Death in the Desert

Ann and I began our first day of work with Humane Borders today. Humane Borders is an organization that focuses on supplying water to migrants in the desert in the hopes of preventing deaths. They maintain water stations throughout Arizona, each marked with a blue flag signalling the presence of water. However, upon my return from work I couldn't help but notice a twitter post by CNN. It states that 18 people have died in a flash flood in France, as seen below.

I was a little taken aback, and slightly disgusted. Here, an American media source is covering deaths in a French flash flood, yet many people still remain unaware of the 128 deaths along the Arizona border in the past 8 months alone. The artifacts of these deaths -- dolls, strollers, bicycles, backpacks, clothes, cigarettes, poems, perfume bottles -- are scattered throughout the Humane Borders office. The struggle for me, though, does not lie in the lack of media coverage and education surrounding migrant deaths. This can always be changed. What strikes me is the hypocrisy surrounding water stations and attempts to save migrants' lives. Many water barrels are shot, slashed, graffitied, or otherwise vandalized. Aren't these people still human? Don't they deserve to live, even if only to be detained by Border Patrol? Maybe we should reconsider as a nation what it means to be open, to be loving, to be supportive. Regardless of your take on the border dispute, I think we all should agree that no human being should perish in the desert -- not even the 1,138 that already have.

map of deaths: www.humaneborders.org/news/documents/cumulativemap20002007.pdf

www.humaneborders.org
www.nomoredeaths.org