Last night I got a late text from the student team members asking if they could put their unopened and left over water in barrels in the morning. Driving anywhere in the vastness of Brooks County takes time, so our last day was our earliest start yet. After a quick breakfast, we packed the van, checked out of the hotel and headed south and east to roads that still hold the legacy of Eddie Canales: life saving water stations.
Beyond Boders Team Members at a Water Station Built by the South Texas Human Rights Center
Beyond Borders Team Members at the Alamo
The team said goodbye to Brooks County and made the long drive back to San Antonio. The ability to leave the situation at the border is a luxury but the transition back home can be tough for some team members. I’ve found spending a few hours in San Antonio being tourists provides them with a bit of buffer as they shift back to the Midwest.
Beyond Boders Team Members at the San Antonio River Walk
Lilly and Chastidy after getting their bags pulled by the TSA
At the airport we weighed our bags and had to do a little rearranging before checking them in. Then in the security screening line, we held our breath as our carryon bags, each with at least one animal bone or antler, made their way through imaging. Chastidy and Lilly had their bags pulled for closer inspection.
We made our flights to DFW and then IND with no problems. We said our goodbyes at baggage claim and headed home to sleep in our own beds. We will continue to post over the next week and hope you continue to take a few minutes each day to read our reflections on this trip.
Chastidy and Makenna playing games at the airport while we wait
“It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world”. The quote appears on the screen at the opening of the movie The Butterfly Effect. The premise of the movie is that everything that happens in this moment is an accumulation of everything that’s happened before it. This idea is not new and is rooted in Chaos Theory, a mathematical theory which states that small differences in initial conditions can yield widely diverging outcomes. It shows that what was once thought to be the randomness of a complex system is actually a system of interconnections, patterns and feedback loops. Chaos Theory suggests that all of our actions, no matter how seemingly small, have consequences.
The South Texas brush
As someone who overthinks everything, Chaos Theory is quite a mental burden. Replaying every word I said to a jury wondering if I inadvertently biased them, hoping the foundations I have laid for my children send them in a trajectory that keeps them happy and safe, and always second guessing whether I’ve done enough to support my students or if my form of support is not the best approach. You must be thinking that sounds incredibly egotistical and self-centered within the context of a prolonged mass disaster where people are dying daily. That the last ten years I have emphasized this is not about me/us but about the conditions at the border, and that is true. What we’ve also seen over the last ten years is no real change in policies at the border that stop or slow the number of deaths. People are still dying in large numbers. The location may shift over time, but the situation is still dire.
An example of the vegetation in South Texas
Our forensic work within the massive scale of need at the border is small. We make a big difference to the individuals and families we directly contact, but after over a decade of work we are not seeing a tsunami of change. Instead, we are always left with questions – Did we do enough? What if we just searched more in that direction? What if we stayed out just one more hour? What if we stayed just one more day? But I do see the tsunami building within the hearts and minds of our young people. There’s over thirty faculty and students from the University of Indianapolis alone that have traveled with the Beyond Borders Team to participate in this work. We also work with numerous other universities and students in the Texas Borderlands. They are experiencing this crisis with a lens and perspective that my generation just does not have. I am able to quiet the questions and the overthinking knowing this experience sets them a trajectory quite different then had they not experienced this.
A previous search and recovery operation showing the environemnt in South Texas
This trip will be different. We will be working solely with Remote Wildlands Search and Recovery on large scale search and recovery efforts in clandestine ranchlands. I am excited to see Deputy Don White, Paramedic Ray Gregory, and any other members that may be able to join us. They are wonderful humans that do great work! We lost Eddie Canales, the Director of the South Texas Human Rights Center and my friend to cancer a few months ago. I still expect to see his smile, hear his laugh, listen to all his new stories and get scolded for not improving my Spanish since the last trip. Eddie also contributed to that tsunami, and I know we will make him proud this trip. The South Texas Human Rights Center continues, and you can make a donation is his memory here.
Eddie speaking with the UIndy team (Jan 2024) about the water station route and supplies.
Earlier this semester I sat with a student in my office for the first of several long conversations. His family came to the US from Ecuador when he was a child because his father had a work contract in Indiana. He graduated high school, enrolled at UIndy and is in his Senior year. While in college his family’s work visa expired and they returned home. He was able to stay to complete his degree. He hadn’t seen his parents or younger siblings since they returned to Ecuador. He was excited because his father was getting a new contract and was coming back so he was going to a hearing about the visa. The next time we met he told me his visa was denied because he is 20 years old and too old to be on the family visa. His parents and younger siblings are coming back to Indiana while he faces the reality of going back to a country he doesn’t know. Is this the story of a migrant we encountered on our trip? No, but it could be. We fight over our broken system and we blame each other for the problems and in the process, we forget these are people. Every skeleton we recover or body bag we pull from the ground is a person with a story. Whatever their story, all I can think of is being on the other end of the phone. Waiting for the call that never comes. Making all the promises to God to just let them call or just let them answer when I call. That helpless feeling of just not knowing what is going on or what to do. While the answers we provide are not what many families want, at least we’re answering the phone when their loved one could not.
The 2024 UIndy Beyond Borders Team
All the people you read about on the blog are volunteers. They volunteer their time, use their own money and chose to dedicate themselves to answering that phone call from family members. Politics aside, the people we work with in the Texas Borderlands run the spectrum from right to left. Whoever you ask will say you cannot have an informed opinion until you spend a few days in the brush. And they all just want to bring some closure to families and return their loved one home. If you have the ability to donate to the cause here are some links:
Beyond Borders Humanitarian Forensic Science Team: Donate Here
Thank you for following our work. We appreciate your support and the ability to share our experiences with you. We will continue regular posts when we depart for another trip to the Texas Borderlands.
