I just arrived home after a long drive and am clean and tired.
I want everyone to know about something that happened this past weeks, for me maybe one of the most intense and touching ordeals from the summer.
Earlier this week a photographer came out to camp, he had wanted to get a shot of a shrine we found earlier this summer. As migrants go through they start little shrines, that sometimes grow big with pictures and candles and other personal items that may be important to people.
The shrine is located on the “Chapman Tank” trail, which is about a four mile loop. We started out and it began to rain shortly after- we kept going thinking it would be okay. When we were almost half way done we started to reconsider, the shrine was in a wash, so we wouldn’t be able to get to it, plus the trail we would come back on was all in a wash. The smart idea was to turn around and go back. A little ways after we started back we ran into a group of 9 migrants. These guys didn’t seem to need our help at, they took some dry socks from us and that was about it. When we asked if they had left anyone behind they said yes, he was following and he was in really bad shape. I went down the trail a ways to find him. When I caught up to him he asked me WHAT I was, and what I was doing? (“What are you, what are you doing?”). I told him I was there to help him. He looked at me shocked: “You’re NOT an angel?”
Then he started crying. Then he showed me the spot he was just about to lay down at and die.
I helped him up the hill where the rest of his group was taking off from. His brother turned out to be in pretty bad shape too, they both stayed behind while the others continued. There was no hesitation in the decision to go back home, the difficult part was how we would initiate the process. It was still raining. I thought we were all going to catch hypothermia, we were all shivering. Both Roger and Roberto’s feet were pretty torn up. We tried to bandage them but all the moleskin, medical tape and gauze was wet. In addition, I had given all the dry socks to the rest of their crew, the other volunteers I was with were new and hadn’t taken any socks with them. Meanwhile, the photographer photographs away, turning their misery into his art.
They weren’t in bad enough shape to get airlifted, and if they were, our GPS wasn’t working. With BP’s inability to read maps, getting them to our location would have been pretty dang hard. Our phone service was also lacking. We ended up helping them to the truck which was about a mile away. We thought with 4 volunteers, each guy could have two humans for support. It turned out though, that photographers are not volunteers, so I had Roger all to myself. We all slipped and slided our way up a huge hill and then back down to the truck. Our plan was to get these guys to camp and call BP from there. The washes were filling up though, before we could get to any destination we were walking through rivers to test the depth. We had to wait at one wash for over an hour. When we got phone service, we got a hold of the other group. They were waiting for us at a neighbor’s house. By this time it was sunny and hot, so we got out there to dry out and bandage them up good. We called BP and helped them figure out where we were. We said to meet us at the Popelotai Wash. When we got there, they had sent four vehicles. They wouldn’t cross the wash though. For two guys who wanted to turn themselves in, they sent FOUR vehicles and not one of the heavy duty government air polluters would go across. They told us to keep them at the camp and that they would come back later.
This worked out well, because they could call their families and tell them not to pay the coyotes (who told them they would only have to walk a block, and then there would be a plane waiting for them- who also told them if they stopped moving they would shoot them- and that the havelinas would get them). They could also put on some clean dry clothes we keep in storage and eat a nice hot meal. BP just stayed up on the hill for a while and watched us. We eventually set the guys up in some beds and had them rest.
By 10pm BP still had not returned. I had crossed the wash twice in our Dodge pickup. I called again to remind them to come back. By 11, nothing, so we all hit the hay. Around 11:30-12, myself and another volunteer heard a car so we got up to look and it was a false alarm, just a local. We looked down at the wash though and saw a light. We walked down, sure enough, it was BP. “ahhh, Are you coming?” I asked. “It looks pretty muddy” he said. “You should be fine, I did it twice today” “Oh I don’t know.” He wanted me to get the guys and help them walk through the river (ya, these guys with severe blisters), I said no, that wasn’t going to be possible, but that we could get them in our truck and take them across. He was cool with that and that’s what we ended up doing, the BP agent seemed to handle them with respect.
Before they left, Roger told me that I was an angel, and that I had saved his life. These are words I have heard more than a couple times this summer. Which is weird, because I don’t speak Spanish, and I don’t have any first aid training beyond what I learned in Girl Scouts- all I really had were legs that allowed myself to end up in the same place as them. It’s a really odd thing to have people tell you this, when you’re just a normal person, and it really makes apparent the inequalities that exist between different races and different economic classes.
Thank you to everyone who supported me this summer, through thoughts and finances. No More Deaths is a great organization- the only one that has people go out into the desert and actually search for people who need help. Rather than living in their nice homes and going out to search for people occasionally, they have people who actually live in the desert, who live very much like the migrants (with many more conveniences, like water and food) so they know what it’s like. I learned a lot about our current system, which I’ve written about before, and needs to be changed. While I’m glad to do it, I shouldn’t be out there searching for people, in hopes that there are fewer deaths. That’s just not just. I’m really not even qualified to do it. But that’s what the organization is, a group of people who organized because these deaths shouldn’t happen anymore, because nobody deserves that. It’s called civil initiative: upholding the government to the duties it is supposed to be carrying out, such as protecting the basic human rights of individuals in its country, or whom its country is affecting.
If anyone ever wants to talk more about this stuff, I would be glad to, give me a call or e-mail me: 651-226-1790, brianna.zeigler@gmail.com
Thanks for reading.
