This podcast is intended for mature audiences.

Listen or discretion is advised. imperative entertainment. little picture.

I first dabbled in bringing people across not as an avocation but something that just sort of came upon me in about 1989.

What came upon Eldin kid in 1989 were two Hispanic teenage girls, stowaways in the back of his raft

tour van,

along with their one-word plea.

Ayudanos.

Help us.

Well, they were probably 16, 17 years old.

I found out later that they were traveling from Guatemala

and they were with a group.

When you sign up for a group like that,

you don't have a guarantee that you're not going to be

hassled, sexually or bullied. You never know. And they feel almost as if they own the

people until they pay at the other end. The group, as Eldon calls it, is actually a method of

traveling that migrants choose when attempting to cross the border illegally.

It entails many people making the journey together, in theory, creating safety

in numbers. But in this case, in the group with the two teenage girls, the opposite had occurred.

They may have been abused by the group leader, but more than likely from the other participants.

They were dirty, shoveled, had one change of clothes, and looked pretty

frightened. At that point my Spanish was a work in progress, but I gathered from them that they were being mistreated.

They saw the California license plate and just hoped and assumed that that was a vehicle going north.

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