Tears and terror

Everyone calls me Grandmother - even the two men from India who demand more bananas that we don’t have but who have kissed my feet, let me know that god blesses me and asked me to say hello on the screen to their Grandmother back in India.

But it is the family from Ghana and the family from China that my heart especially breaks for. Both of them had been captured by the cartel or the Mexican police – neither of them know, but whomever, it was bad.

Both fathers have tears and terror, disbelief and shame in their eyes as they talk about how they were beaten, their wives were beaten, they were stripped of all their belongs, their money, even their shoes.

The mothers won’t look at me as we talk and I fear they were also raped. I hold the hand of “Rose” and tell her nothing is her fault, she’s safe now – although the minute I say this, I wonder if I’m lying. She weeps and tells me how the men held a gun to the head of her 10 year old daughter – TEN YEAR OLD DAUGHTER – who had never even seen a gun in her whole life.

The man from China tells me he was held somewhere in a dark and cold jail, away from the rest of his family, held for four days and nights until he could get someone from China to pay a $2000 ransom. Then he was thrown into the street, at the feet of his huddled family who had also been beaten and stripped of their belongings.

And all this after the children and the adults survived the Darien Gap.