Papers

We are back across the border, car and everything. It's all in the papers you carry. If they say the right things, you're in.  But some 
 people, of course, have no papers at all. 


Here is a story about someone with no papers, no family, not even a last name. On one of Robert's visits to his Mixtec village, Alberto introduced Robert to a new son he had just adopted. Unofficially. But what do papers matter where there is genuine father love? Alberto has a big heart, and most Mixtec families welcome kids. On a trip to buy supplies in the market town, Alberto had walked through the town square and noticed a five-year old shoe-shine boy. The town is Indian, so the boy stuck out because he was obviously Hispanic. Alberto struck up a conversation with this five-year old boy and learned his story. The boy had run away from an abusive family situation, slipped unnoticed onto a series of buses, and ended up in this bustling Indian market town. Here he slept on the street and ate from his shoe-shine earnings. Alberto asked him if would like to come home with him, and this is how Ray joined Alberto’s family as his son. Adoption can be simple in Mixtec towns when fathers are willing.

Ray learned Mixtec and took his place in the family. Years passed. Some ten years later, Alberto got up one day, and Ray was gone. Just gone. Alberto was frantic. He searched everywhere. He asked everyone. No one had seen him. Convinced that his son had been abducted, Alberto got on public transportation and started visiting the larger towns and cities in the area. He went to the state capital. He went to Acapulco, the tourist center. He wandered the streets and asked for help, but how do you find a lost son in a city of a million? Alberto was heart-broken, but his son was gone.

Three years later, Ray came back. Just showed up. Apparently he’d just got fed up at something and run in teenage frustration, but he’d figured out where home was, and he’d come back. And there was a father there to welcome him home.

Back when the Mixtec church had been born, Alberto was one of five elders chosen by the group to lead the church. One by one all the other leaders migrated to the US to look for work, but God told Alberto in a dream to stay and look after the congregation, and so, for many years, he did. Eventually he got into debt. And interest on loans in the Mixtec mountains runs at 50 to 100% per month, so anyone borrowing money gets into trouble very quickly. Business is hard in the mountains. Everything is hard in the mountains. Alberto eventually got into steep debt and fled to the US to climb out of the hole. Ray went with him.

A while back, on a drive across the US, Robert and I stopped to see Alberto in Alabama, where Alberto works long hours welding in a factory. All his money he sends home to his wife and kids. His oldest sons are at marriageable age, and the dowries run high. And the church in his village is asking him to send money for them to buy a new sound system. Some things never change, and the village economy is skewed by imported money. We got to see Ray, who is married now and lives close to Alberto, his father. And Alberto took us out for dinner, to MacDonalds, where he could treat us to the best meal in town. And so it was. On the last morning, just before we left, he borrowed a camera and stood us in front of his door, all solemn as befits such a solemn occasion, and he took our picture together. He said what I will never forget, this loving father of a beloved adopted son, “Robert, you are my best friend.”  What do you do with that? 

I think God is a father like Alberto, father to those without papers.