Molly’s Experience at the Border
The word “disciple” is pretty intimidating. I’m certainly no Peter or Paul! I don’t hold tent revivals. I don’t travel to faraway lands to preach the Gospel. And I certainly have no interest in being a martyr.
When immigrant children began being locked up in 2018, I felt this urgent need to help. Thinking of those children locked away from their parents broke my heart—as I know it did yours. And it made me furious. I felt desperate to do something.
As I sat in my living room one day in the summer of 2018, reading yet one more story about the children in detention, and I realized I couldn’t sit still any longer. So I just started calling United Methodist Churches in the Valley and anyone else I could find on the internet that might help connect me. I finally spoke with a United Methodist Deaconess in McAllen, who was working with volunteers helping immigrants at the border. Within a month, my husband and Chuck and Cynthia Rives and I were at the border, helping as we could. Dale and I have returned eight times to help, and I have returned on my own to take part in protests.
Our work at the border has been cooking for and feeding immigrants on both the American and Mexican sides of the border and helping at the Brownsville and McAllen bus stations. At those spots, we work with local organizations to provide food and other supplies to immigrants recently released from detention and travelling to their families across the country.
During our trip in June, we fed families in the tent encampment in Reynosa—you can see the pictures here. These folks are escaping economic hardship, gangs, human trafficking, violence, hunger—things most of us will never experience.
As you can imagine, we’ve heard many stories.
There was the African man in Matamoros who came from Eastern Africa. He walked to the western side of the continent, then flew to Venezuela (where he could get a visa). He then travelled—by car, bus and his two feet—to Matamoros. The trip took him two years. He had not seen his family in those two years and was looking forward to bringing them to the US.
At La Posada Providencia—an emergency shelter for refugees near McAllen—we got to know a woman who had escaped her home in Africa. She was pregnant as a result of rape being used as an instrument of war. Dale, my husband, taught her to drive during one of our visits. At the end of the lesson, she thanked him with tears streaming down her face. “I never dreamed I would learn how to drive a car,” she told him.
At Reynosa, we talked to a man whose wife and two daughters live on the street in Honduras; their home was destroyed in a storm and they cannot afford a new one. He seeks to enter the US so he can send money to them and eventually bring them here.
For me, being a disciple of Christ means traveling south to help welcome and feed these brothers and sisters. There’s not much else I can do. I’m not a politician; I can’t change laws. I don’t have any skills or knowledge that might be helpful in solving the big questions about immigration.
But sharing my story has helped me see that maybe I am a disciple in small ways—and that somehow I can help fulfill our United Methodist desire to make disciples of Christ for the transformation of the world.