Ben All Over: December 2018

"You may have no value in your pockets, but always have value in your words." This was one of the moral lessons Carlos took from his father, who had once hung his son by his thumbs for 12 hours for stealing a nickel.

I met Carlos at the main bus terminal in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, in 2011. He had just been deported from a U.S. detention center in Chandler, Arizona, after his 5th attempt to return to the country where he had once successfully stayed for 2 years and 11 months. We spoke for more than an hour as we waited for our connections. He was trying to return to his home in a small village of 500-600 people in Departmento de Colón, where he'd see his kids after two and a half months apart.

The time Carlos spent away from his family was not easy. When he was captured by U.S. Border Patrol, he had already been in the Sonoran desert for 6 days. His attempt to re-enter the U.S. was ultimately thwarted by his inability to leave a bleeding woman alone in the desert after she had been raped. He estimated that he carried her around 10 kilometers before a Border Patrol helicopter found them.

The risks of hopping freight trains are serious for desperate migrants.
Photo: public domain

He told me that he had almost no clothes at the time because he had been robbed earlier in Mexico. That leg of his journey seemed to me the most traumatic, as he reported seeing stabbings and rapes on the trains as he traversed that country. It should be noted that this is not train travel as the average U.S. person might imagine it. Those traveling on "La Bestia" or the "Train of Death," for example, are essentially hopping freight trains heading north, and are subjected to not just the dangers and mutilations inherent to this activity, but also to muggings, rapes, murders, and kidnappings by gangs and other criminal elements preying upon the migrants.

His eyes glowed like campfires in a brutal wilderness. He had literally nothing and suffered so much, yet remained defiantly alive without an embittered soul.

Carlos had been given the few clothes that he had by some nuns, which presumably helped him to endure the grueling 19 days he spent in the mountains before crossing into the United States. He told me that, once in the U.S., he encountered several bodies in the desert. This fact he relayed in a grave yet oddly casual manner, a mixture peculiar to someone who had seen the worst of human potential. Unbelievably, though, this man of perhaps 40 years or more, hadn't become hollowed by his experiences. His eyes glowed like campfires in a brutal wilderness. He had literally nothing and suffered so much, yet remained defiantly alive without an embittered soul.

This lack of animosity became evident when he told me how "friendly" and "kind" Border Patrol agents had been to him, and even more so when -- penniless and still a long way from home -- he displayed no special vitriol for the Honduran government either, even though they offered no assistance for people in his situation. Carlos told me that Honduran culture in general openly disrespects black people, but that Garifunas¹ like him do not get mad at the other Hondurans, "because they do not know any better." To further illustrate his point, he mentioned an unsettling fact about where we were sitting: "they kill each other; 40 people a week here." Indeed, San Pedro Sula was the murder capital of the world at the time, but despite the poverty and racism he and his people have endured, the worst he would say was: "we call them chicken brains." To me, this seemed like a term of pity more than one of anger or hatred.

From then on we talked about Garifuna culture, which he told me values hospitality, honesty, and travel. He recommended a book by Nancy Gonzalez for me to understand more of their culture. He could not recall the name of it, but I later found out it was an academic tome entitled: "Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garifuna." With a due sense of shame, I admit I have not yet delved into this volume.

The experience of meeting Carlos was a poignant one for me. He was a complicated man who loved his family and would go to extreme measures to support them. For a time in the U.S. that meant working as a welder and drug courier in Philadelphia. He would have stayed there longer, remaining apart from the family that he was supporting, if he hadn't decided to return home when his mother-in-law had gotten sick. He was someone who bore the scars of personal and systemic abuse, but still radiated an unlikely positivity. He lived a life mired in the distractions and anxieties of poverty but nevertheless was calm, worldly, and wise.

I left my conversation with Carlos feeling sad about global inequities, but also cheered by the durability and essential beauty of the human spirit. I will forever be amazed and inspired by those who have every reason to hate, but refuse to be consumed by the flames of fury.