The Desert and the Wall

Today I joined with a community college group for a very quick tour of a few important aspects of the border expereince just South of Tucson. Our first stop was in Green Valley at the home of one of the founders of the Samaritans, a group that walks the desert trails to provide humanitarian assistance to people who are walking from the border towards Tucson. The people they help are undocumented, and the basis for the help is that it is never illegal to keep people from dying, even though it is illegal to provide help in making their way into the country. So they walk a fine line, with jugs of water, socks, shoes, and first aid supplies in their packs.

Walking where migrants have been walking, where migrants might be concealing themselves nearby, this is a very moving experience, even though we were not out very long. Even on this late October day, it was warm out there. Even though it was not particularly hilly or rough, the land was a bosque,studded with cactus and prickly shrub-like trees. Migrants travel at night to reduce the chance of detection, and I kept thinking of how it might be to dodge through that underbrush.

The spot we were touring was carefully selected -- it had been near a pick-up spot, so there were signs that people had been waiting there. Not recently, but the signs were clear. Items of clothing, backpacks, water bottles, strewn by the side of the trail. I thought of the people who had walked at least two days to reach that spot from the border -- of their determination, of their desperation to find some way to survive by taking this tremendous risk.

We got back in the bus and rode to Nogales. A border runs through it. We stayed on the Arizona side and looked at the wall. It used to be a solid metal wall with lots of art painted on it. This summer, they built a new, improved, wall, of metal posts just far enough apart that you can sort of see through it. The perception of one town with a fence down the middle is even clearer -- we could see Nogales, Sonora, right there, going about its business. We chatted with a young Border Patrol agent who told us about the tunnel they had filled in just under where we were standing. We had lunch in the park and heard the story of someone who had crossed illegally twice and decided to return twice. In that context, the story was especially moving.

Those are the things I need to report. Probably the pictures tell the story.