma, mom, sister and uncle. 

She was a wonderful kid, and has become a wonderful young lady.

The road from the countryside of El Salvador to the upstate of South Carolina is long and hard. 

If you take the time and make the effort to ask the migrants who travel along that road, “Why are you trying to make it to the United States?” they will answer, “I’m trying to find una vida mejor, a better life.”

The journey along this road is fraught with danger and heartbreak. 

Listen to these words from journalist Oscar Martines, who embedded himself with migrants on the migratory road from Central America to the Mexican – United States border and wrote about the people he met there in his book The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. 

"We walk on, telling ourselves that if we get attacked, we get attacked. There’s nothing we can do. The suffering that the migrants endure on the trail doesn’t heal quickly. Migrants don’t just die, they’re not just maimed or shot or hacked to death. The scars of their journey don’t only mark their bodies. They run deeper than that. Living in such fear leaves something inside them, a trace and a swelling that grabs hold of their thoughts and cycles through their heads over and over. It takes at least a month of travel to reach Mexico’s northern border…Who takes care of them? Who works to heal their wounds?"

Before The Beast was translated into English, it was titled Los Migrantes Que No Importan, The Migrants Who Don’t Matter.

 

It is important to remember that people do not leave their family, their homes, their land unless they have to. 

If your children are threatened by violence, sickness or poverty, you migrate and look for una vida mejor for them. 

If your house is bombed and your land is stolen from you by the state or by narcos, you migrate and look for una vida mejor. 

If you open your cupboard, and there is nothing there but dust, and you reach into your pockets to find money to buy food, and there is nothing there but lint, and there is no sustaining work for you to do to support your family, but only less than subsistence wages, you migrate and look for una vida mejor.

 

No, no one wants to leave their family, their homes, their land unless they have to. 

No one wants to take on the danger and heartbreak of the migratory road unless they have to. 

But some people have to. 

Here in the United States, there is work that needs to be done that could provide una vida major for migrants.

There is a way for migrants to find food, shelter, clothing, work, medical care, and education for where there was none before. 

There is a way unless we block that way for them through political demagoguery or caustic indifference, unless we think they don’t matter.

My little student Paola matters.

All of the Latinx students around me matter.

Please let me tell you a story.

One time, a new student named Billy walked into Paola’s classroom.

“Hi,” Paola whispered to him as he sat down beside her. 

“I’m glad you’re in our class.”

She didn’t know the story of the suffering that brought Billy to our school, but perhaps she recognized something familiar in his taut face, quivering voice and shaking hands.

“This is your journal. 

It goes in your desk, like this,” she explained. 

“These are our crayons and markers. 

You can use them if you want to. 

Don’t worry. 

There’s lots to learn. 

I’ll help you.”

Perhaps her eyes are so kind and her mind is so helpful and her heart is so compassionate because she made the journey on the migratory trail from El Salvador to here.

So many of my Latinx students have compassionate eyes, intuitive minds and compassionate hearts. 

They are beautiful, ingenious, wonderful and courageous. 

They are the opposite of the destructive, demagogic, dehumanizing words Politicians use to describe the immigrants at our southern border looking for una vida mejor. 

They are human beings. 

They are life.

They matter.

I want you to know something.

I want them to know, too.

I am here to take care of them.

I am here to heal their wounds.

I have no superpowers to help them.

I only have stories to write and a fragile life to give.

But I hear.

And I’m here.

Maybe that’s good enough for today 💛

Dum Spiro Spero.