Rachel McCormick

I also wanted to see with my own two eyes this border that had transformed EDV from a human being into an illegal alien.

So in honor of EDV's struggle, I packed a bag and I went to the desert south of Tucson, Arizona to volunteer for two weeks with the organization No More Deaths, which, among other things, seeks to end human suffering on the US-Mexico border.

When I got there, I thought I knew what to expect based on the tales that each of me and his friends had told of their perilous journeys.

I had even written my senior thesis at Vassar about narratives of violence on the US-Mexico border back in those days when I thought I knew everything.

But I was not expecting this.

What lay south of the airport and the urban sprawl of Tucson looked more like a cross between a science fiction movie and footage from a foreign war zone than the country I thought I knew.

Don't get me wrong, it was absolutely beautiful.

Not sand like the Sahara, but bright maroon soil and prickly green plants and animals that howled.

As I pitched my tent in the middle of this beauty, I started to notice other things too, like the helicopters that constantly flew overhead and the border patrol agents that would jump out of bushes and point their guns at anything that moved, including me.

Their weapons should have scared me, but unfortunately, I realized that as a white woman, I was probably safe, whereas somebody brown like Edie certainly wasn't.

In those two weeks in the desert, I thought a lot about Idvi.

He was my only real connection between what was happening on the border and what was happening at home in New York.

I thought about Idvi as he danced at our wedding, and I also thought about him as he cried at our wedding because none of his family could be there.

And it wasn't just Idvi that I thought about.

I thought about the millions of other people who had made the same decision as him to leave their families behind and walk north

In my first week in the desert, I didn't actually meet any of these migrants, but I saw signs of their presence all around.

I saw their footprints in dry riverbeds and discarded backpacks everywhere filled with Red Bull and children's toys and photographs.

And in the middle of all this, my task was to work with other volunteers from No More Deaths to leave jugs of water in different spots in the desert.

Because if you decide to walk from Mexico over the mountains to some U.S.

interstate to get picked up,