Introduction

This is a blog I've set up to document the week I spent on the U.S.-Mexican border in August 2009, as a volunteer with No More Deaths, a humanitarian aide group that provides services to migrants who are crossing the border through the Sonoran desert in Arizona. To start off, this is not a normal blog. I was camping in the desert the week I was there, so I didn't have access to a toilet, much less the internet. This blog is basically a transcript of the journal I kept while I was there, with a little editing and linkage thrown in later on. Because I wanted this to be read from beginning to end, I've messed with the dates on here so that the oldest entry appears at the top, and the newest one at the end. On the posts you will see a bunch of weird numbers that say something like "20091224". Ignore these. The real dates appear in the title of each post.

This isn't a blog I plan to continue updating, it's just to share my experience from my trip. I might add another post of two if something comes up that's relevant, but for the most part the bulk of the blog is right here. If you want to read my regular blog, it's linked to the right, but it's not incredibly interesting and I update it very, very rarely. Maybe someday I'll be a good blogger, but I haven't so far.

Since this blog is basically just a transcript of my journal, it relies heavily on my own experiences. There's some pontificating about broader issues going on, but I may have skipped over some deeper analysis or history of the situation. If you have any questions, please leave them as a comment and I'd be happy to have a dialogue with you or point you to some other reading. I've also included some links to the right of some other great websites you can check out.

But just to give a brief overview of what the hell caused me to pick up and go to the desert in Southern Arizona in August: Since the mid-1990s, U.S. immigration policy has been pushing undocumented migrants crossing over to the U.S. further away from the cities and safer areas to cross, and more and more into difficult and dangerous terrain in the desert. Officials have openly stated that they are using "death as a deterrent" to people crossing the border illegally. Every year, hundreds of bodies are found of people who died trying to cross the border from Mexico. Hundreds or thousands more are probably never found. No More Deaths was created several years ago by activists of conscience and people of faith who realized death should never be the penalty for someone trying to find a better life. They maintain a desert aide camp for about 8 months of the year, staffed primarily by volunteers, some from Arizona, and many others from all over the country. They provide water, food, and medical attention for people hiking the desert trails that lead up from Mexico. For more information about No More Deaths, visit their website at www.nomoredeaths.org.