8/5/20

By Josh Rubin

As Hurricane Hanna fed the swelling Río Bravo, as its banks overflowed into the lives of the Matamoros encampment of refugees, and as now swarms of mosquitos, zancudos as they are known, bring still more misery and perhaps illness, we cannot help but reflect on the predicament just faced and still faced by these friends of ours forced to perch precariously on the very edge of Northern Mexico, eyes toward the United States.

The sheer volume of misery is hard to contemplate even from my safe distance. I will not enumerate the horrors. But I want to mention one that, faced with the rising waters, escaped mention for the most part. When there was most uncertainty about the river’s rise, and the ultimately resisted call for forced evacuation resounded loudest in the camp, there was no recognition, no mention, of the special danger of such a move, danger from a deadly pandemic in a city in the grips of a disease that has overflowed its ability to contain it, to care for its people. I think of the water rising on one side while the infected population formed a less visible wall on the other.

The people of the encampment held on to their thin sliver of territory, unwilling to surrender their ground to the river, or themselves to obscurity and pestilence. And they still wait for us, defiant, to recognize their right to survive.