Kathleen - Life on the Border

El Paso is really unlike any other city I have seen. With the downtown right on the U.S./Mexico border, it is truly an international city. For 35 cents, we can walk across a bridge to Cuidad Juárez and with 30 cents (exact change) and a license we can cross back to El Paso. Yet, while the international boundary line divides these sister cities, they really operate more as one large community—with one being a part of the so-called “First World” and another in the “Third World.” The dividing line between these two cities is clear, and disparity in economic and structural wealth is readily apparent.

As part of our local orientation, two of the JVC support people—local residents of the JVC city who are there to assist the JV’s throughout the year—took us to a part of the border fence in New Mexico. Within seconds of parking, a Border Patrol agent drove over and asked what we were doing at the fence. In our conversation with him, he said he had seen some pretty difficult things at the fence—especially the children trying to cross. But, he added, his training taught him to leave his heart at home and that is what he has to do.

As the conversation ended, some children ran up to the fence. We chatted with the five boys for a while, then, spying my water bottle, one boy asked for a drink. Through the chain links, I offered the boys my tap water—clean, safe, and free. Two thoughts immediately hit me: how lucky we are to have that necessity running through our taps whenever we need it, and how I wished I could just touch them. It just felt wrong to have people fenced off from one another because they happen to be born on one side of this arbitrary line. Those were my brothers standing on the very same soil as I, but we could not embrace, or hold hands, or play games.

I cannot stop thinking about this first encounter with the border. And I cannot stop thinking about the immigration debate in Washington taken up, for the most part, by people who have never actually seen this border and how much these cities depend on each other economically, with thousands crossing every day for work and to visit family. Certainly, the whole immigration debate in our country is a complex issue, and it appears very different on the soil of El Paso/Cd. Juárez. It is not an easy question to answer; nor is it a simple issue to comprehend. I just keep thinking of the dignity we owe to one another, whether that person is on the opposite side of the fence or guarding that fence.

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