I began my career in healthcare in the dry heat of the Sonoran Desert, carrying water onto trails used by immigrants crossing the border into the US. I helped to run a base camp that lead groups out to the desert, to teach people about the crisis of preventable death on the border, while helping to prevent those deaths. I went on to become a paramedic in a large urban EMS system, where call after call, I would walk into homes of people in crisis. From their neighborhood, to their kitchen, to their medicine cabinets, I was able to examine the macro and the micro of their emergencies. I was able to see that poor communities, situated right next to oil processing plants had more respiratory emergencies than affluent, suburban white communities. I felt the burnout of emergency room nurses and doctors as patient census reached and surpassed maximum capacity day after day after day. As a volunteer I provided harm reduction and medical services to sex workers, people without homes and people who use drugs. These experiences brought me to nursing; after all that I had done, I felt that I wanted to do more to positively influence the lives of patients. As a nurse, I will to continue growing as a fighter and an ally, not just as a healthcare worker, but as an advocate for change to the healthcare system. When I first became active in humanitarian aid, before I had even been trained as an EMT, I was volunteering for No More Deaths, an organization that places water in the desert for migrants who cross over border using a maze of mountains and canyons, frequently walking a hundred miles in the oppressive desert heat with little food or water. Death was common, and friends of mine have found many bodies of people who had failed. When I first began this work, our program was limited to summer, when heat was at its most dangerous, and students on summer break were available as volunteers to carry hundreds of gallons of water. Summer was turning to fall, and while daytime temperatures were dropping, nights were well below freezing. The previous winter, friends going on a sporadic, off schedule water drop took an unknown route down a dry wash of red, volcanic stone, where they found the body of a 13-year-old girl from El Salvador, who hadn’t been dead but for a few days. The discovery shook our worlds. We couldn’t help but wonder, if we had been as active in the winter as we were in the summer, would we have found her? Could we have saved her life? As the summer program wrapped up, this girl weighed on our minds. A small group of volunteers, without the students, decided to occupy the desert all winter. Though smaller in scale, we developed a plan to continue water drops, to monitor trails and map new trails. We wound up adding clothing and food to our drop sites, building a medical triage tent at our base camp, doing outreach to local community members who cared about ceasing death in the desert, and made a coalition with nuns in Nogales, Sonora who ran a kitchen and resource center for people, where we helped to cook, for migrants, while nurses and doctors could treat minor medical problems. I understand that to some people, the issue of immigration is a difficult subject. I would like to point out that the primary objective of the organization was to end preventable death in the desert, of which the suffering is incomprehensibly painful and lonely. The hundreds of hours that I would put in every month, the days I spent in the field, working, planning, building, this is what I bring with me, is representative to my place in nursing. It’s my drive to restore dignity, to be present for those who are hurt or ill, and to look beyond the illness to its source in the structure of our society.