“Soy mojada”, I am wet. The sun is shining and the air is bone-dry. Involuntarily, my look of amazement locks onto Maria’s glistering eyes and, as if hypnotized, I stare at her for a few seconds, undecided whether to panic or to laugh. Her disarming smile pulls me out of my indecision and only then it begins to dawn on me what she clearly meant.
Maria hitches a lift in my dilapidated Toyota. We find ourselves in one of the town’s most run-down neighborhoods, which is a no-go area for unsuspecting Westerners, but in which I have crept like a shadow to fetch two little girls who so eagerly wish to visit their brothers in the care center. Without beating about the bush, Maria confides to me that she has been washing plates for two years under the scorching attic roof of a restaurant in Houston, United States. Maria was illegal. Just like her, each year thousands of Central Americans venture on a life-endangering journey to the Promised Land, the land where dollars grow on trees and where everyone can live his dreams.
“Los mojados”, “The wet ones”, they call themselves. After a trip of several days through their own country and Guatemala, they run up against the first sizable obstacle, the Mexican border. If they catch you, you get a one-way ticket back to the homeland, if you make it, you will have to face 3.000 kilometers of Mexican mountains and desert, without money, without identity. But it is at the other end of that desert that the biggest obstruction is waiting for you: a rough river and barking watchdogs on the other bank, as well as American border patrol and impossibly high barbed wire. If you make it to the other side, you’ve at least had a ducking. Therefore the name “wet one”.
Her account of the tough journey to the States reminds me of a little problem I ran into at customs myself, a year earlier. My little problem is reduced to a fairy tale next to the horrors that Maria has endured. While on a short break in El Salvador in 2004, I discovered to my fright that the plastic main page of my passport was torn loose. The consul in the capital of this miniscule country that is hardly ever visited by Dutchmen, solemnly stated that his reception desk was frequently stormed by panicky compatriots in the same situation. A new passport would cost 80 euros and take three weeks.
Out of misplaced stinginess and with the absurd thought that I could ridicule her Majesty’s department of foreign affairs, I decided on the spot that I could probably travel the world with a two-piece document. That year, I had decided to travel back to the Netherlands via six more or less dictatorial Asian nations, after finishing my volunteering job in Honduras. A sweet smile will open many doors, I naively told myself.
Armed with a pair of nail scissors, tweezers and a role of transparent medical tape I had laboriously manufactured the falsification of my very own passport and in the cozy hominess of my Honduran apartment I considered the result rather border-proof. A day later, on the plane, the bravura vanished fast.
When I look into the sturdy faces of the custom officers at Los Angeles International Airport, I sense instinctively that not even the sweetest smile in the world would so much as put a door ajar. Vivid images of muscled interrogations and compulsory deportation cross my mind.
How could I have thought for even a single moment that my amateurish fiddling with a pair of nail scissors and some tape would go unnoticed with the specially trained inspection forces of the world’s best protected country? Since the September attacks not even a fruit fly can enter this nation undetected, let alone an entire human being.
Clammy hands. In the armpit of my t-shirt, a perceptible sweat spot is unstoppably growing bigger. The queue shrinks. My eyes are systematically scanning the entire hall for an escape route but it is senseless, there is none.
“Next!”, the officer’s voice reverberates in the chilly air of the sterile hall.
That would be me.
To be concluded within a few days.
Give a child a chance and offer the world some balance!
