We are all familiar with the class clown. The irreverent, often irresistible kid who makes students and teachers laugh in spite of themselves, who’s going a bit too far but never to the point of being in trouble, whose jokes provide comic relief and foster a sense of community. At the Casa de la Misericordia shelter in Nogales, Sonora last spring, I sat in an art class with a dozen ten- to thirteen-year-old children who were given colored pens and pencils and a piece of paper with the outline of a human form. Their assignment was to add a mouth, a nose, garments, and write words depicting what the character was feeling. With each choice a student made–pink pants, yellow sneakers, a necklace with flowers, triste, amable, dormilona–emerged a self-portrait. Predictably, girls glued to each other took the assignment seriously, meticulously adding to their drawing a pretty skirt, delicately drawn eyes, long black hair. The class clown’s portrait had wild green hair going all the way up to the border of the paper and no clothes, in part because he was talking nonstop. I am French, and he had so many questions: Are the Eiffel Tower’s lights always on? Do you have tortillas in France? Do you know our food is better than yours? Each question made the other children giggle. His eyes had that twinkle I’ve always loved about class clowns.

And then he said: “I have a message for American children. When you go home, tell them to enjoy their childhood, because we can’t enjoy ours.”

Lise’s self-portrait from Casa.

What was there for me to do then but nod and look at my own self-portrait: blue trousers with red cuffs, long-sleeved shirt, neatly drawn hair, a tentative smile? I had made sure not to déborder, as we said at school in France when we were given similar assignments and instructed to only color inside the line. Learning not to cross the bords was paramount then, as it is now. The child quickly made another joke, to the delight of his classmates. Months later, I still think of him and his border crossings.

Depicting the time we spent in Arizona and Mexico is fraught with difficulty. How do we avoid platitudes? How do we not give in to the fear that sharing stories is futile? These questions are a diluted version of another one: How do we bear it? Writing about this boy today reminds me of the conversations I had with grown-ups on both sides of the border that week. I talked with a retired postman from Colorado who dropped off water and food in Walker Canyon with the Tucson Samaritans, day after day.

Water dropbox in Walker Canyon.

I talked with an improbably athletic seventy-five-year-old American nun who told me about some of the children she met in the desert. I talked with Lika, Casa’s director, as she was showing me her vegetable garden. I asked these very different people the same question: “How can you do it?” Meaning: how do you find the strength to continue? These very different people would turn to me, look at me the exact same way, and gently say the exact same thing: “How can we not?”

That week, the child, the adults on both sides of the border talked about the inevitability of their lives. Their presence, their actions, their very existence are inevitable. In turn, telling their stories feels inevitable, because it is a way to extend their invitation to reflect on the inevitability of life itself. The class clown and his wild green hair, the energetic nun in the desert, and others shared and are sharing with us their belief in the inevitability of our shared humanity. Positing that humanity is at the core of who we are feels radical these days. Yet how can we not?

The U.S.-Mexico border, taken from Arizona.