At the Border Part 2: We Are All Bound Together

Dear Friends,

It’s been a long but good first day on the ground here in San Diego. Today was devoted to training with fellow recently arrived volunteers. There were about a dozen of us-- different ages, different backgrounds, and different reasons for being at the border. But we discovered that there was one thing that we all had in common, which was a deep belief in our interconnectedness with our fellow humans seeking safety within our borders. There are many different ways of summing up the sentiment being expressed by all of us today. ‘I am because you are.’ ‘We are all human together.’ ‘We are all one.’ Perhaps given the approaching MLK holiday, it is most fitting to lift up King’s very eloquent way of putting it-- that we are all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

Tomorrow I hope to have more details to report about the situation at the border itself. In the meantime, I will be reflecting tonight on the word that, just this past summer, I had inked into my own skin. Ubuntu. My humanity is forever bound to your humanity. May it ever be so.