Cheryl Opalski is coming to the State University of New York at Fredonia on April 13 and 14 to discuss her work with Ajo Samaritans. A small volunteer organiz
AJO â It was a simple message scrawled into a basalt rock lying near-empty cans of beans and jugs of water that volunteers had left deep in the Sonoran Desert for undocumented immigrants passing through: âGracias.â
But to Mikal Jakubal, who, as a volunteer with the Ajo Samaritans, had been making weekly trips into the backcountry to stock water drop locations, the note was affirmation that the groupâs efforts were appreciated.
âFor the most part, we will never hear from the people who use this,â Jakubal said. âWe donât know what it was like getting to this point. We donât know what is after this. But you have this one little connection across massively different life experiences: They found some water and you found a thank you note.â
Advertisement: “You can’t even describe what we are doing as a Band-Aid on a gushing wound,” Jakubal said. He said a long history of U.S. policies in Latin America has contributed to the reasons migrants are risking their lives to trek for days through harsh terrain in hopes of finding better lives in the U.S. In other words, Jakubal said, “what’s going on at the border now is like a symptom on top of a symptom on top of a symptom of the deeper problem.”
A shift in policy Doug Ruopp, a veteran volunteer with the migrant aid group Humane Borders, remembers a time before people started to die at striking rates in the Sonoran Desert. He moved to Tucson from New England in the late 1990s to become a bilingual teacher. Back then, the border crossings he heard about were different.
Occasionally, the hikers came across a piece of clothing, a water bottle, a backpack, or a .50 caliber bullet casing leftover from bombing and live-fire exercises at the nearby Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range. But signs of human life are largely absent in this harsh and unforgiving landscape. The southern Arizona sun, 15 miles from the Mexico border, was brutally hot, even in the early hours of a March morning. The intimidating Growler Mountains loomed over the flat and exposed desert expanse from the east. Shade could be found under the sparse trees that lined a sprawling wash that snaked through the Growler Valley. But to reach the trees often meant passing through thickets of dry, thorny brush that surrounded them.