When I woke up Thursday morning at 6 AM, I was completely alone for the first time in a week. Not only was I alone, there was no reason for me to get out of bed. For some this would sound great, but it was a little disconcerting to me. Wasn’t I supposed to be doing something right now? Wasn’t there some place I needed to be? Of course there are things I need to do, like laundry or grocery shopping, but the drive to get my self to do anything was just not there. This past week, I had been driven by my own goals on top of my team’s goals and that was incredibly empowering.
As I think about my own hardships, they seem surface level and small. I sit here, reconciling that I feel alone in my apartment that has all my things: food, water, and a cell phone that could connect me to whoever I wanted in a second, when we just spent the week searching for migrants who have gone through the hardest physical and emotional labor that I could imagine. Experiencing just a fraction of the environment they face has opened my eyes. It takes three days to travel through Brooks County on foot, and during this time you cannot stop or you will get left behind. I knew this going in, as I knew we would be looking for the remains of these individuals, but knowing it and seeing it has hit me differently.
I am privileged to be able to return to Indianapolis easily by airplane and that I can go back to my life as a student, things that seem simple to me that can be complicated by the migration process. If they successfully make it through Brooks County and beyond, they have to rebuild their life in a completely different country, likely without speaking the language, where a lot of people are hoping for their failure. The rhetoric surrounding migrants and their path north can be extremely negative because people don’t truly understand what is happening. Or they don’t see these individuals as actual people. Derogatory terms are used to not only belittle their experiences, but to other them as a group of people. I do not know why the individual that we recovered decided to cross the border, but I do know that they were loved and had people looking for them. Doesn’t that sound like every other person you know? No matter the circumstances, if you lost a loved one, wouldn’t you want someone to care enough to find them and return them to you?
I find it difficult to think about my own feelings surrounding our trip when there are individuals we did not find. This trip was a considerable success, as we helped Don and Ray clear a lot of land and assess whether or not certain pathways were still active, but I can’t help feeling like I missed something. This feeling was discussed by our team at length as it is something that we all struggled with, but here I sit, still wrestling with the idea that I could have done more. I want to continue to do more, even back in Indianapolis, over 1,000 miles away. If there is one thing I learned from this trip, it is that this is the work that I want to do and that I will continue to do more.
– Lilly
