John Railey 

As the wave of child immigrants from Honduras and other countries keeps pouring across our southern border, memories of child beggars I encountered in Honduras 15 years ago keep coming back to me.

That was in April 1999 in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, which had the previous fall sent walls of rock and mud pouring out of the Honduran mountains, burying people alive and washing them out to sea. I’d been out in the back country, reporting on an Episcopal group from Lexington that was helping the Hondurans recover. The group from Grace Episcopal was serving near the Nicaraguan border. I described that part of Honduras as “a weary country of skinny dogs and heavy hearts, of bread baking in stone ovens and women walking by the road with baskets of fruit on their heads … a land of sparkling rivers and hazy vistas.”

Hondurans in the ancient hill town of El Corpus put the Episcopalians and me up in their modest stone houses, freely sharing their tortillas and melon. They were poor but not crushed, down but not out.

I figured I’d find similar resilient spirits in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, which was guarded by a huge statue of Christ standing on a mountain.

I found something far different.

Third World cities of considerable size offer much to unsettle people of the United States, especially native swampbillies like me. Walking the streets of “Tegus,” I passed by men with machine guns guarding banks and piles of garbage dumped by the street. I passed rows of shacks that people had to call home.

Then I encountered the boys who had no homes. They spotted me from a distance — yeah, I guess I kind of stuck out, with my sandy blonde hair and camera — and swarmed me like mosquitoes. These skinny boys in old clothes danced around me with outstretched hands, begging for money. I gave them candy.

They smiled and talked in Spanish, joking about something, maybe me. They seemed to be anywhere from 8 to 10 years old, about how old my daughter was then. But they had an old and hard glint in their eyes.

They were part of a tide of young beggars that had flowed onto the streets of Central American cities in the days since the hurricane. Later that afternoon, I passed a boy sitting on the street, a walking cane and a begging can by his side. I saw two more boys huddled in a doorway, one stretched out, one sitting up.

I didn’t see any girl beggars. They might have faced even worse fates, maybe sold into sexual slavery.

I’ve often wondered what happened to them and those boys. Maybe some of the boys are dead. The ones who lived would be in their 20s now. Maybe some of them are in prison. Maybe some of them made it to our side of the Americas. Maybe others are among the desperate trying to get their children here now.

And maybe some of those boys are among those hustling children and their parents, profiting out of getting them on the dangerous and deadly smuggling trails headed here.

God help them all.

And God help our country in dealing with this deluge spurred on by parents trying to help their children escape violence and hunger.

Congress and President Obama, because they lack the guts to pass immigration reform, own this problem of undocumented, unaccompanied child immigrants. They still need to act and finally carry out President George W. Bush’s goal of balancing a secure border with a path to citizenship for those already here.

But immigration reform is far off. And the children keep pouring in. Some of them, hopping on railroad freight cars, lose limbs.

You wonder how our country can ever safely absorb them all. You want to get mad at their parents for putting them through this.

Then you think how torn their parents must have been when they stared into their children’s eyes and decided to bid them farewell, knowing their children might be maimed or killed, knowing that at the very least they might never see them again.

No sane parent anywhere would send their child into that unless they’re facing the worst of the worst.

Stare long enough into the eyes of a child beggar and you can only begin to imagine how bad that might be.

John Railey is a Courtland native and the editorial page editor of the Winston Salem Journal where this column first appeared. His email is jrailey@wsjournal.com.