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Day 3: Patagonia Youth Enrichment Center

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 By Willis and Max: Today we walked down to Patagonia's youth enrichment center which helps support the local community of 800 people. We witnessed their conservations efforts to capture rainwater during their monsoon season. The way that they captured is by collecting water in the gutters placed onto the roof, then letting them flow through a pipe that was approximately 4 inches higher than the cistern. This allows enough water pressure to push the rainwater into the tanks. The tanks had a T-pipe for over flow, the water can flows to another pipe leading to a rock basin, that waters a tree which will grow to shade the cistern in turn keeping it cool and able to last longer.  We helped build a rock lined basin to improve irrigation into their fruit garden and prevent erosion. In addition the rock basin allows water to go into the ground instead of being evaporated. The group laid down a liner and stacked rocks  to complete the rock basin. In addition, we added an extra ci...
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Day 6 - Photographing Artifacts of Migration, Communal Sustainability, and Wrapping Up

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 Dearest Gentle Reader,      As far as last days go, today was definitely a memorable one. We began the day by visiting Tom Kiefer's art gallery in the Ajo plaza. Kiefer's three studios were filled with artifacts he had collected while working as a janitor at the processing center near Ajo. He worked for 11 years for this border patrol station. After apprehending migrants crossing the desert at these border control processing centers, the border control officers would seize any items deemed potentially dangerous or nonessential. Tom noticed as he started his work there that many cans of food would get thrown away, so he asked his supervisor if he could take this food to Ajo's food bank. He was granted this permission, but as he began to collect he started to notice the other items that were taken from the migrants. These items, deemed dangerous and unnecessary, were often children's socks, stuffed animals, deodorants, letters, and family photos. Kiefer began to ...
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Day 4 - Patagonia to Ajo

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  Hello My Friends, Today we embarked on a journey from Patagonia to Ajo. It was an eventful trip with a lot of fun adventures and lots of singing featuring the new hit band out of Patagonia, The 5 Cubs. Additionally, we completed the song ( all the verses) of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." We took a stop in Tucson at a local market, The Mercado, where we enjoyed the local treats. The rest of the trip to Ajo through the immense Sonoran Desert was also filled with singing, fun conversations, and bonding between the group. When we arrived in Ajo, we stationed ourselves in the Sonoran Desert Inn, run by the International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA). The inn is stationed in an old abandoned school that was renovated into the only non-profit hotel in the country. The high school was made into apartments for artists to live and work in. We met Crystal, who is of both Mexican and Tohono o' Odham heritage, and Jay, who is Caucasian and from the midwest. They explained that ...
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