Familias Unidas

What has been going on at our Southern Border has broken my heart.  I have been weepy for a couple of weeks now just picturing all the many many people I worked with back in the 90's who found themselves living in Tijuana after the mostly being displaced from more dangerous cities and countries to the South.  I can't shake it and I know I shouldn't shake it because it is serious and awful and I'm human and I should feel things but it is making me physically ill and I find my emotions bordering on low to

depressed.  I feel like at some point my next career, job or volunteer opportunity will most definitely involve working with refugees. 
I wrote this on my Facebook page. 
For the better part of the 90's I spent my life living, working and learning from those living along the California/Mexico border in Tijuana. At the time, and I assume it is not much different today, most of those living there were not actually from there but from poorer and more dangerous cites and countries to the South. They came by the 100's, leaving their families and everything they knew in search of a better and safer life. Many, probably most, didn't ever make it across the border and thus called Tijuana home. They lived in houses made out of old election signs and scrap material, whatever they could find to make a shelter for themselves and their families. Some even living and "working" in the enormous city dump. And even in what looked to me to be miserable conditions, to a one they were unbelievably thankful for a better life than what they had previously been living. In working with these, mostly, refugees I learned invaluable lessons about beauty and love and resilience and hope and it changed the trajectory of my life. I felt privileged
that they trusted me enough to share the stories of what they were fleeing from. I was heartbroken for them and with them.
Sadly, 'heartbroken' doesn't even come close to describing the unbelievable and overwhelming sadness I'm feeling about the current way these refugees and asylum seekers are being treated by our government at that same border and others like it across our southern border. And to hear it is being justified by quoting Bible verses as if Jesus would not only condone but endorse this horrific treatment of any human is sickening. I know of no one more liberal, compassionate and inclusive than Jesus Christ.
Please, please call your representatives! Support those groups who are trying to right this incredibly misguided ship. We must demand better. This is pure evil. #Familiesbelongtogether

Sign the petition:
https://www.familiesbelongtogether.org/

At the end of this article it provides ways to help.
https://www.refinery29.com/…/how-to-help-parents-children-k…

And also posted this poem which so eloquently describes the all too often refugee experience. 

Home, by Warsan Shire (British-Somali poet)

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.

you only run for the border
when you see the whole city
running as well.

your neighbours running faster
than you, the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind
the old tin factory is
holding a gun bigger than his body,
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.

no one would leave home unless home
chased you, fire under feet,
hot blood in your belly.

it's not something you ever thought about
doing, and so when you did -
you carried the anthem under your breath,
waiting until the airport toilet
to tear up the passport and swallow,
each mouthful of paper making it clear that
you would not be going back.

you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.

who would choose to spend days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
unless the miles travelled
meant something more than journey.

no one would choose to crawl under fences,
be beaten until your shadow leaves you,
raped, then drowned, forced to the bottom of
the boat because you are darker, be sold,
starved, shot at the border like a sick animal,
be pitied, lose your name, lose your family,
make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,
stripped and searched, find prison everywhere
and if you survive and you are greeted on the other side
with go home blacks, refugees
dirty immigrants, asylum seekers
sucking our country dry of milk,
dark, with their hands out
smell strange, savage -
look what they've done to their own countries,
what will they do to ours?

the dirty looks in the street
softer than a limb torn off,
the indignity of everyday life
more tender than fourteen men who
look like your father, between
your legs, insults easier to swallow
than rubble, than your child's body
in pieces - for now, forget about prideyour survival is more important.

i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to
leave what you could not behind,
even if it was human.

no one leaves home until home
is a damp voice in your ear saying
leave, run now, i don't know what
i've become.

but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

On Friday, Josie and I hopped a train and ended up right in front of the US embassy for a political rally demanding that FAMILIES must stay together.  Josie stayed up late the night before making us a sign to take with us. 

I was so proud to be able to do something that is so incredibly close to my heart with my beautiful, aware, loving and caring daughter who is also so incredibly close to my heart.   We also met up with a woman we had met several years ago when we were

vacationing in Cancun. She had recently graduated from a University in Monterrey Mexico and was working at the Kids club at the resort we were staying.  I could tell she had spunk and was so lively and fun.  We became Facebook friends and liked each other's pictures here and there over the past 4 years.  She recently moved from Mexico to Berlin to study German and will continue on and move to Bonn in the Fall to attend University there to get her Master's Degree.  Over the past few months we keep trying to get together.  Although I wish it had been over happier circumstances, we met Rosalba at the rally.  She is just as lively and spunky and cheerful as we remembered.