border blues (first and random thoughts)

i forget when far from these places how much i hate border areas. it brings out the worst in people, the vulture culture that i think is a result of people being seperated based on illusions of superiority, the haves and have nots. the places that people die to cross, the places where people are forced to be the subservient against the wall of the rich and coveted. it is something that exists everywhere, but borders seem the absolute meeting point. there is no disolve of the madness here, no time or space or other elements to help obscure the obviousness of the absolute extremes.

the world over, these borders are the same. gangs of kids that live in the streets (or in some cases like nogales arizona, literally under the streets) , folks forced to sell whatever they can (drugs, their bodies), folks inprisioned in camps for trying to cross these lines in the sand come manifest.

and always in certain ways i feel under attack in these places, preyed upon like in no other place in the world. i feel the madness of these extremes coming through in the way people treat me, treat eachother. i spent the past couple days walking around town with michael, a migrant from uganda. it took him over two years to reach this side of the border and has been in the camp three months now. he swam from morocco to here, which i’ve been told takes up to 7 hours in extremely cold water.

he told me the first day how people here treat him for his black skin, but i was shocked to see it first hand. young kids actually approach us and tell me to not walk with a black man, men look at us like they want to hurt us when we enter a cafe, and everyone looks at him in disgust as they pass him on the street. and of course this is not unique to border areas, but something i am not used to in such obvious honesty.

spent yesterday listening to the stories of men imprisioned in the melilla, spain migration detention camp. people spent years traveling across africa and the world to reach this spot and now have been sitting in this camp for over two years. so many of them spoke of how it feels to have lost these years of their lives. the men from bagledesh told me how their friends committed sucide upon deportation because of the shame of not suceeding to make it into europe in order to provide for their families. all of them told me of their wish not to have to leave their families, their homes, their countries and onlt have beacuse the situation in this world has forced them to. they all said in their home countries they will make less then 1$ a day.

it was hard to listen to their stories, their pleas for me to take their stories to the world, knowing what little power i have. really, what am i going to be able to do for these people in my small existence in the world?