Bones bleaching in the sunWe regularly find skeletons of boats on the beaches along the coast. Usually these are the wrecks of people escaping from the Dominican Republic, trying to get to PR and the U.S. to find a better life.
They build these flimsy boats, put on an outboard motor and some gas, and load 50 to 100 people standing up. This one came ashore on Survival Beach (is there irony in that?) a couple of weeks ago. It's about 30 feet long, 12-15 feet wide at the beam. The bow post is a piece of tree trunk about eight feet long. The hull is rough wood with a single layer of fiberglass.
They take off across 75 miles of open ocean across the Mona Passage, an area not known for calm, quiet seas. Each person pays from $600 to $1000 for passage, this price in a country where the average income is $2 per day. The trip, with little water, little food and no shelter from the tropical sun, can take three days and three nights. Once they reach the Puerto Rico shore, the refugees run and scatter, hiding from U.S. Border Patrol and Puerto Rican police, hoping to find their way to contacts in PR, mostly in San Juan on the other end of the island. Hungry and dehydrated, the refugees look for whatever help they can get.
It is hard to imagine how bad things must be in the Dominican Republic that this seems like a good idea.
If we help them in any way, even just the basic humanitarian act of giving them water, we can be arrested and get five to seven years in federal prison.
After they land, the hulks of the boats are abandoned to break up on the beach and bleach in the sun.
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