‘It hasn’t stopped’: Arizona volunteers try to stem the tide of migrant deaths in the desert
Posted By Grace Oldham/Cronkite Borderlands Project on Thu, May 20, 2021 at 6:53 AM
AJO – 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: “Gracias.”
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 group’s efforts were appreciated.
“For the most part, we will never hear from the people who use this,” Jakubal said. “We don’t know what it was like getting to this point. We don’t 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.”
https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2021/05/20/it-hasnt-stopped-arizona-volunteers-try-to-stem-the-tide-of-migrant-deaths-in-the-desert
