Brenda- Humane Borders- Day Five

Day five, our last day, we teamed up with a group of students from South America who are studying at the University of Arizona, they came from Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. They joined us on the BANWR (Buenos Aires National Wildlife Reserve) water run that had 6 stations. Juanita also joined us again and acted as a translator for the other students. They were very curious as to the rules and the challenges that were involved in crossing over. They thought it was ludicrous that people were risking their lives to come over, but Juanita calmly explained that the situation has to be horrendous and the people that desperate to risk their lives crossing the desert for a chance to make money and send it back home. The highlight of the trip was going down to the border in Sasabe. None of the students could cross but we were all content with seeing the border and the process that one had to endure before driving down and coming back. Betzi drove down and delivered the remaining water to Grupo Beta, the equivalent of Humane Borders in Mexico. The Border Patrol agents were dickwads. They were very rude and Betzi had given me the impression that they were actually quite nice and approachable and open to questions. Juanita later explained that it was probably because we had a group of 20 Hispanic students that quite blatantly did not look WASPy. I wandered over to the other side of the parking lot, because the agents said we had to stay in the parking lot and saw a Man and his Son loading up all of their stuff into their truck. It didn’t hit me until they were pulling up to enter Mexico that they had to take all their stuff out for border patrol to inspect their truck for illegal items or people smuggling. Border patrol wasn’t even helping them put their stuff back on the truck, and they had a whole ton of stuff! The fence itself was absolutely nasty. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. It marred the landscape and Juanita explained to us that the labor that was used to build it came from undocumented construction works….ironic.