My father...

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Couldn’t get out of Dodge quicker, E dad and I left Valaparaiso on the first bus out of town.  It was 5 am when our bags were packed and ready to be anywhere but here.  After the last few nights with Satan’s children we were ready to leave faster than lightning.    Another bus, another transfer but this time we have to hurry and get to Ojo fast.  Dad is not feeling well, his legs are swollen and he is in pain.  Attempting to sleep on the bus is a pain but we do it anyways because the lack of sleep from the past two days, all the walking and now dad’s poor health are all taking a tool on us.  Dad suffers from all kinds of things; he has diabetes, two or three knee surgeries and a back pain going back 23 years.  

Twenty five years ago my father decided to give the U.S. a try and left his wife and his kids with his mother-in-law in Mexico.  Dad arrived to work and money.  He quickly began to send money home and mom was able to place is in private school.  I remember him coming back the next year to visit and my mother begged him to stay with us or take us with him.  My father refused and told her he would send more money.  He left leaving my mother pregnant and alone soon after my youngest sister was born.  Shortly there after my father stopped calling or sending money, my mother was devastated.  The rumor mill began churning and mom’s brother and sister in the U.S. soon started sending word to my mother that my father had found another woman and that was the reason she hadn’t heard from him.  My mother gathered her things and her children, said good bye to her mother and the only family she knew and went off to try to find the man that abandoned her kids.  She made it clear that she didn’t care if he left her but there was no way he was going to leave her kids without a father.  The torment we went through to try to cross the border is filled with stories best left for horror novels.  A single woman with tree children 8 months, 5 and 7 trying to cross a border filled with criminals and violence, I don’t know how my mother found the courage.  I see myself now trying to be strong, living in a foreign country attempting to go back to my family and I am weak in comparison to the worrier women who have raised me. 

After arriving in the U.S. we arrive to find my father in a small apartment laid out on a dirty floor on an even dirtier mattress in agonizing pain.  It turns out that a month before he was at work on the back of a mobile home.  Two big rigs were moving two separate mobile homes at the same time one of them didn’t notice my father guiding the other one and backed into the mobile home sandwiching my father between the two mobile homes.  He lost the feeling in his legs temporarily and they thought he might never walk again.  Being an immigrant without health insurance in the U.S. is a deadly situation.  Soon after the accident the company refused to cover him because he was undocumented and the hospital kicked him out for lack of payment.  His room-mate brought him back to the hell hole they lived in and left him on the floor to rest or die whichever came first. 

Now from a more recent work injury my father has had several knee surgeries and between his knees, back and diabetes he should be making these kinds of trips anymore.  But with my mister two years ago my mother last year and me this year he has no other option but to take this dangerous trips.  Women can not and should not travel alone in Mexico and so it is my father’s obligation to accompany us into this leg of our journey.  Now it’s his legs that are in trouble.  One of his legs has swollen so bad I am worried for him, his shoe cut into the back of his foot and the wound is not heeling, on the contrary there’s an infection spreading.