Three pictures from El Paso-Juarez

By December 4, 2016Travel

 

A week after returning from our Thanksgiving holiday in El Paso, and I continue to be grateful for family harmony. In three days under my brother’s roof, there were no arguments or disagreements about the recent election. We are all in accord about the frightening state our country is in now. We are bound together for reasons beyond shared DNA. We all hate bigotry. Everyone in this two generational picture voted for justice.

On the day before Thanksgiving, our friend Rosy drove my sister and me to an orphanage in Juarez. Eighty-eight children, ages five to twenty-one, live there with little electricity and almost no heat. They share two bathrooms, one for the girls and one for the boys. There’s no refrigeration. They have two meals a day. On the day we were there, they ate macaroni and potatoes. All white. No greens or fruit. We gave them clothes and blankets and books and chocolates. (Yes, I know we should have given them kale and brussel sprouts.) They gave us abrazos. Here’s the picture.

Thousands of people cross back and forth from El Paso to Juarez every day. My brother, a physician, sees patients in both cities. As far as he is concerned, they are one community.

Leaving Juarez, we looked back at the unattractive slabs of cement and fencing planted on the bank of the Rio Grande. Graffiti abounds. If you live thousands of miles from the border, you don’t know what a wall looks like. You don’t see this ugliness. You don’t know what a wall does to your community. I looked at that wall and thought, “Why?” Why spend billions of dollars on a wall when people (little children!) in both countries need food and shelter? Where is justice in this picture?

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