Luces Encendidas: 10 Things I Appreciate about This Experience
4 min readMay 8, 2021
- Dusk and dawn in the desert sky are truly magnificent. If not for the prohibition on photography in the shelter campus, I’d be clicking away constantly at the clouds over the hills.
- While I am not by nature a yeller, I can certainly project my voice when I need to. (Apparently this is not universal!)
- The 40-hour workweek is a godsend compared to shiftwork and mandatory overtime.
❦ Subpoint: One has to mentally approach a job where the goal is to provide “be there and deal with things” coverage very differently from a task-oriented “get these things done” job. It’s harder; there are no efficiencies to the passage of time. - Being control of your laundry, home climate, and food access doesn’t feel like a luxury until you aren’t.
- America’s borders and immigration system are perhaps even more confusing to people who work inside them than to the general public, and that’s largely because the general public has no idea of their legal and practical complexity.
❦ For example, the unaccompanied children in these U.S.-sponsored shelters, who are ideally being delivered into the custody of their families here for the foreseeable future, have not been formally “admitted” into the country. (And they may not be later!) - Texas is home to a lot of truly wonderful people, but it is absolutely not for me.
- In the absence of clear, top-down communication, whisper networks will spring up to inform workers of what’s going on. (On a related tip, planning and operations are absolutely independent processes; your strategic view is worthless if your tactical deployment is incompetent.)
- There are infinite levels of second-language fluency, and there are a million tripwires in misreading cultural differences, but the big stuff pretty much always gets across.
❦ I’ve been told that part of the reason it’s hard for me to hear what the kids are saying is that they’ve been taught not to speak up to adults. (Maybe, I dunno. Plenty of them have bravado, and I’m perfectly willing to admit I’m not used to Central American accents.) - According to feedback from multiple colleagues, my walk has both a recognizable posture and gait. (I just thought I was impatient.)
- Not long after I arrived in San Antonio, one of the site coordinators said by way of advice that we have to be like “flowing water” in situations like this. (I don’t know if he’s poetic by nature, or if it was just the three days he had allegedly gone without sleeping.) You’ve got to let loose your expectations and be carried along, however things go.
❦ What he meant: Don’t expect to be able to settle in to one role or one place, and be ready to change direction at any given moment. Priorities change, circumstances change, and our role is to flex into whatever’s needed at the moment. We have all had plenty to grumble about, but the people I’ve seen here who’ve had the roughest time of it have been those who refused to budge from their comfort zones even in what is clearly not a normal environment.
↳ I’ve been relying lot on the “HALT” rule of thumb to gauge where I am mentally — that is, monitor yourself when you feel a bit “off” to see if your reaction to your situation is because you’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. There have been a slew of times lately when I’ve been hungry, lonely, or (predominantly) tired, but surprisingly I’ve only found myself getting angry on occasions when I’m frustrated about the technical operations of the shelters (see #7, supra). I know harping on things like A/C and laundry can seem annoying petty, but they really dictate the contours of one’s well-being (#4), especially for those in the custody of a foreign government (#5). So it’s a bit of self-care and a bit of empathy in a fro-yo swirl.
↳ The kids are holding up remarkably well, all told. A trickle are going home to their families (HHS is hiring more caseworkers! They just need to work on expediting the process.) but many of them have had to creatively soldier through The Great Boredom for over a month now. Some are disgruntled, but there’s still a remarkable reservoir of good humor and goofiness underlying it all. (Earlier tonight, I “judged” a 1 a.m. pushup contest among four teen boys who weren’t ready to go to sleep and still had something to prove to each other. The winner got to about 16; his prize was to go wash the floor dust off his hands.)
↳ I mention 1 a.m. in the previous paragraph since I have to come back around, yet again, to the accidental title of this series. The dorm lights are on at all hours of the night (ahem, #4 again); they’re dimmer than in daytime, but not for the kids sleeping in the areas directly under them. I don’t know if anyone ever gave them a “flowing water” speech, but they’re making do with suboptimal circumstances in pursuit of the greater hope of safety with their relatives here in the United States. Some will eventually go back to their home countries; some might get some form of immigration relief (#5 again) and thrive here.
❦ While I appreciate the experience — as inconvenient as it’s been in a lot of ways, duty called and I answered — I’m still grappling with what it all means. Our government is spending a great deal of resources (physical plant, salaries, the all-encompassing “overhead”) on this humanitarian effort, one that I’ve seen attacked from both the right (certain politicians come to mind, see #6) and the left (I have met a number of people personally who are skeptical of our government’s intentions here, and of Homeland Security generally; trust me, I get it). But I still subscribe to the “walk and chew gum” philosophy of public services: this is just one of many challenges we as a nation and a federal workforce are confronting, and we are doing our darnedest. You can’t embrace the ocean, but you can learn to ride the waves. - (Bonus) The aggregate scent of 800 boys is a dormitory is: feet. (If face masks weren’t necessary for pandemic reasons, they’d be recommended regardless.)
