Pregnant with Hope: The View from the Migrant Shelter
On the same day that Elon Musk’s team was taking over the Treasury’s $6 trillion checking account, two thousand miles away in a parish-hall-turned-migrant-shelter, a few hundred yards from the Mexican border, a young man in donated sweatpants, t-shirt, and sandals was rallying a few hundred dollars for a flight to Orlando for himself, his wife and his two kids. A barber by trade in Colombia, he journeyed to the United States with a small leather duffel bag containing his scissors and clippers. The shelter coordinator set up shop for him in the men’s bathroom: a fold out chair in front of the mirror and sink. My three year-old son sat in the chair. A Kenyan man - fresh out of the detention center, estranged from his family, without a destination - waited for a haircut of his own. The barber revved his clippers as he held them in the air for my son to see, “Car. Vroom, vroom,” he said and smiled, pleased with his English. My son smiled back and the barber began his work. The Kenyan smiled, too.
Outside the bathroom in the far corner of the main hall, a young girl with chicken pox made the best of her seclusion by practicing cartwheels. On the other side of rows of Red Cross cots, a Venezuelan woman and an Afghan woman hunched over a cell phone translating Spanish to Dari; a few feet away in the kitchen, the wife of the barber washed bowls and countertops after cooking arepas for all the shelter guests, with help from the Venezuelan’s teenage son and a 20-something volunteer from Maryland. A window-size Virgin of Guadalupe watched over it all from the wall by the stage where donated cough medicine, toothpaste, and diapers sat waiting for the multitudes who had their asylum appointments cancelled after the recent executive orders. From her prayer-clasped hands hung a black sash symbolizing her pregnancy.
There are so many reasons to despair; what we’re experiencing is a “coup”, write the historians and journalists. And yet, as a Christian, North American volunteer at this shelter on the border, I also feel hope. Maybe, just maybe, this moment is pregnant with the choice to practice what we have long preached: that by baptism we are the family of God, that our loyalty to the dignity of our brothers and sisters in Christ trumps all other loyalties, and that such a choice might both pierce our hearts and be exactly what our hearts have been longing for.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.