Beyond Border
4 Pages 938 Words
Beyond the Border
“Now, I want you both to look out your windows and take everything in, realize just how lucky you are.” Those were the words of my aunt. My cousin and I were sitting in the backseat, headphones blaring, totally ignoring everything. We were on our first, annual, all girls, trip to sunny, Rosarito Beach, Mexico. My mom was asleep in the front with my aunt, who was driving, while my sister and the rest of the girls in my family were in two other cars. We were on the freeway, just past the border. The song on my CD ended and a new one was about to begin, when my aunt spoke. I turned off my CD player and looked at my cousin. She just turned hers up and started to read a magazine. So I looked out my window by myself. Abruptly, I felt like I was drowning in a pool of desolation and sorrow.
I was looking at a hillside covered with what were supposed to be houses, but in reality the could barely be called shacks. They were pieces of plastic, bits of cardboard and parts of wood and it seemed held together only because of some crazy glue. They reminded me of the projects that I used to make in kindergarten. I couldn’t tell whether the hill had any grass or trees or flowers because shacks and trash covered the ground. Everything from smelly, used, baby diapers to old, beat up, rotten couches littered the entire area. It looked like the hill was a volcano and all this waste was the lava just spewing from the top and coming down the hill, overflowing onto the street. Where was my sunny Mexico beach?
We exited the freeway and came to a stop at the light. A bunch of traffic in front of us rendered our car immobile. About 25 people wondered around that little exit. They were knocking on car windows, standing off to the side with signs, and sleeping on the dirt to the side of the road. Out of the 25 people roaming around, more then half of them were under the age of 10. It reminded me of a scene from a war movie, just ...