Migrant Experiences

We are now at the Guatemala Border with Mexico. We had a wonderful experience in Guatemala City that really plugged us into the circle of migrants that we are now surrounded by. The Scalabrini Order of the Catholic church is completely dedicated to the welfare of migrants. We have found that there are about 20 institutions set up to assist migrants in North and Central America alone. At the house in Guatemala city named the "Casa Del Migrante" we were able to conduct interviews with six people two of whom were workers at the mission and four were migrants currently making the journey to the United States or on their way back after an unsuccessful attempt. One man was a native Ecuadorian who was returning unsuccessfully from his second and final attempt to realize his dream in the United States. His was a heartbreaking story. During his first attempt through Central America he experienced a shipwreck during the trip from Ecuador (In South America) to Guatemala, that he told us almost took his life. Thankfully his boat was in a caravan that had 140 other migrants aboard. With the help of the other boats they were able to restart the engine and continue to Guatemala. Had they been traveling alone their possibilities for survival would have been slim. The boat was out in the middle of nowhere full of illegal migrants, helpless. As scary as that was, he told us, it did not get any better as he progressed. Once through the Guatemala/Mexico border he hopped on a freight train, after two hours aboard the train he told us that everyone in the freight car was shivering. He told us that had he succeeded in finishing the trip on the 10 hour train he would have been "half dead". Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately in his case the train was stopped after two hours and was searched by the "migra". He was quickly found and deported back to his home country. But the dream did not end quite yet. On his second attempt, now wary of travel by boat he decided to buy a round trip to Honduras legally and simply not return. On this attempt Julio and his family opted to get a Coyote to insure that he make it across the border. Coyotes cost at least five thousand dollars and can get much higher. This number is almost unfathomable to a farmer such as Julio and he left Ecuador on borrowed money gambling that he would make up the money to pay off his debt. Once in Guatemala he met with the Coyote in a Hotel. Unfortunately the Coyote did not uphold his end of the bargain. The Coyote canceled the deal and robbed Julio of his borrowed money. Julio was locked in the hotel for 15 days until he managed to escape. He ran up a mountain to get away from the Coyote as he was shot at. Migrants such as Julio are targeted frequently by bandits because of their social position. On his way down the mountain robbers took the last borrowed $300 he had leaving him penniless. With nothing to his name and not wanting to further his families increasing debt he decided to give up in Guatemala. He was picked up by the police and taken to the Ecuadorian Consulate. At the Consulate he was told that now he must pay for a $600 ticket home. People like Julio have bleak options. In Julio´s case he told us that he is now forced to sell his house and does not know how he will come up with the money. In a tearful call home his wife begged him to come home, and that they would come up with the money somehow. "It´s better to live. If I had been shot and died my family would have nothing." Julio said contemplating his recent experience. Now Julio is saddled with a debt well over five thousand dollars. Unfortunately his story is all too common here.

Written by Steve Eaton

Guatemala City

On May 6 I met up with Steve in Guatemala City. After four miles of walking and five local buses over six aggravating hours, we arrived at the Casa Del Migrante or Migrant`s house. The house is run by the Scalabarini order of the Catholic church and was set up as a safe place for migrants to rest before heading out again. The facility is so new they are still finishing the second half. The quarters are modest but very clean and well kept. Compared to the alternative of sleeping on the streets the place was amazing. Father Abraham was not quite sure about us at first (gringos showing up saying they are journalists and want to stay the night) but his generosity won out in the end. All the facilities including three meals are offered free to migrants but people are only allowed to stay three nights before moving on. This is because they want to maintain their ministry for migrants and not simply house the homeless in Guatemala City (there are other missions for that).
Steve and I stayed two nights and had some great opportunities to talk to migrants as well as the volunteers and priests that ran the house. Steve will tell you a little more about our interviews but I wanted to talk about an interesting observation from the night before we left. That night we gathered together and talked about human rights at the prompting of Father Abraham. Each night he brings us together before going to bed to talk about a topic pertinent to migrants.
As the conversation rounded the horn I was struck by the diversity of the group. Everyone spoke Spanish (Steve and I were they only second-language Spanish speakers) but each in their own accent. Father Abraham was raised in Mexico. Juan and Adolfo are from Guatemala although they each had lived in the States for some time, spoke English, and brought their own unique perspective. Then there were Juan and Javier, the brothers from El Salvador. Javier had lived in the states for 9 years but was deported after he was stopped for not using his turn signal. This time he decided to bring his brother to the States with him. On the other side of the room was Eric, a Garifuna (black) man from the north coast of Honduras. He spake English quite well but his Spanish accent was so thick I could not understand it. Just a few days ago he had been beaten by Guatemalan police and was here to rest and recover. In the corner, tucked away in his quiet but confident demeanor, was Julio. Julio is from Ecuador and was told to come here by another church after being robbed of his last $300. It is an extremely long trip from Ecuador to here and there are still 2500 miles until the U.S. border.

An English equivalent to this group would be like gathering people from British Colombia, Texas, Australia, New Zealand, and New York all with the same goal. As an outsider it was hard to catch all the cultural subtleties going on but they were definitely there.
Earlier today I was going through the library here and say a poster asking the question: ¿Somos familia en la migracion? Are we family in migration? It´s hard to imagine such a diverse group being family yet stories of migrants helping and sharing with each other are very common. People here need to rely on strangers and sometimes that means getting robbed or beaten but without this family of migrants, No one would get where they wanted to go.
That next morning one of the guys had a loaf of bread he had bought the day before. Instead of eating it himself he broke it into bite size pieces and shared it during breakfast. There was not enough for all nine of us but he shared it anyway. I imagine we are going to run into a lot more generosity of this kind on our way to the states. At least we hope so.

Leaving Tegucigalpa

Two nights ago was my first true migrant experience although it only lasted a few hours. There is a bus that leaves Tegucigalpa every night at 10:00 pm for the border of Guatemala. I was told it was the bus that most migrants take so off I went. When I arrived at the station it was already overflowing with working age men. They all seemed somewhat on edge and besides few brief conversations, they mostly kept to themselves.
Earlier that morning as I was planning the trip, Jo Ann (Calvin Professor and wife of Kurt Ver Beek) said I should buy the ticket early in case the bus filled up. The bus certainly filled up but buying a ticket would not have been a problem. Once the seats were full we started filling in the isle. Standing room only was quickly becoming a reality. I was by far the tallest person on the bus and the ceiling left room just for my shoulders. I started envisioning what my body would feel like after riding eight hours in a semi-upright position. The prospect was not good.
In the Meantime some of the guys around me learned I was from the U.S. and I quickly became a center of attention. I tried to turn conversation around and ask them about their upcoming journey but it was no use. I was the odd man out. One guy asked if I liked ´musica negra´and in a moment of relaxed judgment, I pulled out a few rap lines from high school. For the rest of the night I could hear guys chattering about Eminem in the back of the bus.
It took less than fifteen minutes to be sick of standing up. I tried to convince the guys around me that if we all sat down there would be enough room but that was not happening. Instead, I found and empty spot in front of the guy next to me and left the others to practice sleeping on their feet. By shoving my legs under one seat and my head under another I discovered I could lay out almost flat. It was not terribly comfortable but it beat standing. I spent the rest of the bus ride there on the floor.
At 1:30 am we arrived in San Pedro Sula where those going directly to Guatemala City were filtered out from those stopping at the border which happened to be most of the bus. The migrants stayed in their same cramped space while we precious few were ushered onto a brand new movie equipped, air conditioned, air suspension bus. My legs which are so used to being discriminated against by public transportation were excited to see the generous seat spacing and before we left the station, I was out cold. That next morning I discovered we were following the same bus I had taken from Tegucigalpa. Even though there were seats to spare in our heaven on wheels those who were to be dropped off at the border rode like sardines. As we approached the border the other bus pulled off at the last Honduran stop so its inhabitants could find their way across without documents being checked. We took the more formal route and after our passports were checked, we crossed into Guatemala without event.
This time I went the easy way. This time all it took was a nod from the border patrol but soon we will discover what happens when that other bus pulls off. Where do those migrants go? How do they cross the border? At the crossing in to Mexico we will search out the subtleties of what it takes to cross a national border.

Nueva Suyapa Interviews

Over the past few days I have conducted interviews with many people through Nueva Suyapa and around the capital building in Tegucigalpa. A few people asked for photos after my last post so I am trying to update our Picasa album (hopefully it works this time).
Nearly every (I am not exaggerating) family has someone who has left for either the U.S. or Spain to find work. Over the next few weeks we will be giving you an idea of what it takes to get to the U.S. but the trip to Spain in comparison is safer, and cheaper. The potential migrant will take a plane to Europe as a tourist and then stay and work instead. This is also illegal without a work visa (same as in the U.S.) but a plane ticket will often run under $2000 as opposed to $6000 which is a common rate for Coyotes who take people from Honduras to the U.S. Ironically migrating to the United States illegally is very expensive. Most people cover these costs by getting loans from friends or family that they will then have to pay back when they find work. Spain is now clamping down on supposed tourists and cross checking to make sure people actually have plans to travel and not work so it is quickly becoming more difficult to migrate there as well.
Unfortunately I don’t have space to write about all our interviews so I picked a few to talk about instead.
I met Oscar at the Christian Reformed Church in Nueva Suyapa. He just got back from the U.S. after being detained for two months in Austin Texas for crossing the border illegally. Oscar has who brothers in the U.S. (North Carolina and New York) but his wife and children live in Nueva Suypapa. He said his trip to the U.S. was difficult especially for his wife and children because he had no way of contacting them and letting them know he was alright. Sometimes people leave for the States and are never heard from again either because they start a new life or because they die along the way. Because of his two month incarceration and subsequent deportation, Oscar’s financial situation has only gotten worse. He is now several months behind on rent and back (literally) where he started. Still, despite his bad experience, Oscar said he is not angry. He thanks God that the U.S. has been blessed with prosperity and prays that God will continue to be with them in the future.
In most of the interviews I have done so far, the theme of family comes up quite often. Many people decide to leave in order to support their families and unfortunately, it is the family unit that suffers the most. Kurt Ver Beek, Calvin College professor for the semester abroad program in Honduras, says one of the biggest reasons he often does not support people leaving is because of the many families he has seen suffer as a result of one or both parents being gone.
This spring Calvin students Jill Van Beek and Katie De Yong conducted interviews with teachers and children in a rural village in Honduras. The teachers reported that many negative behavioral patterns began when one or both parents left the home to work elsewhere. One teacher reported that children know how to love their siblings but don’t know how to love in the context of marriage.

Still, for many people the benefits of leaving far outweigh the negative consequences. Pastor Valasquez of the Christian Reformed Church in Nueva Suyapa talked about a young woman named Merari. She left for Spain the day after I arrived in Honduras because her and her siblings were under severe financial pressure. Here parents are not in the picture (I did not find out why) so her siblings are now staying with their grandma while she goes to find work. Pastor Valazquez said this could be good for Merari´s family since it is harder for women in Honduras to find work than men.
Over all it seems like the decision to leave is tough. For some families the financial benefits for a family member to leave for work and send money back are good enough to give them a significant boost while others suffer family disintegration, financial loss, or other hardships (I talked to one man who lost both his legs while trying to get on a train in Mexico). Still, more people decide to leave every day and it does not seem like that will change any time soon.
If you have more questions or comments about these interviews, let us know and we will do our best to respond.

Why We Go

Throughout the next few weeks we will periodically post Bible passages and attempt to apply them in Light of what we see along our journey.
Today I want to talk about a passage that is commonly brought up in Social Justice circles, Matthew 25:31-46. This is the passage where Jesus talks about the final judgment and separating the sheep from the goats. As we prepared for this trip, I used Matthew 25 quite often to explain why Steve and I wanted to do this project so I thought it would be a good place to start.
At first sight it seems like the works based mentality that God uses to judge his people in this passage is at odds with the grace based gospel we are more frequently taught. What is the point of Jesus´ sacrifice if we are judged by what we do in the end anyway?
I think the truth in this passage has little to do with proclaiming a works based salvation and much more to do with diligence and seeking God wherever he is manifest. The two parables prior to this passage deal directly with diligence while waiting for something to come (parables of the ten virgins and workers given money by their master). As a follow up, verses 31-46 seem to work as a ´how to´ for what this diligence should look like. “As you did to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me”
The other night I had the privilege of sitting in on a book study of the “Irresistible Revolution” with a college class studying in Tegucigalpa. As the conversation progressed, some of the students lamented how hard it is to hear God’s voice in terms of finding your calling. I remembered thinking this many times myself. How can people feel called by a God you cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell? As the question was presented this passage popped into my head. Are we really dealing with a God so aloof that we can’t begin to approach him? Or is he already so close that we would go cross-eyed before we really saw him? Maybe the reason we often do not hear God’s call in our life is because we are waiting to hear from the God of the universe and we forget he is also the God of our tangible, everyday lives.
I think when Steve and I started forming the ideas for this project, it was because we started to see God’s call in Matthew 25 played out before us in a blatantly obvious way. Not once did I have a ´feeling´ about what God was saying to me specifically. In fact there were many times while planning this trip that I wondered if this was God’s will or our will sending us to Central America. But every time these questions came up, I could not bear the thought of not doing something in light of what we learned about immigration last spring. In the end, we had to do something and understanding the journey of migrants firsthand seemed like a good place to start. So here we go as fallen but faithful servants to a God too close to see.

Tegucigalpa

I am now in Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras. For those of you who don´t know our background, Steve and I studied international Development in Teguc for a semester last spring. That is where the idea for this project began. Steve is not down here yet since he still has to graduate from Westmont. I will be meeting up with him next week in Guatemala City. Despite our skeleton crew of 1, I will do my best to give you some background from the starting point of our journey. Tegucigalpa has seen a lot of growth in the last few decades. Similar to most other third world countries, as work becomes more industrialized and farming more mechanized, many people have moved to the city to find work. As a result, informal neighborhoods have sprung up around major cities. I am staying in one of these neighborhoods called Nueva Suyapa. Although Nueva Suyapa´s population is generally poor, there are many organizations, churches, and businesses working here. Several years ago the main road into Nueva Suyapa was paved and many of the residents are receiving legal titles to their land. Development is happening here quite rapidly but the evidence of poverty is still prevalent. Opportunities for work are scarce, especially for the majority of people who have not received a high school education. Wherever you go you can see people selling mangoes, brooms, water, candy, and any number of other things on buses and street corners. In Nueva Suyapa there are some nice houses but many are no more than wood and tin shacks clinging to the hillside along dirt alleys. For those who have plumbing, water comes every 15 days (each house has a tank that gets filled so the water lasts more than a day). Despite the poverty I can´t help but say Nueva Suyapa is also beautiful. Don´t ask me to explain how. I have tried and I can´t. you will just have to take my word for it or come see for yourself.

Deciding to leave a place like this in order to support your family by working in another country can´t be easy. If this is all you know, the U.S. must seem like a very foreign place.

Over the next few days I will be talking to several residents of Nueva Suyapa who have family who left to find work either in the States or in Europe. I hope to discover how the decision to leave happens and what life is like for the families still here in Honduras. If you have questions you want me to ask families here, please send a comment to this post and I will be sure to bring them up.

Until then, Que Dios Les Bendiga,
Nate

Honduras

This is a piece written by Jessica Howen, one of our classmates in Honduras this past spring. It does a very good job of summing up our experience and will hopefully give you an idea of where our project was conceived.

DEDICATED TO KURT, JO ANN, AND THE DEVELOPMENT CLASS OF SPRING 2007:
THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS SEMESTER WHAT IT WAS

Dinner with Honduras

On a dark, cold night, I knocked on the door of a small, earthen house. I came from curiosity, knowing that there were things to learn inside, though not yet knowing what. And perhaps I just wanted to get out of the cold. The door was opened by the small, gnarled hand of a small, gnarled woman. She quietly regarded me as I waited in anticipation on the porch. Then opening the door full, she welcomed me into the warmth of her home with a tired smile: "pase adelante." I entered her house with an eager step, eyes open to soak up what I could. I kissed her with the obligatory kiss of a stranger, to do what was expected. Then with her lips she pointed to a plastic chair and I sat as she went about her work.
She is Honduras, and I have come to know her.

I watched her as she began to prepare a plate of food for me. Her hair was drawn back, growing sparse like the mountain forests. Her aging skin, the color of roadside honey, her hands, worn with the work of many mornings and her arms as strong as ceiba trees. Her belly and hips were casualties of the joy she took in her many children. Over her old skirt she wore an apron with yellow frills, in which she kept the earnings of the day, selling tortillas and mangos. On her back was a second-hand shirt made by the sweat of her children. When she smiled, warm as the tropic sun, her teeth showed like scattered kernels of corn and her eyes sparkled blue like the waters of the northern coast.
She is beautiful, though she doesn't know it.

She set the plate in front of me: rice and beans, golden plantains, fresh corn tortillas, a lump of cheese, and smooth mantequilla. I began to eat and continued to study my hostess. I saw on her arm a bruise where her lover had gripped her too tightly. A foreigner from the north, he came with a strong grasp to take from her what he needed. He still hangs about the house, their relationship close and amicable, but the power differential is clear. She loves him and hates him. He will never leave, and she would never leave him.
But she is strong, though she doesn't know it.

As I sat at the table, savoring the food, her children were passing back and forth through the kitchen. Some children were well-dressed with long-toed shoes, others were dirty from working in the garden. One eyed me to the side as he passed, flashing an 18 tattooed on his wrist. Some were leaving through the back door, chasing a dream, but the children kept coming out of the bedroom to fill their place. The more I watched, the more I understood what they were about, but I could never claim to really know them. They spoke to me with grace and I to them with broken lines and phrases unsure, but somehow the meaning made its way through the muddled words, cutting windows into their eyes so that I could catch a glimpse inside. At times the windows stared, and at times, looked away.
They are my brothers; oh, that I would know it.

I am full and it is time to go. I look sadly at the plate. So much food has been left on it that I couldn't finish. My hostess smiles and shakes her head, takes the plate away, and gently leads me to the door. A tear hides in the corner of her eye, and one in mine, but perhaps the tears mean different things. One last embrace and I am gone. As I walk out the door, my legs are a little stronger, my skin is a little darker, my belly a little rounder, and my eyes, hopefully, a little wiser. Mucho gusto, Honduras, and thank you for your hospitality. My dinner with you has left me satisfied and wanting more.


-Jessica Howen