Andrethegiant.blogspot.com

This tour takes you in and around Tijuana, one of the most interesting places I've ever been. You'll see the terrain, life living on a dump, the border fence, and other particularities of Tijuana.

Here's an exerpt from my essay...


�One can argue that crossing the border is illegal for some, but one cannot say that it is immoral.� When my colleague spoke those words, I felt some of my vague thoughts take a concrete form. I had been in Tijuana for three straight days and two nights, and my perspective on the trip was blurred by emotion, fatigue, and the energy that comes from observing inhumanity and obscene wealth when they back up against each other the way they do in Tijuana.

What else could he say, what could anyone say who had been there? The poverty is as crushing and unavoidable as the flow of people through the city. One young woman we met was waiting to cross the border. It wasn�t her first attempt. The first time she was traveling north from Honduras. She tried to jump a train but no one would help her, she fumbled and fell by the moving train, hurting her leg badly. Some people threw her into the bushes and left her to bleed and die. Luck was on her side, though. Someone came along and found her, after she had crawled some distance. Meanwhile, she had applied a tourniquet to her broken and bleeding leg. Though that didn�t save it and it was amputated at about six inches above her knee in a Mexican hospital, the Mexican health system did pay the bill without much complaint. Now she has a second-rate prosthesis that she hopes will carry her across the border and to her friend in Boston. She is fiesty, determined and even a bit delusional about her chances. I wish her luck and don�t count her out; she has already made it back to Tijuana from Honduras....