As I prepare to return to Brooks County for a 14th year of volunteer humanitarian forensic science in the Texas borderlands I find myself pausing as I write. I’ve never been short on words as this work is deeply meaningful to me both in the practical purpose we serve and in the educational opportunities it provides to students. Our main goal is to assist in identification efforts for individuals who have perished while crossing our southern border. I believe strongly that everyone deserves the dignity in death of a name. What started as a one year trip has now lasted 14 years demonstrating the extent of the need for forensic specialists at our southern border. In regards to educational experiences, my goal is to provide students with an experience that elicits empathy and understanding in a way that no book could ever do. I began this work thinking we would quickly be irrelevant in this context because I was hopeful things would change. Whether that be a change in policy, a change in funding or a change in perspective. I fear my loss of words is because I’ve said much of this before and nothing has changed.
My daughter is obsessed with the Wicked movies. My first introduction to them is recent, even though I know the story has been around for a awhile. I grew up with the Wizard of Oz. We would look forward to the time it was played once a year on tv, and it would be an event in our household. We would cheer for Glenda the good witch and for all the bad things that happened to the wicked witches of the east and west. We knew the wizard would end up being a fraud, but Glinda was good and the other witches were not. Wicked really challenged my childhood beliefs and showed me that the popular narrative is not always the truth. The man behind the curtain has more power in controlling the story than I originally thought. The truth is often a much more complicated web of rights, wrongs, goods and evils all woven together to form the fabric of the person or issue at hand. The fibers glisten with meaning based on motivation and perspective. To further complicate things, what is considered right and good by one is considered wrong and evil by another. This is the story of the border. Everyone in the US has thoughts and opinions about the border, but the more time you spend there the more you realize it is not that simple. That is why the issues remain.
This year the Beyond Borders Team will work with our colleagues from Remote Wildlands Search and Recovery. We will also be joined by South Texas Mounted Search and Rescue and UIndy alum Dr. Reed McKinney, DDS (a dentistry practitioner in Fort Sam Houston, TX). We will be revisiting areas where partial human skeletal remains were recovered with the hopes of locating more of the individuals that can be returned to their families. We will also be searching new areas that have GPS coordinates of missing persons in the hope of locating them. It’s physically demanding and emotionally heavy work. We have a wonderful group of people coming together for the same goal: to find those that have gone missing, provide them with a name and return them to their families.
We invite you to check in each day to follow our work. Thank you for your support!
~KEL