Looking for dead bodies was not what they had in mind when they joined. Whether they work with Humane Borders, Samaritans, No More Deaths or Borderlinks, each volunteer aims to save the lives of migrants struggling to survive the Arizona desert. But when the call came in, telling of the probable death of Prudencia Martin Gomez, an 18-year-old Guatemalan woman, they turned from rescue mode to recovery mode. They went searching for her remains.
The call came through channels from her fiancé, a resident of northern California. He had found steady work there, so Prudencia decided to surprise him by migrating there herself. Lacking the immigration papers, she linked up with a group of migrants who successfully made their way across the border and began their trek — a hike of 60-70 miles — to the area of Tucson. With the group she journeyed on foot nearly 60 miles through the dry, hot desert. But she developed a heavy menstrual flow. Her strength began to give out. So the others found a spot to leave her, an area of soft sand under a tree that provided some shade. They left plenty of water and electrolytes with her. They studied the terrain around her, noting the numbered telephone pole not too far away.
The others on the journey reached their destination. But days passed before her fiancé got word of her attempt to join him. It took still more days for him to discover and then reach the Tucson-based, church-related ministries working in the desert.
These ministries all work side by side on parallel tracks of service. Borderlinks, formed in 1987 by former GA moderator Rick Ufford-Chase, provides educational opportunities for Americans, Mexicans, and Central Americans that aim to open eyes to differences, commonalities, and needs among communities.
Humane Borders was set up in 2000 to provide water stations — 40 gallon tanks of fresh water marked by tall blue flags, 86 in number these days — for folks wandering in the desert.
Samaritans was organized in 2002 to send SUVs and pick-up trucks out into the desert — driving on dirt roads — to offer hiking or stranded migrants water, food, and medical care.
No More Deaths, “No Más Muertes,” organized in 2004, sends summer volunteers (mostly young adults) out on the hiking trails to offer similar help. They also staff a tent gathering place on the Mexico side of the port of entry in Nogales, where captured, undocumented migrants find a warm welcome after being returned by American authorities. The volunteers there provide food, water, and medical care to more than 2,000 migrants a week. They also document reports of abuse and human rights violations that may have occurred in their process of arrest and detention.
Each of these groups works with, not against, the border patrol and other government officials. The groups’ trainers explain to the volunteers that they can not be “aiding and abetting, harboring and transporting” any migrants. Nevertheless, “humane aid is never a crime,” as one of their mottos says, and accordingly, they simply help needy folks survive their challenging environment. And they keep in regular contact with the border patrol.
Often the migrants’ health plummets during the perilous journey, and they ask a volunteer to call for Border Patrol to take them into custody and send them back.
They also work in close partnership with the Mexican State of Sonora Commission for the Care of Migrants.
The No More Deaths volunteers’ service approximates the experience of the migrants. They give anywhere from a week to a whole summer to live in the desert. By night they camp in tents, where plumbing is a distant memory. By day they hike for two four-to-five hour shifts each day, carrying bottles of water, sandwiches, and medical kits in backpacks.
Each volunteer has a story to tell.
Andrew “Budge” Burridge, an Australian, is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, studying geography. Intrigued by border issues, not a major topic in his ocean-surrounded nation, he is spending the summer exploring the U.S.-Mexico complexities.
Erica Irwin, a recent American Studies graduate of St. Louis University, signed up with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Phoenix, who sent her to the NMD camp for the week.
Xylem (no last name), a resident of Tucson, soon to join the Southside Church, is in her third year of service. Having begun as a hiker, she lost too much sleep over the suffering she encountered in the migrants, so became the cook and camp manager to support the other workers.
Joe Wittberger, a Ph.D. candidate at UNC Chapel Hill, studying anthropology, is researching social movements, hoping to gain insight into the undercurrents and direct experience of people whose survival is a pawn in a pitched governmental debate. He shares with the group that the grapes on his upstate New York parents’ vineyard aren’t getting picked for lack of migrant workers.
Rebecca Wolff, a philosophy student at U.M. Ann Arbor is serving for the second summer in a row. Her heart has been pierced by participating in the campus organization MIRA – Migrant and Immigrant Rights Awareness.
Jason Odhner, a nursing student in Phoenix, is in his third summer of volunteering two out of every four weeks to NMD. He also volunteers at least one weekend each month through the school year. Spending most of his time at the border crossing tent, he provides medical care to the returning migrants, the most common problem being badly blistered feet, even worn all the way down to the muscle tissue. Some have suffered bad bone breaks, heart trouble, and other heat-and-exhaustion-induced troubles.
In a pause between arriving migrants, Jason reflects on the big picture, the major cause for migrant suffering. “On a spiritual level, we need to let go of this self-other thing, this real need we have in our lizard brains to divide people into people who are the same as us and people who are outside of us.”
He also waxes political. “We need to start with reality. People talk about closing up the border. If they really meant closing the border completely I would be opposed to that, but it would at least vaguely make sense. But what we’re doing now is that we’re making the border more open than it’s ever been. We’re making it easier than ever for capital, for corporations, for products, for everything to move back and forth across borders — except the labor’s supposed to stay put. You don’t get it both ways. … Labor follows jobs. It’s just the physics of the situation. To argue about whether it’s good or bad or harmful or beneficial for labor to follow jobs is like arguing that we’d be better off if the sun would rise in the west instead of the east. It doesn’t matter what’s good or bad. It’s just how things work.”
Mike Plank is nearing completion of a full year of service as a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Young Adult Volunteer working with Borderlinks. While there he has heard the call to ministry, has become an inquirer with the Missouri River Presbytery, and will attend McCormick Theological Seminary in the fall. He reflects, “If we continue pouring all this money, all these resources and all these agents onto the border and think that that’s going to stop it, we’re sadly mistaken. The problem isn’t that our border isn’t secure enough. The problem is that there’s a situation in Mexico that’s obligating people to leave their families to come look for work. We can build as many walls as we want. We can build a 50 foot wall. Someone is going to build a 51 foot ladder to jump over it.” What we do need to do, he clarifies, is to provide aid to Mexico, to work with the Mexican government “to end some of their government corruption and to redistribute some their wealth a little bit more,” and he adds, “to put in micro-loan programs; things like that.”
Prudencia Martin Gomez had not needed a 51 foot ladder to climb over the border. A group of fellow pilgrims guided her across the national divide and led her through the desert journey that followed. Through most of it, that is.
Having heard her fiancé’s account of her story late the previous night, on the morning of July 6, Robin Hoover sprang out of bed. The pastor of Tucson’s First Christian Church and founder/president of Humane Borders feared the worst. The heat this past week has been topping over 110 degrees. The desert area between Tucson and Nogales had produced six dead bodies in the previous seven days. So, along with eight other volunteers, Robin set out to search the area where Prudencia had been left. They spread out over the wide area, but by 7:15 he found her remains where she had been left. Long black tresses of hair draped over her bleached skull. He and volunteers from the various partner organizations sat a reverent vigil until the medical examiner arrived to take away the body.
The recovery of dead bodies was not what any of the volunteers had set out to do. But even in death, humane aid is never a crime.
