Guest Column: Orcas Woman Sees One Tragedy After Another

Jan Koltun Titus writes from Arizona, where she lives when not on Orcas.

“It’s one tragedy after another,” said Sura Wallin, a grey-haired woman not five feet tall nor a hundred pounds in weight, but one with a gigantic heart,  as we picked our way through rubble to return to the  Samaritans vehicle parked on the U.S. side of our Nogales border with Mexico.

Sura, active in the practical-help group Samaritans for the past ten years, and I had, four hours earlier, crossed the border (legally) with four others from our group, taking a dozen boxes and bags of clothing to the Comedora,  a “free restaurant” run by Catholic nuns in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.

As we had walked across into  Mexico, I was shocked to see three U.S. soldiers carrying automatic guns with long barrels. I don’t know one gun from another, but I couldn’t help remembering that the British patrolled the old border between China and Hong Kong without showing weapons.

While we were trudging across the rubble that used to be a nice parking lot, everybody seemed to know Sura and to ask her for help: a belt, shoes, a warm jacket, dog food.  We dodged trucks and cars on several narrow streets to get to the Comedora, a one-story building where some 50 Mexican men and women and a few children waited in lines.

Inside, we laid the clothing out on long  metal tables.  Then the gate-keepers let in the patient folks who’d waited for us.   Each of our group stood at a table, reminding the  customers to take only one of each item, which also included toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap and towels.  We also brought cat food for  the Comedora’s grey-and-yellow striped tabby, who basked in many pats.

I strained to understand what one slight man was telling Carol, another woman in our group who has fluent Spanish.  He had come from El Salvador, and wanted to cross the border.  She explained the dangers to him.  These were also laid out, for all to see, on the Comedora wall: maps pin-pointing where illegal immigrants had died in our 50-mile desert stretch of the border, 250 of them in the past year according to the Pima County Medical Director.

Some of the dangers that no one but a starving man or woman would risk: freezing temperatures at night, snakes and dehydration in the hot days, lack of water and food, bandits who steal everything and at the point of guns force “illegals” to carry drugs when their previous sole reasons for crossing were to find jobs to feed their families back home in Chiapas or Sinaloa, Guatemala or Colombia.  (The drug people and cartels are, of course, major villains in these lives.)

Carol urged the El Salvadoran to return home, and we gave him a warm jacket and a small amount of cash because he couldn’t eat at the Comedora any more: his “free ticket” for ten meals had run out.

Sura disappeared for a couple of hours, and when she returned had a worried look.  “I need eighty dollars,” she told us.   She had been at a small bus station where the owner has facilities for would-be immigrants to take showers and sleep.  She and the owner had convinced three men that they’d never make it across the border. The men had decided to go back home to lower Mexico, but they didn’t have the bus fares.

Sura never carries more than $100 with her, and she always returns penniless.   In this case she had paid for one bus ticket and half of another.  The five of us gave her all the money we had, which miraculously added up to another $80.

Later, on the way home, we talked about what we’d heard at the Comedora.  There was the mother and child, the latter about ten years old, both with gaunt faces like those of the very poor whom the late Dorothea Lange had photographed in the 1930s in our own country.  This mother wanted help with recovering their U.S. Social Security cards.  They lived for ten years in Tucson until her husband was arrested and deported back to their native Mexico.  When she and the child got there, her shoulder bag was ripped off and with it went the cards.

Another woman wanted to get her baby back; she had been deported more than a month ago and her child was still with her sister in southern California.

There were some badly bruised persons, a man whose arm was in a sling because bandits had beaten him up while he was trying to cross the mountains, a woman who said individual Border Patrol members had pushed her down a hill and shouted abuse at her. Mind you, I have a compassionate relative who works for that organization.  However, if they are to be effective, they will need to constantly weed out the bad apples that come into their ranks, and to re-educate those infected with meanness.

For sheer evil, however, the Mexican cartels are poster boys. Sura’s close Mexican friends had a 2,500-acre ranch in Sonora (the province closest to us).  One day, her priest asked her to come to the church because two men wanted to talk with her. When she got there, the priest said he was leaving.  The men said they wanted to buy her ranch, for $1,000,000, which they had in a suitcase. She said she didn’t want to sell it. The men said that if she didn’t sell it she would find bodies all over it, of people who’d been tortured and killed.  What could she do?  She sold the property, but now lives in fear because the men know she knows who they are and probably who they represent.

This was an emotionally moving trip; I’ll never look at border problems the same ways again.   We can only do what we can do; my way seems to be to become more fluent in Spanish as quickly as possible and to find ways to move food, clothing and shoes to people who need them, working with the Samaritans and anybody else who wants to help.

(Jan would welcome emails  [jansound@rockisland.com] from friends who might collect warm clothing and/or who are traveling this winter to southern Arizona to bring some along for the relief of Mexican people who are living in poverty.   Any checks should be made out to Church of the Good Shepherd (United Church of Christ) in Green Valley with a ledger note of “Samaritans”. )