Riding the Beast

“You have to watch this movie on Netflix,” my husband said to me one day. “It’s about immigrant kids.”

Oh man, I cried nearly all the way through the documentary, called Which Way Home. Geez Eli, have pity on my hormones and my soft mommy heart!

The film follows young children, some as young as nine, as they travel alone on top of freight trains trying to get from Central America to cross the Mexican border into the United States. Some left their parents to try to find work in the US, some come trying to find their parents who had left them behind years before.

Many die.

These little kids, with no money or no adult supervision, get robbed by the police, fall prey to evil smugglers, or simply fall off the train and meet death under the wheels of “the Beast" as they call it. Many are rounded up by Mexican Immigration and sent back to their home countries. The few who make it to the US alive find out that their dreams of being adopted by some nice rich lady are nothing more than empty fantasy.

The filmmakers asked several very small children how long it had been since they had seen their parents. The answers always came in years. One woman had left her baby at the age of one and confessed that she felt nothing, no maternal love, for her now grown daughter.

My baby got annoyed with how tight I was holding him.

Sorry buddy, but mommy will ALWAYS, ALWAYS be here to hold you as tight as I can.

As I watched the film, my mind inevitably drifted to my own immigrant kids. They came from the same kind of poverty, lived in the same kind of old leaky shacks as the ones captured by the camera passing by on the train. But mine never rode the Beast. They crossed the border in a comfy airplane with a flight attendant watching them every moment. They need not avoid cameras or fear the Feds knocking down our door and sending them back. Nor do they need to beg on the street or work twelve hour days in order to survive. My niños attend private school and live in the suburbs. We paid a lot of money that all those things might be so.

Who pays for all the other kids?

No. That isn’t the question I really want to ask because the answer will never be nice rich ladies adopting poor Latino kids. The real question is how do we make their home countries places that don’t need to be escaped from? Really what I want to know is how do we end poverty?

I know what you’re thinking: oh? Is that all? Yeah, I know. I might as well ask how to end war and suffering and while I’m at it, how to brew gold in my coffee pot.

I don’t care if it’s impossible. I need to know. I need it to end. I refuse to wait until the Day of the Lord to tackle the big problems. How could it possibly be ok to do nothing while a 9 year old is raped and left for dead in the desert?

What I do know is that the answers are going to hurt. It is easy to remain in my cushy North American bubble but doing what is easy will solve nothing. I don’t want to be one of those Christians who talks a good game and then doesn’t do anything. I don’t know what or when but I trust that God is leading our family to great things.

Two isn’t enough.