A Mother, A Son — and a 1500 mile search for home

Julie Turkewitz and Isayen Herrera for the New York Times tell the story of a young boy and his mother looking for a home in the pandemic.  Sebastián Ventura’s “mother, four months pregnant, rushes to keep up. There are hundreds of people on the highway that night, all Venezuelans who had fled their country’s collapse before the pandemic and found refuge in Colombia. Now, after losing their jobs amid the economic crash that followed the virus, they are trying desperately to get back home, where at least they can rely on family. The global health crisis wrought by the coronavirus has played out most visibly in hospitals and cemeteries, its devastating toll clocked in cases and deaths, its aftermath tracked in lost work and shuttered businesses. But a second, less visible aspect of the catastrophe has unfolded on the world’s highways, as millions of migrants — Afghans, Ethiopians, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians and others — have lost work in their adopted countries and headed home. . . . [W]hen the virus hit, Venezuelans living abroad were often the first to lose jobs in their adopted nations, the first to be evicted from pay-per-day apartments in cities like Lima, Quito, and Bogotá, Colombia’s capital.”

KJ