Day 1 – La Primera Vez
or, the first time..
Wednesday, May 2nd,
very early in the morning…
I entered this day
with very little information. All that I knew was that my role was as an Emergency
Youth Worker at an Emergency Shelter in Harlingen, Texas. The youth, or "jovenes"
that I would be working with in this emergency situation were going to be far
different than the suburban teenagers I have worked with before. The exact
details of what I would be doing, who I would report to, how long I would be
here, when does the day start, when does the day end, where am I staying, what
do we do about meals...all a mystery, but I have always claimed to thrive in
the unknown, we’ll see…
This was not an
accident or random occurrence, let me fill in the back-story...there was a
sequence of events that ultimately put me in the back of a fifteen passenger
van with four strangers on May 2, 2012.
The Back Story
September
2010
– I was teaching a series on the Book of Acts and the mission of the church. As
an example of how people and the institution become distracted and drift off
towards division instead of unity, we watched the movie, “Hotel Rwanda.” The
story of this massacre in the most Christian nation on the African continent
captivated me, so I explored this topic in more depth. One of the books I read
was, "Mirror to the
Church" by Emmanuel Katangole. Katangole was
Rwandan but serving in Uganda, his front row seat to this human travesty gave
him a very interesting insight. This book led me to another of his books, "Reconciling
All Things." In this book, Katangole talks
about the brokenness of the world and the role of the church in repairing the
brokenness, he asserts that the church should find brokenness and step into
those gaps as repair agents. The idea of the church filling gaps in a broken
humanity captivated me. To make a long story short (too late), I have
desperately been looking for gaps to fill. Normal life in the institutional
church world is boring me…
June
2011
– A friend and I visited a mutual friend that was detained in an Immigration
and Customs Enforcement Facility (a softer, more marketable replacement for
Immigration Prison) in Aurora, Colorado. After our visit and on the way back to
downtown Denver, my friend and I get stuck in traffic on IH-70 east of downtown
for an hour or so. The blessing of traffic is that it sometimes forces us to
slow down and talk. In our conversation, he highly recommends the documentary "Which Way Home."
A few days later at
my home in San Antonio I watched this documentary. It journals the travel and
plight of a four boys as they travel from Central America to the “land of milk
and honey.” This documentary piqued my interest in this particular brokenness,
a brokenness that is happening right in my back yard.
July
2011
– I recommended this documentary to a friend of mine in San Antonio that has
experience with Immigration issues. Shortly thereafter, he arranges a meeting
with a guy that works for the Department of Health and Human Services and is
responsible for placing all of these Unaccompanied Alien
Children (UAC). We shared coffee and
conversation for a couple of hours, the issue of unaccompanied children
crossing our border is a massive problem and is growing larger and it is a
humanitarian story of crisis that is mostly untold...
March
2012
– My wife read a news story on one of the local news sites about the downtown
YMCA being used to temporarily house some of the UACs. There are no
organizational names mentioned in the article but there is a picture of a 15
passenger van. The name of the organization is on the side of the van. I google
the name and find their website. It is a great organization doing much good
across the globe in the name of Christ. They also have a Career Opportunities
tab, I search and find a few jobs that I am marginally qualified for and send
them my resume. They called the next day, interviewed me two days later and
immediately put me on their roster of Emergency Youth Care Workers. Now I wait
for my first assignment.
May
2, 2012 – My first assignment comes in,
sixteen days in an Emergency Shelter in Harlingen, Texas.
The Van
At 7:00 a.m. I stand
in the foyer of the organization’s headquarters with nine strangers, most of them
look as perplexed as me. I ask the receptionist if she has more detail, she
replies, “If you’re going to Harlingen put your luggage out by the vans and
wait here.” Thanks for the clarity. I introduce myself to the others and not
much more is shared. The curiosity builds. Finally at 7:30 a.m. we get orders
to load up the two vans, the ten of us are split into groups of five. And so it
begins, the only certainty is that I am in a van headed south on Highway 281
with four strangers. By the time we reach the south side of San Antonio we
begin to loosen up a little and make introductions – Joe, our driver, is a
retired Firehouse captain from San Antonio; Jim, the co-pilot, a retired School
Administrator from northeast Texas; Paula, a housewife from San Antonio; and
Ester, a single mom from San Antonio. With the formalities out of the way, I get
straight to the point.
“What
am I supposed to be doing here? I have been given no job description except
Emergency Youth Worker and no list of expectations.”
Joe and Jim were no
help, they were working on the facility/logistics side. Paula and Ester, on
their second assignment, were of some help. They told me of their experiences
in the first assignment but it was still very vague. They assured me that it
was going to fine, just stay close to them and learn, they will take care of
me…as the highway rolled by on Highway 281 and still no clear expectations for
this trip, I developed a plan. And the plan should be no plan at all but rather
a way of life that is fluid in any and every situation I might find myself in –
suburban youth ministry, homeless ministry, the corporate world, the golf
course, in my neighborhood – the plan - do my best to be Christ-like in the
Emergency Shelter, to be the presence of Christ there and to be a peacemaker,
an agent of love, mercy, grace, and a servant in any way possible.
The First Time
We arrived in
Harlingen in the mid-afternoon. After checking in the hotel that was to be our
home for the next sixteen days, we head out to the shelter on the rural east
side of town. The shelter was on a campus that was formerly a Theological
Seminary, then a Private School, then a Youth Summer Camp, then a Retreat
Center, and currently home for several hundred adolescent immigrants. The
campus has several dormitories for long term residents (more on this later),
administrative offices, a large kitchen and dining hall, and a gym/recreational
complex. The Emergency Shelter was in the gym/recreational complex. From the
outside the gym looked like any other high school gymnasium except for the
Border Patrol vans and Highway Patrol cars that were scattered in the parking
lot and the Mobile Clinic RV that was parked next to the front doors. The
soccer field and pavilion adjacent to gym had a more prison-like look to it. It
was surrounded by a ten feet tall chain-link fence topped with concertina wire.
On the sidewalk between the gym and the field stood a row of eight
Port-A-Potties. On the east side of the field were two large trailers - mobile
shower facilities - each with eight small shower stalls. The loud hum of
portable generators dominated the sound waves outside of the gym.
This was the first
time for me in any kind of Emergency Shelter. I have been in a few homeless
shelters and transitional living shelters. I tried to volunteer to help at the
Emergency Shelters that housed Hurricane Katrina refugees in San Antonio but
was never able to get on the roster. Our church was able to house some refugees
fleeing Houston because of Hurricane Rita one year after Katrina, but this is
the first time I have been in a bona-fide Emergency Shelter dedicated to
serving those whose lives have been upended.
The Emergency Shelter
was inside the gym; what appeared to be a normal high school gym on the outside
was anything but on the inside…this court of this gym was converted to a
temporary bedroom for 128 boys between the ages of 10 and 17 – the court
divided into five sections by portable curtains. Each section had four clusters
of eight cots each. All of the nooks and crannies of the gym were used for
supply storage. The Home Team Locker Room was used for a staff break room, the
Visitor’s Locker Room was the Intake (more later) and Phone Call Room. This
place was a beehive of activity - cots, work tables, partitions, medical staff,
janitorial staff, logistics staff, direct care workers, and over one hundred
twenty eight jovenes, the reason we are all here.
It was the first time
I have been thrown into a job that I had no idea what to do, it was a baptism
of fire...when we walked into the gym everyone dispersed – Joe and Jim in one
direction, Ester in another, and Paula was summoned by one of the permanent
staff. I stood there alone, a different person in a different place of a
different language wondering what I had gotten myself in to and wondering how I
was going to make it through sixteen consecutive days in this place. After a
couple of minutes of awkwardness, Paula came back to me and said that I was
going to help her with phone calls. Okay,
it’s all coming together…not.
She led me in front
of the bleachers to the mid-court corridor, then through the corridor to the
Visitor’s Locker Room. The toilets and showers in this Locker Room were boarded
up. In the middle of the room were two folding tables with two folding chairs
on one side and two on the other side and one on each end. On the tables were
two three ring binders and two cordless phones. Two walls of the Locker Room
had built in benches and on the benches sat eight boys. This group of boys, or
young men, or jovenes ranged between
fifteen and seventeen years old. They were all clean cut, showered and dressed
in basketball shorts, t-shirts, white socks, and plastic government issued
huaraches. Our task at this moment was to help these boys make first contact
with their families since being detained.
Paula called the boys
two by two to our table, when they were seated she would ask them for a number
to call. The jovenes would have a
small scrap of paper with a U.S. or Central American phone number on it. While
she initiated the phone call, I took the number and began filling out the Phone
Log Form. Detail oriented work, forms and administration are not my areas of
giftedness but I try to remember my pledge to serve in any way…
“¿Como
te llamas?”
“Erick,
Jose, Martin, Rudin, Misael, Jorge, Miguel, Gino…”
“¿De
donde eres?”
“Guatemala,
Salvador, Honduras…”
I had the easy part
of the job, logging the names, countries, and numbers called of these young
men. Paula was the one that did all of the heavy lifting on this assignment.
When mom or dad or some other relative picked up the call on the other end she
identified herself and our organization. She went on to tell them that their
son was in the United States and in custody. She would then tell the worried
parent or relative that they were not detained by La Migra but by a church
organization and that their son was being cared for – comida, ropas, escuela, y médico – food, clothes, education, and
medical care. She would then tell them that their son was sitting there with
her and that he wanted to talk to them. Paula carried out this work with the
grace and compassion that only a mother of three could muster – I am certain
this grace and compassion traveled through the phone system to the nervous mamá
on the other end of the phone.
“Hola
Mamá…” or sometimes, “Hola Papá.”
It was the first time that these boys made
contact with their families since being detained by U.S. Border Patrol. After
the grueling 2000+ kilometer journey, the first time they hear their mother's
voice they wept. And particularly, the faces of Gino and Misael are etched into
my memory. On the bench before their calls home their countenance was stoic and
brave. After their conversations, fear and longing. They move to the metal
chairs in the corners of the Locker Room to make room for the next set of
calls. These brave young men sit hunched over in the corner trying to hide
their tears. My experience with adolescents tell me that these boys needed a
hug or a human touch to comfort them but government restrictions prohibit any kind
of physical contact. And there was compassionate Paula giving them tissues…
“Esta
bien, esta bien mijo.”
This was the first
time I have been personally confronted with a problem as large as this. This
was the first time I had seen such a collision of prosperity and despair. This
was the first time I have been so close to a problem of this magnitude that I
could look into the eyes of the suffering and see the tears rolling down their
cheeks. Close enough to hear their tender words for their mothers, worlds away.
And questions flooded
my mind…what did these boys go through to get to this place? Why are their home
countries so unbearable that they endure the journey to this place? How will I
be able to endure this emotional roller coaster for the next fifteen days? How
can I walk in this place as Jesus walked in dusty Palestine?
Later on that evening
in my hotel room, I wept for them and I prayed for them…
