Enrique's Journey

Recently I read the book Enrique's Journey. The true story follows Enrique, a seventeen-year-old boy from Honduras in his fervent attempt to cross the United States border to find his mom who had crossed eleven years earlier to find work in order to put food in her children's mouths. They say you can never understand someone's story until you walk a mile in their shoes, and that's exactly what this reporter did. She hopped trains and faced situations of robbery and imprisonment (saved only by documents from the government to aid her story) in order to fully understand what Migrants go through.

Anyone who knows me well knows how my heart breaks for injustice in this world, and while reading this book my heart was weeping from the hurt and the brokenness that is dealt with in families across Latin America. The desperate situations that drive children aged 10 to 17 to face a perilous journey alone, or adults to leave their families for safety or money... All I wanted was to reach out to all of them and reassure them that it would be okay. That's the problem though.

See, it's not all going to be okay, not on earth at least. We live in such a hate filled world where we're too scared to reach out to those different from us, too desperate to reach the top of the social ladder, to do anything to help fix the brokenness. Why must we be so greedy? Our lives in America... It's not the norm. Most of the world is in worse condition than us by far. I honestly wish I had the courage to drop everything and go help the hurt and the lost in this world. The question is, am I willing to give up my comfort? In the end, I don't know. Although materialism has always disgusted me, spending money on unnecessary stuff when there are so many things in this world that need the funds more, I do enjoy having a warm bed in a safe house with the assurance that tomorrow I'll wake up with a secure life, and I don't know if I could give that up.

In the end though, I want to do something. I want to help all the migrants looking for a secure life and a happy family, all those who starve in third world nations while we sit here throwing away last night's leftovers. I don't want my legacy to be that I thought, oh, it would be nice if I helped things change, I want it to be, Sara loved others and she wasn't afraid to give things up to help them.

So Enrique, I'm hoping your life is happy, and know that you and so many others have my prayers and support. Maybe one day the world will be a better place, where we all love and look out for each other.