Perils of Kathleen 2-27-08

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Well we made it back to PV but not without some interesting experiences. After visiting my daughter (Laura) and family for a week, we headed to Green Valley where we visited with friends in an over 55 community for a week. I liked the area but Leon did not. You could buy nice stucco and tile roof houses for a song (about 3K sq feet) but they did look alike. The Santa Fe style houses were nice if you like flat roof and desert style. After one week we flew to Seattle which was a shocker in that the weather was windy, cold and wet. But AZ was also windy and it forced me to buy some new clothes which were warmer - a coat, long pants and tennis shoes. We enjoyed Green Valley but don't know that we would like to live there - especially in an over 55 community. When we arrived home we were faced with mountains of mail (mostly junk) and many invitations to see friends and family that kept us totally occupied until we flew back to Phoenix and drove to PV arriving on 2/14. Leon's brother and wife plus two neighbors visited with us from 2/16 until 3/4 which kept us hopping.

We actually flew back to Phoenix on 2/8 and then drove to Fort Huachucha that evening to spend the night with my daughter and family. The next day we drove to Juarez, across the border from El Paso, where we picked up my son's fiancee at the Juarez airport the next evening. We found Juarez interesting but the purpose of our visit was to accompany Sandra when she went to get her VISA. We stayed at the first hotel we came to which turned out to be pretty close to the consulate and the med. clinic where she needed to undergo a physical. We checked out the locations on Sunday to be prepared on Monday. At 6.am we started our day in high spirits for about 5 minutes when we noticed the people queuing up two blocks away and realized that we would be spending the day as one out of a thousand some people. It was a fantastic and also humbling sight to see families, children included, and individuals huddle in the darkness and near freezing temperatures to apply for a visa, the granting of which is by no means a certainty. To add luster to this emotional event, which I likened to Ellis Island in a way, two four piece bands played Mexican music. We figured out that this crowd had three different destinations, two for different clinics and one for the consulate. When some person started handing out numbers we ended up 386. By 9:30 am Sandra went inside and reappeared at 2:30 pm, but without the paperwork she needed for the next day. She was instructed to pick that up at 6 pm without a doubt because of being unable to keep up with the deluge of applications. Promptly at six we commenced another three hour wait for the papers. Since our 6 am start had proven to be too late, 5 am was decided on. Her turn came at eight and she was rewarded at two with her visa. The hours waiting gave us the opportunity to talk to numerous people and hear plenty of stories that tug on the heartstrings. One woman said she was aware of the migration problem, but now understood the US position,after seeing a crowd of this magnitude. Leon commented on the irony of us living in Mexico in our retirement, standing in the middle of huge crowd of people praying for a chance to start to live the American dream as we did 45 years ago. We have a lot to be thankful for in the United States, let's not forget it. Leon got tears in his eyes realizing the milestone that was achieved in Sandra's life; now to become the matriarch of her offspring down the generations in the USA.

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