Reprinted with the permission of the Abilene Reporter-News
By Ronald W. Erdrich
Photocolumnist | Big Country Journal
Abilene Reporter-News
DEL RIO – It was a pale sun that shone upon the two camps beneath the International Bridge.
Though it was my first time seeing anything like this, the first camp was nonetheless familiar.
Rows of large tents, pallets of bottled water, dozens of vehicles parked in orderly lines; if I didn’t know any better, I would have sworn I was back in the Navy SeaBees on a field exercise.
But it was the other camp which drew my eye, and the purpose for my visit.
More than 8,000 Haitian migrants – along with others from Central and South Americans – had created makeshift shelters using the tall cane stalks growing everywhere in this place by the Rio Grande River.
It was early evening, there was maybe 90 minutes of daytime left before the lights topping the generators around the camp would switch on for the night.
The sun, its light filtering through wispy clouds beyond the river that separates Texas and Mexico, shown across the camp as families began their evening routines.
Thanks to office of state Rep. Stan Lambert, I was one of the few still photographers to see the camp up close and in person. As my DPS escort watched me from his perch beside the Fox News nightly stand-up, I began making my pictures.
Thirty feet separated the migrants and me, enforced by a low concrete barrier, a dirt road, and finally yellow caution tape. I was warned not to engage in conversation as it could draw a crowd, and thus the risk of confrontation.
Those were the rules and so I made the most of them, in the best way that I could. I had about a 50-yard space I could wander both left and right, and two telephoto lenses that provided a decent reach into the life of the camp.
What I didn’t like was my weird voyeuristic situation. I don’t typically like to take pictures of people from a distance unless I can speak to them afterward. But here, the conditions of my presence precluded that and besides, most spoke either Haitian Creole, Spanish or Portuguese, none in which I’m fluent.
I didn’t see any cook fires, I was pretty sure they weren’t allowed due to hazard. The cane huts were covered in both leaves and clothes, which dried in the air.
What were people doing? Most passed the time with companions. If they were family or not, I had no way of knowing for certain.
Occasionally I would focus on a detailed scene and jump when I realized in the corner of the frame was the naked behind of a child trying to enter a tent. It seemed I’d caught most of the kids during bath time.
No one seemed to worry about naked children randomly walking past, however. Thinking about my conversations the day before, I knew most had seen far worse.
Every day that I was in Del Rio, at 11:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., a bus would arrive at a particular convenience store and take migrants waiting there to San Antonio.
Having been processed for entry by U.S. immigration officials, the migrants would show their tickets, in the form of a QR code on their phone, to the driver and board. From there, they would connect to wherever they told border officials they were headed.
There has been criticism about this practice. Migrants are required to meet with an immigration agent at a given time once they arrive at their destination. Cynics roll their eyes at this process, but most migrants statistically keep those agreements.
I went to the convenience store to find someone who could tell me about their experience coming to America. A group stood beside the front door and around the corner, beside the car washes. I approached with my cameras and audio recorder, and the suspicion in their eyes was plain to see.
“Does anyone speak English? Can I talk with you?” It’s a humbling experience to ask that, especially when they turn their back to you.
“I speak English,” replied a young woman, lifting her hand.
Giselle, 30, had been a Cuban doctor before leaving the island in 2017 for Suriname, a country beside Guyana in northern South America. She thought she had escaped the Castro regime until the Cuban Medical Mission found her and her husband and began pressuring them to return to the island.
He escaped and made it to Miami and she was preparing to join him when things took a turn for the worse and threats began to be made toward her remaining family in Cuba. Giselle slipped out of Suriname and quickly found herself traveling with the wave of Haitian migrants working their way north.
The journey turned out to be far more dangerous than she expected, however. Her experiences within Colombia, and the now-infamous Darién Gap separating that country from Panama, are the stuff from which nightmares are made.
Traveling through those forests, often those who stepped into the jungle never stepped out.
“I saw with my eyes, my own eyes; people who had walked into the jungle and they died,” she said. “People were dead, just dead on the (jungle) floor.”
Sometimes, someone did come along and cover a body. But Giselle said she saw many bodies simply laying out in the forest, the victims of exhaustion, injury or illness.
“Sometimes they're so tired they cannot…, they just sit in one corner and they cannot walk anymore. They die by hunger, by being thirsty and (from) disease.”
Giselle was a general practitioner in Cuba and in Suriname. For anyone watching someone suffer like this would be painful. Imagine how that would be for a doctor.
The words came to her softly in a voice thick with emotion.
“It's ... It's hard; it's hard because even if I want to help them, I cannot because I have nothing to help them with.” Her eyes glassy, Giselle looked down at her feet.
“At that moment, I don't have water, not even food. I have nothing.”
She looked up, then around at the other migrants waiting for the same bus.
“I only can see, and give them hope, and tell them to go further. But it's frustrating.”
Kept away from the camp, restricted to a 50-yard patch of dirt bordered by a barricade of cement, roadway and yellow tape, I still somehow managed to make a connection.
I watched women balancing five-gallon jugs on their heads, filled with water as they carried them to their huts from the tanker truck immigration authorities had parked beside the migrant camp. I wasn’t entirely unsure some of them weren’t showing off for me, they mostly smiled and sometimes waved as they carefully strolled with those containers above their brow.
I watched a little girl, probably no more than 3, spooning a milky paste from a package, slurping it down as she spun occasionally with her head back in the same sassy manner as my youngest daughter.
A woman came out a moment later to shake the grass from a thick blanket. It was a curiously futile undertaking; it was likely the blanket was going to end up back on the ground.
But the action spoke to humanity, to the need – even in the most squalid, desperate conditions – the desire to have some semblance of civilization. The lady knows the blanket is just going to pick up grass again but, by golly, at least it’ll be fresh grass.
I watched a man nuzzling what I believed to be his baby daughter as she laid on her back in his lap, her head on his knees. He kissed her, then rubbed his nose and forehead to hers as she drew a hand across his cheek.
A little boy, maybe 3, played nearby and caught his attention. The man put a gentle hand on the child’s face, cleaning something from his cheek that I’d noticed a moment earlier through my telephoto lens. The presumed father rubbed the boy’s face, then the side of his head, smiling.
At that moment, a woman came over with a handful of other children and chaos ensued.
Suddenly there was crying, there was carrying-on, and surely wails of something being unfair, and I just had to laugh. That was my family too.
The dad saw my laughter, gave me a thumb's up and for a moment, we knew each other.
That was when I recalled the worst of Giselle’s tale.
The bus was still an hour away. Giselle had agreed to act as an interpreter and together we asked the other migrants if they would share their stories.
A few turned us away. We kept asking, and I thought about our earlier conversation.
“Did you see anybody die on your trip?” I quietly asked.
Her voice softened in another muted reply.
“Yeah, two kids. In a river, they just…,” she stopped for a moment.
“How old were they?”
“Three years,” she said, collecting herself. “Three years; one was Haitian, the other one was white.”
They floated by, she couldn’t take her eyes away.
“I don’t know what happened, but I think because of the river, the current was too strong, they just fell.
Why would someone bring their children on a journey like this?
Perhaps the question answers itself? When people are so desperate to leave, any risk is worth a price.
The other answer is the same one that pioneers learned heading west across America. There’s no understanding of the true depth of the risk until it's too late. Once a group reaches that part of Colombia, the chance for making it back safely has passed.
Giselle remembered the jungle trail punctuated by discarded clothes, belongings and diapers as migrants began to realize their survival in the wild depended on lightening their load. Bags filled with clothing took on enormous weight as rainwater soaked them through.
But if migrants could survive the exhaustion, the rain, the dangerous plants and animals, along with the wild country itself, there was one threat that rose above them all.
“In the jungle, they are the people who live there. They are very dangerous,” Giselle recalled. “They just tell you, 'Give me your money!’ If you say ‘No, I have no money,’ and they catch you with money, they will kill you.’”
Aristilden was a young man in his late 20’s who smiled as we approached him. He was lucky to have escaped with his life and his family. He and his wife left Chilé, where they’d lived seven years because the government there wouldn’t provide them with proper immigration status. They sold all of their possessions after saving thousands to make the trip north.
“That part, the Colombian people, they call it the Place of the Dead,” he said through Giselle.
The country was rough, marked by low mountains, few roads and those who preyed on people like him. Aristilden remarked on it to Giselle in Spanish.
“Those people sexually abused pregnant woman, they killed people. He saw it,” she said. “He was scared, really scared because that can happen to anyone.”
“He said, ‘Inside you have to be strong because I don't want to finish like him,’” Giselle said, translating. “And ‘him’, he means the people who are dead on the floor.”
The bus had arrived by now. We thanked him and Aristilden went to rejoin his wife, an infant on her shoulder taking in the scene. Soon it would be time for Giselle to board the coach herself, but her thoughts were still on the man we’d just met.
“It's just like a movie, or a horror movie actually, to see something like that. I couldn't,” she said. “Thank you, God. I didn’t see that part, but I saw the children and that is...”
She trailed off and became quiet again, and I knew it was time for us to part. I thanked her, wished her well, and watched as her bus soon departed.
Horror movie.
The expression swirled through my mind two days later as I finished editing my pictures from the camp. It was hard to imagine these children escaping that, and then I thought of the victims Giselle saw and realized there were likely many more.
My mood lifted and I smiled when I came to the pictures of the dad and his children, the clearest example of the expression, “But for the grace of God, there go I.” Looking into his face, I could see the gratitude he felt to simply be with his family.
Even in that impermanent space, a village beneath a bridge in a no man’s land, its huts made from dead cane and roofed by the clothes they carried on their backs; even there, I could see his happiness in that moment.
“That is a rich man,” I said aloud, unexpectedly, and to no one in particular in my empty hotel room. “Even in a migrant camp, with nothing to his name, that is still a rich man.”
My eyes watered for a moment, and I wondered what was to become of him. What’s to become of any of them?
Our world could use more rich men like that.
Ronald Erdrich is the only photojournalist and a columnist for the Abilene Reporter-News. If you appreciate locally-driven news, you can support local journalists with a digital subscription to ReporterNews.com. He can be reached at [email protected]. He has been an NPPA member since 1997.
