Your Move

I like to challenge myself. I'm a poor chess player, but I appreciate the skills you learn from it.

We all know, chess is a game of strategy, of predicting your opponent's next move and planning for the inevitable future. Kevin was about my height, but skinnier. He had a beautiful, slender face and kind, dark eyes, and he was very good at chess. He was born and raised in Honduras, where he lived, gangs governed and as he grew up, Kevin knew he had three possible moves, join a gang, be killed, or get out.

I imagine Kevin leaving for the United States for the first time as a teen, sleep deprived, hungry, willing to do anything to find safety, entering Mexico and entering the United States through Southern California were the most dangerous points on his route. On the train to San Diego, kings would commonly interrupt the desperate travelers by stopping their transport, raping the woman and beating sometimes killing the men. Kevin told us about how the gangs would beat up passengers and demand the addresses of their families so that they could rob them too. He told us about the time he gave a man his family's information for fear of being beaten to death.

After lunch, I saw Kevin sitting in a window lit corner, looking pensively at a chess board in front of him with no one else around. And there we were from two opposite worlds, and so we played this game as Kevin closed his rook and on my king, he opened up his past to my attention and told me of life in El Paso man. He said, I never go out. He didn't want to be deported for a fourth time. Kevin doesn't leave the house, but he can sure play chess.

He continues to develop a strategy to live a better life, to predict the Border Patrol's next move and to plan For the inevitable future your move, he told me,