A COLD FRONT BRINGS SPECIAL CHALLENGES TO IWC VOLUNTEERS
by Michelle Rumbaut
The cold front sweeping the country is making itself known even down south in San Antonio. Friday the winds were bitter cold, an appetizer for the 15-degree freeze being promised for the week ahead. It is bad enough even when you have a warm home and your choice of thick coats and no concern about sufficient food. It is a whole other matter when you are homeless, penniless with insufficient clothes.
Such was the case with Alvaro, who I met at the station on Friday. He was born just one year after my oldest son, making him 32-years-old. Yet he already looked like a much older middle-aged man who has seen and suffered much.
What a complicated story he shared with me. He admitted he had come to the states illegally from Guatemala, six months ago. A friend had helped get him to “Carolina del Norte” for some work, which he had been doing since he arrived. Apparently, he walked 45- minutes each day from where he slept to where he worked. Six days before I met him, he was on that walk when a group of thugs attacked him and demanded all his money. He told them he did not have any, they pursued him, put a gun to his head, and proceeded to beat him up. Several bullets were fired in the confusion, one of which entered his thigh, exited the thigh into the next leg, and exited that leg. A through-and-through injury, as it is called.
The thugs took all he had on him, including his Guatemalan passport. I am not sure how he managed to find his way to a hospital emergency room, but he was treated as evidenced by his discharge papers and a large bag full of medications. Alvaro explained that the police interviewed him, told him that they were unable to find the criminals, and that therefore he was still in danger since the thugs knew his route and might retaliate further to make sure he did not identify them. Hence, it was decided between the police and the hospital, the best thing for him is to leave town. They offered – name any city in the country and we will pay your bus ticket. With no connections here, Alvaro suggested San Antonio, knowing that Spanish is greatly spoken here.
And so, I met Alvaro in the Greyhound station. He has no shoes, only hospital slippers. His light blue cotton pants look old and worn, I imagine they came out of the hospital lost and found. I call my friend and volunteer coordinator Katie, a librarian who always impresses me with her knowledge and resources. But in this case, she too is stumped. Without immigration papers, like those carried by 99 percent of the immigrants we see, he will be shut out of most resources in the City. Without an ID, he will be shut out of other shelters like the Salvation Army or Haven for Hope. She promises to explore options, especially knowing that the winter blast is on the way.
I ask Alvaro to see his many medications, a total of eight pharmaceutical bottles. My health care background and being married to an orthopedic surgeon have given me some useful knowledge which I used to advise him. The high strength Ibuprofen and Acetaminophen make perfect sense, I tell him. The muscle relaxants, and various others that will affect his clarity are a bad idea. I see a bottle of oxytocin and tell him that this could be a further cause for him to get mugged on the streets. I take a sharpie pen and blot out the name of the drug, and suggest he take one if truly needed for pain and if he is in a safe place.
We only have two pairs of shoes in our closet, one of which fit him. He cannot bend over to put them on, so I gently place them onto his feet. I go out to my car and bring back a nice leather jacket my husband had pulled out of his closet last night, and another volunteer brings him a quilt.
One of the gentlemen I have known for a while now, who brings the Loaves and Fishes bagged meals for us to distribute, gets involved in the situation. It is only then that I learn he too is an orthopedic surgeon – and was one of my husband’s professors at the San Antonio medical school decades ago! We are both surprised and laugh at the connection that Alvaro brought to our attention. Peter agrees with all the medication advice I gave Alvaro, and offers to take him to the (nasty!) men’s bathroom to check his wounds and show him how to change his dressing with supplies provided by that North Carolina emergency room.
Katie sends a text … she is running out of options. Alvaro gets up and says he needs to go find work somewhere to make money and be able to care for himself. I cringe imagining him being out on the streets tonight, alone, fresh from his painful gunshot injury, knowing nothing about San Antonio. I ask him to wait a bit more.
Then another IWC volunteer comes by, named Mario, who has a big heart and always goes out of his way to advocate for the migrants. He takes an interest in Alvaro’s bleak situation, and we begin to brainstorm about his ID. He remembers he has a friend in Guatemala who has access to IDs left behind. He uses my phone to send a WhatsApp message, and within minutes the friend has sent a photo of that ID. And Mario the Miracle Man whips out the tiny portable printer he recently bought for our supplies, and we figure out a round-a-bout way to get the image from my phone to a printed piece of paper! Suddenly his prospects change, and Mario offers to drive him to the Salvation Army and plead his case for a safe place to sleep tonight. Ojala (hopefully).
In the meantime, a young family from Venezuela enter the station. Three young sons, one daughter, all under age 10. They have been traveling for over two months, including through the horrific Darien Gap. They have family eager to greet them in Tennessee, and in fact I get to “meet” the aunt over WhatsApp while we huddle around my car picking out coats for them. The aunt explains she cannot afford to buy them bus tickets yet; she must pay the rent first. So ,the family heads to the Migrant Resource Center, hopefully able to sleep inside with the children on this cold night ahead.
I cannot imagine the suffering ahead this week for the thousands of homeless around the nation buckling down for the winter blast. And the image of Alvaro haunts me, wondering what will happen to him.
