The Caravan of Poverty
What drives a person to abandon their home, their country, and everything they have?
The only answer is escaping hunger and violence. The need to survive and cover basic needs. And it’s not hunger for a day, it’s the desperation of going weeks, months and years suffering to survive.
More than 7000 Central American migrants, the majority Honduran, started a march with the end of reaching this country, with the hope of gaining political asylum, which this government is very unlikely to provide.
It’s easy to say, but a journey of 4000 kilometers is not easy. They didn’t have any preparation or training, many of them come walking with sandals or rubber shoes and perhaps only one batch of clothes and no more.
As they go through towns, the people give them water and food and that is the least of what they should do, after all they are humans and they need help.
It’s not a problem that is easy to solve, since anything that is done, whether it’s good or bad, will leave a mark that in the worst of cases can be catastrophic. Some journalists and analysts think that the United States is, in part, responsible for what’s happening and that it could have done something sooner, but that now it’s too late.
It’s proven that the relationship between countries is much like the relationship between neighbors: some are rich, some are poor, some work, some are rowdy, all of them living in the same area; so if one neighbor is very dirty and disorganized and we don’t do anything, sooner or later it will affect us. In the same way, if a neighbor has a cockroach infestation and we don’t help them fight it, sooner or later they will arrive to our home.
The poor asking for help from the rich is not a new thing, it’s part of the history of humanity; and the reasons for the rich ones not to help are always the same: they are not like I am, they are not part of my reign, they asked for it, and besides the poor are always ugly.
