Karina, who is six months pregnant, had to move her tent and belongings away from the lower, shaded component of the migrant camp in a place where, in full sun, the house’s internal temperature now reaches more than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius). ). Training
“The dam was intentionally designed to allow the park to flood severe storms and hurricanes,” said Erin Hughes, a volunteer engineer for Global Response Management (GRM) and Resource Center Matamoros (RCM), two leading non-governmental organizations working with the camp’s residents.
In the months leading up to the storm, Hughes had advised that the most vulnerable people be evacuated when the Brownsville River indicator reached 19 feet (5.8 meters) with a full evacuation at 21 feet (6.4 meters).
In the wake of Hurricane Hanna, the width of the Brownsville River rose from 12 feet (3.7 meters) on Monday morning to 19 feet (5.8 meters) on Wednesday morning and 24 feet (7.3 meters) on Saturday, July 31, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. .
On Tuesday, as it became clear that the banks of the river would break the camp, Mexico’s National Migration Institute (MRI) advised an evacuation and introduced Mexican Marines and buses to do so, sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities in the Rio Grande Valley, said.
This gesture interpreted through some camp citizens as a sneaky tactic to close the siege. “No one wanted to leave,” said Juan, 30, from Honduras. “People were afraid that if they left, they wouldn’t be able to come back.”
“The problem,” Santos, the head of the camp’s 28 Mexican families, said, “is that there is a total breakdown of confidence.”
Pimentel stated that the Mexican government’s lack of acceptance is a matter of deciphering what they do. Working with asylum seekers detained in Mexico is like an “elaborate dance [in which we have to] bring all kinds of people together,” he said.
While humanitarian organizations assessed the risks, the owner of the camp’s 50 portable toilets eliminated most of them, Pimentel said. “We ended up without a bathroom,” said Carolina, a mother of two from Nicaragua. “We had to go to the outdoor bathroom,” he says.
“This hurricane was not a direct blow,” said 26-year-old 26-year-old 26-year-old 26-year-old Texan who is running for RCM and GRM. In terms of damage, “there’s definitely nothing damaged in some tents. But we must be able to guarantee fundamental human rights to the other people in the camp. We can’t do this without toilets, sinks, etc.”
In addition to flooding and facilities, water has brought rats, snakes and mosquitoes.
John described the stage in the camp as “a calamity,” as a rat sneaking between his legs to be beaten through a closer guy digging the earth for a new tent site on top ground.
Despite the difficult conditions, citizens look to the environment.
“We have to prevent the garbage from spilling into the river and, despite everything, at sea,” Santos said.
Teams of asylum seekers worked to clear debris from the lower grades of the camp with small fires burning biological waste, such as occasional rats.
As a component of the cleaning effort, Emelia Valle, a 52-year-old Guatemalan, waded through deep-sea basins to retrieve sunken belongings, as dozens of small dark snakes crawled through the muddy waters around her.
While looking to leave the area blank, a boy aged about 4 years stood on newly submerged sandbags that had only been installed 24 hours earlier in the camp by the invasion of the river.
North of the camp, two bridges allow cars and pedestrians to cross between Mexico and the United States. Valley checks the degrees of the river through wading to look at the hand-drawn markers on one of the docks. “The river has grown to 3.81 cm (1.5 inches) in the last five hours,” he said, returning from one of the trips, rainy to the chest.
While Santos spoke of the unrest expressed to Mexican families under his leadership, he got rid of a small amount of land from where his tent was located, to expose a very venomous red, yellow and black coral snake he had recently killed. “If he had bitten me, I wouldn’t be here to tell him,” he says. “It is so harmful to us to live in those conditions, but what else can we do?”
Swollen banks have also brought “mosquito clouds,” said Ryan Kerr of the GRM, “that can bring diseases like dengue or chikungunya.”
“Other people left the camp to rent an apartment in the city,” Juan said. “But most stayed. It’s too expensive to pay the $200 rent.” Rent also means more food prices as only camp citizens get food packages.
Berta, a 61-year-old Venezuelan woman, cried as she said she had to leave the camp when the situations were too difficult. Now you have a two bedroom apartment with a bathroom with 11 other people.
In your room, there are two mattresses, which are shared between five people. The rent would be $200 for the apartment, but it is covered through a humanitarian organization, Berta said.
Despite overcrowded conditions, living in the apartment allowed Berta her nutrition prescribed by doctors due to her fitness issues.
It is not diabetic, but also suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which places it in a high-risk category of COVID-19.
“The credit of being in the apartment is that we have a refrigerator where I can buy fruit, milk and other foods that allow me to have a better diet.” Social estrangement is an option.
Space is also a challenge in the camp. As the banks of the river were invaded, “the population moved their tents to high ground, which crushed them further,” said Dr. Dairon Elisondo Rojas, GRM volunteer physician and Cuban asylum seeker.
“This makes social distance even more complicated than the pandemic.”
The camp’s citizens come from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Mexico.
Although Mexicans are not meant to be included in the mexico stay policy, several Mexicans, adding Santos, have been informed that all programs are suspended by the pandemic.
Since April, all hearings in the United States have been postponed and applicants have been asked to call a U.S. number. To agree on a new date.
The number requires enough credits to make a call abroad and works intermittently.
“I can’t pass, ” said Maria Elizabeth, a 56-year-old Honduran. “If you answer, you don’t speak Spanish.” At the top of asylum seekers in Matamoros, Maria does not speak English.