Reflection on the first week-- Rachel

Ola! Somos voluntarios de la iglesia-- tenemos agua y comida!
My apologies if the spelling is incorrect there, but regardless if you sound it out, you get what we have been hearing for a lot of this past week (english: Hello! We're volunteers of the church-- we brought water and food!)
It's hard to know where I should begin to reflect on this past week and all that we have done and learned. As I type now, Bri, another volunteer Brittany and I are at the house of one of the founders of No More Deaths, who is letting us stay at his house for a night to rejuvenate. Tomorrow we will go to Nogales for a dedication ceremony for an aid center there, and then return to our desert camping.
To give you a general idea, our days are spent as follows:
After sleeping outside under the stars (desert nights are made of everything amazing and wonderful) we wake at 5 a.m. Either Cyril (the camp leader for the past week) or I make the coffee (those who drink it make it), we all fill up on cereal and other things, and we (anywhere from 4-8 people) head out to do morning patrol. This consists of hiking along migrant trails around Arivaca, AZ, with a pack of food and water. We hike anywhere from 2-4.5 miles at a time, and we hike during the day because the migrants who are in distress will be out during the day (most move at night). We leave gallons of water on the trail, and if we run into any migrants we give food or water or medical aid as necessary. Let me reiterate that this is all done with a policy of transparency, meaning the Border Patrol knows exactly what it is we do, and it's legal. After monring patrol we take a break, eat lunch, retrieve water and ice from neighbors who let us use their resources, and prepare to head out for afternoon patrol at 3 p.m., which is the same routine as the morning. Finish up the evening with dinner, conversation, and sometimes a little singing with guitars, and you have our day.
Those are the dry details, but they don't even hint at how impacting this place and work is...the natural landscape alone is enough to make me want to reflect and write for days on end, but once you add in the human component, I can hardly comprehend it all. The trails we hike are constantly reminding us of the people who move through here-- water bottles, shoes, food wrappers, clothing, backpacks, and other random personal items sit as reminders that every night people use these trails to make their way towards a better life for them and their families.
We have come across a few migrants thus far, each impacting in their own way. The first group was around 12-15 people in size, and we surprised them at the beginning of our patrol. They must have assumed we were Border Patrol (BP), and they took off running. We all felt so badly that they spent the energy to run away from us, when that's the last thing we want to make them do. The second was a group of three migrants who were in the back of a BP truck, and we saw them as we were driving away from what you could call a trailhead. We stopped and asked the BP agents if we could give the people in the back some food and water, and after some hesitation they allowed it (when they're deported to Mexico, most migrants are basically dumped in the desert with no food or water, so getting them these essentials before they're deported is important). Wackenhut, the private company that takes over migrants after BP, is not so kind in letting us give food and water.
The third migrant I'll talk about has impacted all of us the most, I believe. On Saturday night's patrol (while Bri and I were at a different camp, soon to return to Arivaca camp), one of the groups came across a man who had been sitting on the trail for two days, had been drinking water from a cattle tank for four days, and was in a bad state. He was disoriented, and so our camp offered him food, water, and rest for the night. The next morning (this morning), two of us stayed back at camp with him while the others went out on patrol. He was friendly, and despite our language barrier (my Spanish=horrible), we managed to get a game of double solitaire going! After continued medical evaluation, however, it became clear that he was not improving, and it actually looked like renal failure might be occurring. After lots of deliberation an ambulance was called, and they then decided that it was necessary to helicopter him to Tucson, over an hour's (bumpy) drive away. This man came all the way from Nicaragua to find work to support his wife and five children, and he ended up in a helicopter to Tucson for some serious medical care, which will likely end in him being deported back to Central America. No one felt good about making the decision to send him to the hospital, since it's almost ensuring that he will be caught and sent back, but with such serious problems with his kidneys, no other option seemed even close to appropriate. As we watched them load him into the helicopter today, he waved to us from the stretcher, which is a good example of the pleasant personality he had; even though he was in excrutiating pain, he tried to remain happy and calm. And now he's off in a strange sterile building surrounded by people speaking a language he doesn't understand, worried about what his release will mean...
We are all still trying to process this and what it means-- to have such a warm face to attach to this issue of "border security" as it is so often dubbed, as if it's as simple as just keeping out some obvious hazards. Carlos is not a hazard, he is a man trying to feed his family, and even when his body begged him to stop he wanted to go on. How do you fault a man like that, how do you label him illegal and toss him back into a desert?
And that's that.