Sense of Decency

By JIM McKEEVER

I spent the last two weeks of May at the US-Mexico border in Texas, volunteering with the humanitarian organization Team Brownsville, welcoming asylum seekers.

In those two weeks, we welcomed hundreds of men, women and children, providing food, clothing, hygiene supplies and occasional assistance with transportation to other cities.

The need is great, as these desperate people have fled danger and violence in countries all over the world.

A common complaint about people like me and organizations like Team Brownsville is, “We should help our own people first.”

Has anyone told them we can do both?

Every morning on my one-mile walk to Team Brownsville’s welcome center, I invariably passed at least three, sometimes more, people — American citizens, I’m sure — on this side of the border who are clearly suffering.

Each day I took something with me to distribute — a sausage biscuit from McDonald’s, a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, loose change or an extra dollar bill.

There were three “regulars” on my route. 

Most mornings outside the ironically named and boarded-up Majestic theater and Majestic Mall, a woman sat slumped over in a wheelchair. A necklace with a crucifix dangled from her neck. She wore a scarf on her head and appeared bald, but I wasn’t sure. She never asked for anything, and didn’t seem to be aware of her surroundings. I startled her one day by leaning in and handing her a $1 bill. I noticed some teeth were missing when she looked up to thank me. I have no idea how she got there each morning. 

I ran into “Brother Scott” three or four times — once he came into the Team Brownsville welcome center and asked for a pair of socks. “I’m just a homeless guy down on his luck,” he said. (Many unhoused people in the city know about the welcome center and that we have food and clothing there.)

Another day on the street Scott asked me for a cigarette. And on my second-to-last day in Brownsville he hit me up for a dollar for coffee. I had a few minutes before the welcome center opened, so we had time to chat. Scott is 50-ish, tall with short white hair. He had been a long-haul trucker and was familiar with the New York State Thruway and the exits for Syracuse, near where I live. He said he had been in prison in Texas for 10 years, had never had been in a fight and even served as an unofficial prison chaplain. 

“Do you know the shortest sentence in the Bible?” he asked me. 

“Jesus wept,” he said, answering his own question.

The “regular” who intrigued me the most, however, was another white-haired man, just as tall and even thinner than Scott. His ruddy face seemed even redder and more sunburned behind a snow-white beard.

He carried a backpack, and I recall that his hands shook. 

I would see him at the McDonald’s where I went most mornings for breakfast. One day I gave him $3 so he could buy his own coffee, and he nodded a thank you as he sat down with it in a booth.

He often wore a long-sleeved shirt that read “World Tour 16” on the back. It took a few encounters to make out what the front of it said in script — “Shinedown,” a hard-rock band I had never heard of. In my head, that became the man’s name.

This particular McDonald’s is just four-tenths of a mile from the Gateway International Bridge at the US-Mexico border.

A few hundred yards farther into Mexico, 3,000 migrants from more than 20 countries are trying to survive under crude tarps in a claustrophobic encampment that turns to mud during heavy rains.

One morning, as I was getting ready to leave McDonald’s for my shift with Team Brownsville, “Shinedown” sat alone, as usual, in a nearby booth. He ambled up to the counter to get a refill on his coffee, which perhaps someone else had bought for him that day. 

I gathered up the remnants of my breakfast — oatmeal with apple slices, raisins and cranberries that came in individually sealed packets with instructions on how to open them, and a separately wrapped plastic spoon — and tossed the packaging in the trash.

I passed by the booth where “Shinedown” had been sitting  and noticed a tattered book on the table.

It was a Bible, open to the Book of Job. 

Jim McKeever is a co-founder of Sense of Decency. He travels regularly to the US-Mexico border to volunteer with humanitarian organizations that help asylum seekers and other migrants.