Mexico

Mexico It's the fourth time I've come to Mexico. This time it's really a flying visit. Vanni and I are at the border in Arizona, precisely inside Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a dry place with 40 degrees in October; who knows how many there are in summer. Our campsite is on the US side, but so close to the Mexican border that we pitch the tent just five metres from the hedge that marks the boundary. Here the coyotes howl at night as the hyenas do in Africa. We cross the border on foot. A quick glance at the passport and then we step into the past. A bus takes us about ten km south into Mexico; here we get off, paying a couple of American dollars. For Vanni it's the first time in this famous country, made known by the many western films we see on our televisions.

We immediately notice the ramshackle houses; here you certainly don't need an architect to build one, nor, for that matter, the permission from the town hall: you build it and then ask for the electricity connection, which is regularly done by attaching a new wire up there to the cable, bringing it into your house, with the meter hanging on the wall out in the street. By the way, gas too is out in the street here; we notice that everyone has a big gas cylinder that evidently gets refilled now and then by a truck that passes by. But what's the gas for in a place this hot? Just for cooking? In Australia they have electric stoves too; but I forgot, here we're in Mexico and poverty rules. Sonoyta is the name of this place. Some Mexicans with broad-brimmed hats sell junk on the ground.

But who do you expect to buy a gearbox cog from goodness knows which car, or a half-shaft or a headlight? If he's lucky an American will pass by and buy one thing to put in his display case every six months. And these people expect to live off what they earn? I don't understand. Anyway, it would be a good deed to take our children from Italy on a tourist trip to see what misery means; a pity about the distance. Vanni is astonished by so much poverty; I'm a little less, I'd already seen it in Africa, and worse. We take a very beat-up vehicle here in Sonoyta and head back towards the border at Lukeville, in the more modern United States, where with our Italian passports they let us through without problems.

We know that every night dozens of desperate people flee from Mexico to the USA to reach nearby Tucson, and this we can confirm: that night, through the broken fence that marks the border inside our campsite, we see two shadows running north. We're truly lucky, Vanni and I say to each other. Bye bye