MARCH 1, 2025:  Douglas Day 1

We began our morning bright and early today! After a restful night in our temporary home for the week, we started by breakfasting together in the heart of Iglesia Bautista Amistad. Mark Adams and Joca Gallegos joined us, giving us the rundown for the week to come. Gallegos also led us in learning a famous Agua Prieta song of hope, reminding each other that tu eres muy importante. 

After we finished singing, we loaded up into the van, unsure of what seeing the border would bring. The short drive (four blocks from Iglesia Bautista Amistad) to the border had the team filled with anticipation.

Arizona is not a very forgiving landscape—the colors don’t always inspire hope, but you can feel it anyway. Love and hope thrum through the desert, which releases beauty. We drove beside the border first, the van engulfed in complete silence. On the U.S. side, barbed wire coated the wall. The metal was old and rusted—it’s how we knew it had been there a while. Deep divots protected the U.S. side during floods, and glass littered our dirt footpaths. Behind us, nothing but thin mesquite trees could be seen, the red mountains coloring the landscape.  

But in front of us, between the unforgiving metal of the wall, we saw two men riding bicycles. Signs for new apartment leasing were written in thick Sharpie, and we saw a new Ford F150 in the driveway of a white adobe home.  

On our side, the wind rattled the metal. It rang out like a long-lost scream, silenced quickly by the cars of the Agua Prieta side. On the Mexico side, we heard laughter—Spanish spoken quickly, intertwined with the sounds of construction and feet pattering.  

Whether you looked left or right, the wall never ended— “it was like a giant scar", Sofia Bartholomew mentioned. “It was jarring. I didn’t know what to think,” Zeina Gailani remarked later.  

We took a moment to hold the wall, either praying, meditating, or just having personal reflection about what we had seen.  

After leaving the border, we had lunch with FPC Douglas, where we engaged in wonderful conversation about ministry on the border, and how much it has changed over the years. Gallegos and her fellow pastor Peggy Christiansen, as well as a few other members of the church, served us a wonderful lunch while they shared their stories.  

Afterwards, the group got to take a break and walk down the Main Street of Douglas, where we visited the Last Supper Museum, the (haunted!) Gadsden Hotel, and spent lots of time reflecting, laughing, and getting to know the town around us.  

One of our last stops of the evening was the Whitewater Draw. As the sun was beginning to set, we drove all the way out to see the sandhill crane migration. We realized the landscape around us was home to more than just human migration—animals were migrating all around, too. The cranes would be leaving this March for Canada, to spend the summer where it was a bit cooler. We enjoyed a stunning, windy sunset, the desert surrounding us. It was the perfect way to wind down after an intense first day, and the photos cannot begin to do justice to the beauty we saw.  

We completed our night with dinner back at Iglesia Bautista Amistad—which we shared with Lee Ann Grace and Howard Henry, two life-long volunteers from Frontera de Cristo. After a quick essential Wal-Mart run, we returned to the church to wash up, reflect, and get ready for our first border crossing tomorrow.  

We are reminded by Howard Henry the words that keep his hope alive while living at the border: “We are all one people. We are all brothers and sisters.”  

Tu eres muy importante.  

You are very important.  

Written by Emily Allison and Emily Skaar