Dos manos
Before the trip to Brownsville, Texas, to help prepare and
serve food to asylum seekers held in the tent city across the river in
Matamoros, Mexico, Marti told us to bring fanny packs or other bags that would
leave our hands free. Whether chopping vegetables or serving from the trays of
hot food to the 1,000+ men, women, and children of every age, we would need
both our hands, dos manos, at all times.
How did we come to be there and why were we doing this?
Hunger and homelessness exist inside our nation’s borders, both in cities and
rural areas. Tightrope, the new book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl
WuDunn, describes families shattered by what the authors call “death by
despair.” Donating to good causes and volunteering at soup kitchens are not
uncommon, and churches and other organizations strive to meet the need on a
daily basis.
Still, the need that drew a dozen women in their 60s, 70s
and 80s to this community just across the Texas border was on a different
scale. One journalist had found conditions in the tent city in Matamoros worse
than those she observed with Syrian refugees encamped in Lesbos, Greece.
One woman, Marti Michael, inspired and led us. I met Marti
about two years ago, after she retired from an administrative position and was
stirred to respond to the shocking treatment of asylum seekers legally
admitted by ICE to await hearings on their individual cases on this side of
the border. She had learned that ICE was simply dumping hundreds of migrants at
bus stops with no food, no money, little or no English, shoes stripped of
shoelaces (even the children’s shoes), often not knowing where they were or
what awaited them. Hungry, dirty, exhausted and terrified.
Marti had heard of the group Arizona Jews for Justice in
Phoenix that was trying to welcome these busloads—living out the promise still
inscribed on our Statue of Liberty. She flew to Phoenix and said, in essence:
“Use me. What can I do?”
Hispanic and other churches in the area banded together in
this humanitarian effort, allowing migrants to sleep on their floors, take a
shower, and eat whatever meals their congregations could provide in haste.
Volunteers donated or purchased clothing, toiletries, and toys for the
kids.
Marti flew out several more times, before each trip creating
a fundraiser through GoFundMe, so she could provide funds as needed to buy
clothes or toys or food or even portable showers.
Then came MPP, the misnamed Migrant Protection Protocol law
that protects neither the migrants nor US citizens. Rather, it created the
crisis that brought us to Brownsville. Under this law, legal asylum seekers may
no longer enter the US while their cases are being reviewed. Detention centers
built under earlier laws are mostly empty. And while these centers are
jail-like, at least there is solid flooring underfoot, a roof overhead,
toilets, showers and food. The legally admitted asylum seekers typically had a
family member or other sponsor in the US who would receive and house them while
they waited their turn at a hearing. So their stay in a detention center was
relatively short.
Under the new law, asylum seekers cannot cross the border.
They are held across the Rio Grande in Mexico in tent cities of which Matamoros
is the largest—some 2,000 souls including at least 700 children. They slept on
dirt floors with tarps for roofs, no fresh water, and few porta-potties. They
bathed, did laundry, and everything else in the river—with the result that many
became infected with parasites and worse. Humanitarian agencies recognized the
desperate situation, and that was the crisis Marti observed on her flights to
the border cities.
Volunteers in Brownsville scrambled to provide meals for
what were at first about 40 people held in Matamoros. They cooked in church
kitchens and private homes, piled food into carts, and pulled it across the
bridge to Matamoros. It was hard but they could manage.
But the number of migrants fleeing Honduras, El Salvador
and Guatemala—threatened by gangs in their homeland to kill the family if they
didn’t agree to sell their daughter, or to kill teenage boys if they refused to
join the gang, and many similar horrors—grew from a manageable 40 or 50 to
1,000 and now almost 2,000. Tents covered by fragile tarps multiplied. Meals
were handed out and taken back to their tents because there was nowhere to sit.
With rains, the ground under and around the tents turned to mud.
Committed volunteers realized they needed to raise funds on
a larger scale. They applied for non-profit 501C3 status as Team Brownsville
and received it. But they were a small group and the tent city was huge and
growing.
International master chef José Andres, one of my personal
heroes, created an organization called World Central Kitchen to deal with
crises such as hurricane Maria in the Bahamas and hurricanes and earthquakes in
Puerto Rico. He recognized the dire conditions in Matamoros and brought the
World Central Kitchen (WCK) there to feed thousands of asylum seekers in need.
By chance and serendipity, WCK moved into Brownsville just days before we
arrived.
Where Team Brownsville volunteers had been setting plates
of food out on a wall along the plaza, now there was a splendid large tent with
tarps underfoot, 40 tables. and hundreds of chairs. There were long
serving tables for the trays of hot food and salads, each tray intended to hold
up to 40 servings. Generators outside the tent also provided lighting. The
light was transformative for families sleeping in tents on the ground with no
electricity. Suddenly the dinner meals became safe, orderly, comfortable, and
cordial. Families and friends could eat at leisure and share
conversation.
WCK had set up the prepping of foods, always for the next
day’s meal, in a generous church kitchen. WCK purchased the food, provided
utensils, cutting boards, wickedly sharp professional knives, hairnets, gloves,
and set whatever volunteers showed up to work. Our group of two college
students and a dozen older women were put to work chopping. And chopping. And
chopping. Enough cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, onions, squash, kale, lettuce and
more to feed over 1,000 people each night. A WCK chef planned healthy, varied
menus from one day to the next and cooked the meat and other ingredients of the
hot main dish in a restaurant truck. We never saw the inside of the truck, something
I regret, but we were so busy chopping it never crossed my mind while I was
there.
Afternoons we had free to shop for ourselves, also for toys
or school supplies for the children, or to rest. By 4 pm we were back,
this time at the bus station, to gather with other volunteers and wait for WCK
to arrive with what typically was 10 large heavy bins filled with hot dishes or
salads or breads—by far the heaviest were the hot bins. We transferred the bins
to collapsible lightweight carts, one bin per cart. Then we pulled the carts a
half-dozen blocks from the bus station to the bridge, through the
always-friendly Mexican border control, and on to the levee separating the
plaza from the tent encampment on the Matamoros side of the river.
With some strain on our aging backs, legs and arms after
pulling the carts—especially those labelled “hot”—we were delighted and
grateful when men and boys and girls from the tent city rushed to welcome us
and to carry the carts up and over the levee. We had enough trouble simply
getting ourselves across without falling, and there, too, adults and kids
sprang to offer us a steadying hand or arm.
Setting up was easy and carefully programmed so you could
approach tables from either side and have the full array of bottled water
(contracted from a vendor on the Mexican side), hot main dish, salad, bread,
fruit, and a tiny fork wrapped in a napkin. The migrants lined up and waited
outside the tents until WCK or Team Brownsville said we were ready. The
kids—hundreds of them—raced into the tent and up the sides to be first in line,
but no shoving, only laughter and eagerness. For fun, rather than hunger.
As families came through, many carrying babies and
toddlers, children clearly as young as four or five would follow or precede a
parent, sometimes scarcely tall enough to see over the table top. From our
side, holding out the little paper boats filled with food, what you saw and
what I will never forget, was the eyes of those children, very serious,
watching, waiting, often holding in one hand a bottle of water. I would lean
over the table to offer the filled boat to a child who would in turn reach out
the one tiny free hand. As they smiled and said “gracias,” I would shake
my head and say, “Dos manos.” The
smile got bigger and the bottle was handed to a parent or tucked under the
arm. “Dos manos” for them and for us.
MPP keeps these families and thousands more like them
shuttered just across the border, visible and tempting but out of reach. But
thanks to Team Brownsville, World Central Kitchen, and volunteers from
everywhere, each evening the migrant families receive a nourishing meal in a
civilized setting, served with love and respect. (One day, 12 states were
represented around that chopping table, from Alaska to Hawaii to us from New
York).
One final thought to end this blog, if indeed it is a blog.
Our current anti-immigration, anti-asylum policies may well continue for
months, even years. No one wants to live this way, of course, but remember why
they are here and why they fled their homes in their own countries. Grim
as it is, living in a tent city is the only option for many migrants who hope
to legally gain sanctuary in the US. They know that the odds are against them.
Fewer than .1% of applicants are successful now. And, sadly, one result is an
increase in suicides as asylum seekers surrender the hope that keeps them alive
and wanting to live.
At the same time—and they must also know this—our
government is deporting hundreds of immigrants from inside the US back to the
countries they fled or sometimes not even to their country of origin. We see
reports of hundreds of deaths, rapes, brutalities beyond our imagining. We
cannot turn our backs and pretend this isn’t happening. Those of us who spent
our one week at the border will continue fundraising and we will go back. I hope our stories move others to donate, to
go volunteer if possible, but also, urgently, to work to change these cruel and
inhumane policies that are traumatizing children and costing lives whether
through suicides or as a consequence of the callous deportations.
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