My Compassionate Heart by Nanci Hartland

My Compassionate Heart

By Nanci Hartland

A personal essay on what confronting genocide is like in real life. This essay comes from a GWI partner through Facebook. She has written a lot about the world in general, and she may come on board our team as a ghostwriter soon.

“You must either learn to carry the universe or be crushed by it.

You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough

to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors...” ~ Andrew Boyd

My Compassionate Heart...  Nanci J Hartland   ·   Thursday, November 1995 © Nanci J Hartland

Life is a series of openings. With all the injustice and greed going on in Africa and all my years of work there, I can forget that God is in the middle of a bigger plan. My work and my writing is part of that sacred plan as the fear and the pain recedes into a new and stronger belief in a God of Abundance. This shift led me to take on projects that are bigger than me and always move me forward into a larger complexity of my Faith and a deeper belief in myself and that some circumstances are beyond my control.

On the way home to America in 1995, I met the Director of a refugee camp for Rwandan refugees in some airport somewhere in the middle of the night. We immediately recognized the dusty boots, and backpack, no cameras around our necks.

We shared our stories and our deep love of Africa and its people. She told me that every day she held people while they died of starvation, of despair, of diseases, of machete wounds that would not heal, of war.

As I wiped at my tears, I told her I was repairing an Infirmary, delivering water lines, hundreds of textbooks, notebooks, pencils, fruit tree seedlings, organic vegetable seeds, and seed of Change and Hope in a quiet peaceful village 8500 feet up near Mt. Kilimanjaro, she began to cry.

I was startled by her tears and mine. I felt so deeply after hearing her story that I was fortunate and yet, perhaps I had taken the easy way out. I asked her why she was crying. Her response as we held each other...

"Because what you are doing, Nanci, will prevent what I am doing."

Our conversation haunted me on the long plane ride back to San Diego, CA. There is so much of Africa I do not know. She has seen a different Africa, has a more painful view.

I visited her refugee camp that next year bringing what I could. My heart was torn wide open and grown again as I was offered a small bowl of rice and stringy vegetables, their only food for the day. To refuse would have been an insult to their dignity and my pity would destroy it. I ate gratefully, aware that my compassionate heart was finding its own peace within the world’s tragedies.

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New Migrant Caravan from Central America

A new migrant caravan is forming in Central America, with plans to leave next week

By Sarah Kinosian and Kevin Sieff

The Washington Post

Jan. 11, 2019

A view of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. A new caravan of migrants is expected to leave the country Tuesday and head toward the United States. (Edgard Garrido/Reuters)

MEXICO CITY — Another migrant caravan is forming in Honduras, with plans to set out next week on a journey that will once again test the immigration policies of Mexico and the United States.

In much the way last year’s Central American caravan originated, a flier is circulating on Honduran social media. “We’re looking for refuge,” it says. “In Honduras, we are being killed.” It advertises a 5 a.m. departure on Jan. 15 from the northern city of San Pedro Sula.

The Mexican government says it is preparing for the group’s arrival.

“We have information that a new caravan is forming to enter our country in mid-January,” Olga Sánchez Cordero, the interior minister, said at a news conference Monday. “We are already taking the necessary steps to ensure the caravan enters in a safe and orderly way.”

When the previous caravan reached Mexico in October, Mexican authorities closed one of the main border crossings but allowed thousands of migrants to swim across the river separating the country from Guatemala. The migrants then continued north through Mexico, most of them traveling without documents.

[The road to asylum: A look inside the migrant caravans of 2018]

This time, Sánchez Cordero said, the government will place guards at 370 illegal crossing points, and the border will be “controlled to prevent the entry of undocumented people.” But she suggested that members of the caravan could be allowed into the country legally if they apply for visas.

“We don’t know how many people this will be, but it’s a lot,” said Walter Coello, a taxi driver from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, who helped organize the last caravan and is playing a similar role once again. “With this caravan, the goal is to give them a chance to work and have a better life, be it in Mexico or the United States.”

Last year’s group, with about 7,000 people, was dwarfed by the roughly 400,000 people who were apprehended at the U.S. border in 2018, as well as the more than 100,000 who applied for asylum in that period. But it became a major focus for President Trump, who attempted to use the specter of an invading caravan to rally his supporters.

On Thursday, Trump deployed similar rhetoric about the new group.

“There is another major caravan forming right now in Honduras, and so far we’re trying to break it up, and so far it’s bigger than anything we’ve ever seen, and a drone isn’t going to stop it, and a sensor isn’t going to stop it, but you know what’s going to stop it in its tracks?” he said. “A nice, powerful wall.”

For Central Americans, who typically depend on expensive and unreliable smugglers to travel to the United States, caravans offer a cheaper, safer way to migrate. So, despite Trump’s opposition, experts say it is likely that they will continue to form.

“The caravans are an opening for people,” said Karen Valladares, executive director of the National Forum for Migration in Honduras. “Every day, people leave, but this way they feel more secure. There is more solidarity in going with groups. They don’t have the fear that they are going to be the victims of organized crime.”

Thousands of members of the previous caravan are still waiting in Tijuana to begin their asylum applications. A U.S. policy shift in November requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their claims are being processed has not yet been implemented, but it could delay their entrance into the United States even further.

Yet in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where pockets of extreme violence persist and economic opportunities are limited in many places, there is a widespread perception that the earlier group succeeded.

[For migrants in Tijuana, seeking asylum in U.S. starts with a worn notebook]

“Many people see the last caravan as a success in that people were able to travel safely, and they were well taken care of,” Valladares said.

Glen Muños, 18, from the Honduran city of Choloma, plans to travel with the next group this month.

“It’s not just employment or that Honduras is dangerous,” he said in a telephone interview. “I’m young, and I want to know another place.”

Muños’s brother, 36, traveled with last year’s caravan but split off from it in northern Mexico and crossed the border illegally in Texas.

“Honduras is dangerous and I’m not having him stay there. I want him next to me working, not there,” he said of his younger brother in a text message. He spoke on the condition of anonymity now that he is living illegally in the United States.

Karla Riviera is also considering traveling with the caravan. She traveled with the last one from Honduras to the Guatemala-Mexico border. But in southern Mexico, immigration officials took her to a makeshift detention center, she said, first claiming they were offering her shelter and later returning her by plane to Honduras.

“They treated us like criminals. They tricked us, jailed us and deported us,” she said, speaking by phone.

Back in Honduras, she said she continues to receive rape and death threats — from the father of her niece, whom she reported for sexually abusing the child, from “macho men” who insult her because she is gay, and from the father of her partner’s children.

“Right now, I don’t leave my house much. I have to hide. I’m still worried about my life,” she said.

She saw news about the coming caravan on WhatsApp and asked her partner whether she was interested in going.

“We are talking it out,” she said. “I guess my alternative is to live and hide.”

Read more:

Two Honduran teens from migrant caravan are killed in Tijuana

In a major shift, Trump plan would force asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as cases are processed

Daunted by U.S. border, some caravan migrants seek asylum in Mexico — for now

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/does-it-matter-if-the-wall-is-called-a-wangdoodle-or-a-fence/2019/02/04/def33575-c3e6-4b45-b157-046e03db18cc_video.html 

Google: GHOST WRITER INC for your Ghost Writing, Ghostwriting or Editing book, screenplay, music, freelance and contracted copy writing, and all of your writing related needs. Ghost Writer, Inc. also has top level marketers, promoters, and publishing or optioning assistance services. Visit www.rainbowriting.com (only one "w") as soon as you're done with this blog, if you are serious about your worthwhile project. We will consider doing work for non-profit organizations, if we can get a grant for ghostwriting or editing a book project, or something along those lines. Thank you for your valuable time.