Looking for the future

Jasmine and Harry live in a tent made of plastic and cardboard, four square meters wide. They are wife and husband, they have a three-year-old child in their arms.
“Come here, let's get in a circle,” they tell us. We gather, we join hands, they begin the prayer.
«Our Father who art in heaven, bless our journey». They come from Haiti, a country tortured to the core, and they need to get to the United States.
For now, however, they are stuck in the city, camped together with hundreds of other people along a railway track on the outskirts of the city.

It is one of the first images we have of Mexico City.
We arrived in the country a few days ago: ten of us left to visit Sister Katia di Serio, a Comboni nun who lives and works in the city. She is our guide, she who takes us to the heart of matters, she who puts us face to face with migrant people.

First, the reality: one of the deadliest migratory routes in the world passes through Mexico. Tens of thousands of people leave from Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti, Colombia and head towards the USA. To get there they have to pass through Mexican territory.
They sell their house to get money for the trip, then set off on foot and walk for months, sometimes years.
They have no alternative: those who leave do so because they no longer find a dimension of the future at home. Organized crime controls the migratory route.
Pay, this is the verb that allows migrants to continue their journey: first with money, then with their bodies, sometimes with their lives.
Kidnappings, kidnappings, abuse, torture, violence, are the pieces of hell that people carry on their skin. The situation has undergone a significant change in recent months: in Mexico City, the number of migrants has increased significantly for a substantially bureaucratic reason.
A year ago, the American administration issued an application that allows you to obtain a legal interview at the US border, but to access the app migrants must physically be in Mexico City. However, weeks, sometimes months, pass between the registration and the American response.
So people camp informally or find hospitality in migrant homes which - in positive cases - are truly a safe place.

We also stopped for a few days in a house for migrant people. We are just there to be, to watch, to let the encounters we have pass through us. The walls are yellow, the building has three floors with gates that rise to the sky, a necessary measure to protect people from a neighborhood that can be cruel. The migrants cook, play, chat, wash their clothes and then dry them. We meet Miguel, who manages much of what happens in the house.
He is 27 years old and has already been threatened fifteen times for his work protecting and caring for migrants.
«Yes, of course I'm scared – he says – But the love for this humanity is stronger». We meet Ales, a five-year-old boy who climbs on his back imitating a spider, his favorite animal on par with the scorpion. Now he chatters, jumps and shouts, but when he arrived at the Migrant House he no longer spoke due to the shock of what he experienced during his journey from Venezuela. Every now and then we hear a bell ringing: it's a sign that someone has managed to obtain a legal interview at the US border and will have to leave within a few days. Everyone applauds, rejoices, hope can be touched with one's hands. But there is no insurance, just an extra bureaucratic step to cling to: at that interview there could be a yes or a no, a new life to build or a rejection.
We listen to Father Juan Luis, the head of the house, who talks to us about the structural causes of migration, of hands that come from far away to plunder people, with a good responsibility of the Western countries, the richest, ours.

We don't want to leave anymore. Some tears fall from our eyes when we have to say goodbye to the people we have met. But ours is just an experience: we arrive and leave.
The result is that big questions open up in the heart, those that are unleashed when you share a little time with someone whose life is totally different from yours. Questions that may never be answered.
But they make you want to understand more and better, to inform yourself, to live stronger, to keep those faces in your heart, to embrace the indignation to transform it into concrete actions. To be shaped.

Chiara Vitali
NP August / September 2024