Photo Credit: Kassia Binkowski, 2014
The sweet stench of stale urine, that's what comes to mind. It's a putrid smell so raw with humanity, so pervasive in these parts of the world where infections are more common than infrastructure, poverty more prevalent than plumbing.
As the Director of Communications for an international nonprofit organization, my nostrils have reacquainted themselves with the smells of poverty many times over. Stale urine. Burning garbage. Festering infection. Human sweat.
These are the smells of poverty in Central America. And it stinks.
For the past several months the implications of life in low-income countries have quite literally crept across our borders. Or at least they've tried. Since late 2013, more than 60,000 unaccompanied children have been caught crossing into the United States. More than three-quarters of the youth are coming from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala alone - the latter of which is where I happen to work.
As the children pour across our borders and into the limbo that is our legal system, I can't help but wonder: Do the politicians with the authority to decide their fate have any concept of what exactly they are running from?
I hope at least they know the statistics: roughly 50 percent of all Guatemalans live below the poverty line, 25 percent of the population is illiterate, and nearly half of the population is malnourished. These are the numbers, but what does that look like? What does poverty taste and smell and feel like?
Throughout my work with Reading Village -- a Colorado-based nonprofit that empowers youth to eradicate illiteracy and lead their communities out of poverty - I have met Guatemalan children who are no different than those locked away in detention centers in the border towns of Murrieta and Oracle and Waco. I have come to know their realities, to share their successes and wallow in their anguish. Theirs are the stories not being told, the realities not often considered in the political debate that border children have become.
Take Angelica, for example. An indigenous Mayan girl who risks her life every day to get an education. She was recently walking the six miles home from school, when she noticed a car following her and then felt the brush of a chloroform-soaked rag against her face. As her kidnappers fought for control her screams set off dogs barking and neighbors ran to her aid. As it turns out, her father is deeply in debt and Angelica nearly paid the price.
Or Juan Carlos -- his family went into debt to buy him a shirt to start the first grade. When Juan Carlos completed the sixth grade his mother needed him to start earning money for the family. With a sixth grade education, Juan Carlos would be stuck earning less than a dollar a day toting 100-pound bags of produce to market. Instead, he fought to stay in school, so now he wakes up at 5am to work in the fields, rides in the back of a pick up 30 minutes to and from school, and works in the fields again in the evening and does homework until well after midnight - all while surviving on a few tortillas a day.
These youth are not strangers to the desperation that drove their peers to flee Guatemala. This could have been them, a group of brave children on the headline of an American newspaper. Instead, they are scholars in Reading Village's literacy and leadership development program. They are finishing high school unlike 90 percent of their peers - an accomplishment known to increase earning potential, improve health, and reduce child mortality among future generations. Furthermore, they are building literacy skills among local children and leading community development projects that will change the trajectories of their small rural towns.
It seems to me, then, that we have a choice. We can try to clean up the mess once it reaches our radar, once it is personal, or we can invest in local solutions before they become international crises.
Reflecting a recent trend in philanthropy, Reading Village is just one of many nonprofit organizations that are empowering local communities to solve their own problems and alleviate their own poverty. By investing international resources to cultivate local potential, researched-based and locally-driven projects can keep children from ever ending up in such desperate situations.
We call them unaccompanied minors, illegal immigrants, refugees, but they are just children. Their names are Angelica and Juan Carlos.
The policy is complex, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But the reality is so simple: poverty stinks, and the desperation that drives these children into our country deserves immediate attention. This is not an immigration issue. It's not a matter of national security. It's an international development issue, and until we understand what exactly these children are running from how can we possibly figure out where they rightfully belong?