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After the big announcement from a few weeks ago I feel like I’ve been remiss in sharing with you stories of our lives and the lives of our children here in Honduras. So with that in mind I’d like to tell you the story of Iris.

Iris is in Laura’s 4th grade class and lived down the beach about a 45 minute walk. She lived with her mother Claribel, father Santos, and two younger sisters. Her mother was an active member of our women’s bible study group and her father often referees the soccer games we have on the farm. They lived in a nice house as watchies (kind of a cross between live-in security guard and caretaker) for three gringos who have vacation homes on the ocean.

I speak about this in the past tense because everything has changed. On Sunday Iris’ mother Claribel went mojado. To go mojado means to illegally cross the border into the US. Mojado in Spanish means wet and it refers to crossing the river between the US and Mexico. To reach the US Claribel has paid a coyote, someone who smuggles people, to guide her on the journey through Honduras, into Guatemala, on to Mexico and finally, maybe, into the United States. The journey is difficult, long, dangerous and expensive. At the end of this journey she will face the possibility of discovery by the Border Patrol and deportation.

And today Iris is alone. Her mother has left her here with her two sisters. Her father has no interest in caring for her, and on Thursday she will move out of her home and her father is sending her and her sisters to live with a man with a terrible reputation. As Beau and Laura struggled to reach out to her we in the volunteer community struggled with the pain of immigration in our neighbors.

There is Maritza who made it all the way to the US only to be picked up by Border Patrol on the second day, held in detention for several months and eventually deported. In the meantime her ex-husband has taken their children and moved to the other side of Honduras and she is struggling to get them back.

There is Osman, Tiana, Carlos, and Pablo, other children in our school whose parents have left them, each of whom has been orphaned by the American Dream. Our community is littered with families broken apart by a mother, brother or aunt who left to go to the states. When we asked why Claribel she was going she replied she wanted to have the American Dream. Dream or illusion, life in the states is incredibly difficult and often dangerous for illegal immigrants and the same is true for the families that they leave behind.

This morning I woke up to find Iris in my front yard picking fruit from our tamarind tree. It took me a minute to realize why this was odd. She had arrived at school at 5:50am, a full hour and forty minutes before class started at 7:30am. I don’t claim to understand immigration policy, free trade or macroeconomics. What I do understand are the tears of a lonely 10 year old whose mother has left her and she doesn’t understand why.

In peace,

Michael-John