On behalf of a father’s daughter

My phone rang tonight with an unfamiliar area code, and from a noisy room, a woman’s voice came through : “I’m calling on behalf of Leonicio Delgado, who spoke to you this summer…”

It took me a few moments to understand.

“About his daughter, about Elizabeth?” I ask.

“Yes, about Elizabeth – he’s calling to see if you’ve heard any news, have you heard anything?”

Laura Elizabeth Delgado went missing over a year ago, in August 2009. She called her family from Nogales, Sonora and told them she would be crossing the border soon with her neighbor, Concepcion Tlatenchi. Concepcion also contacted her family just before they crossed.

No one has heard from either woman since.

I stumbled across this story learning about the border, the risks people will take to cross it – and what happens to their families.

Concepcion’s daughter called agency after agency looking for her mother before she turned to the press. She spent hours on the phone with me and sent me family photos by email before agreeing to let me visit her on the east coast. She also told me about Laura Elizabeth, and gave me Leonicio’s contact information.

I don’t speak Spanish – I say I’m working on it and I am, but it’ll be ages before I have the fluency to talk comfortably or do a thorough interview. But for people with common purpose, there’s always a network.

My phone call was answered by a family friend, whose email I trouble shot in exchange for help translating questions and answers that slid back and forth electronically until Laura Elizabeth’s story and then her photograph appeared on my laptop screen.

I finished the story, and told my editor I wanted the photographs to run as large as possible – they can never run too often or too large for me. If anyone responded with information, I promised the families I’d pass the information on.

I didn’t know what to expect – where the articles would run, who would see, who would care. I didn’t know if anyone knew anything. The desert doesn’t pick up the phone and call in.

And it’s been silent.

With other stories and assignments – and the rest of modern day life – competing to fill the gap, I’ve only thought about the story when people ask what I did this summer or what I’ll do next. It’s been far too easy to think of the project as complete because the edits are finished and the story hasn’t been picked up. It seems to float, motionless, on the site – static. Over.

But for Maria and Leonicio, it’s not. For Maria’s three children, her husband, her brother, her sister and their father, it’s not – just as it’s not over for Leonicio and Laura Elizabeth’s young daughter, who’s two or maybe three by now.

Tonight, Leonicio’s friend called me on his behalf from a noisy restaurant in New York, asking if I had news. Through the upbeat music in the background, I couldn’t help but picture the father who has missed his daughter ever since she didn’t arrive at his door.

I live with someone’s stories for a few hours, a few days, maybe, if I’m lucky, a few months. I won’t forget that you live with your story every day.

Concepcion Tlatenchi with her husband in Mexico

Laura Elizabeth Delgado before leaving Mexico

Reporting: photos from the road

Nogales, Arizona (June 2010)

So what have I been up to this summer? A little bit of finishing old projects (the Dubai site), a little bit of new projects (rearranging the apartment), and a lot of running around Arizona. Sometimes I’m solo, sometimes it’s a group event, either way, there’s a lot to do for my team’s News21 story which is now in the editing phase and will post later this summer. Whether it’s practicing Spanish on the go or taking photos while (literally) on the road, we’ve been trying to make use of every second this summer.

In these photos, four of us practice Spanish in the car after a day of interviews, Lauren and I attempt to capture the sunset between Nogales and Tucson, and Felipe watch the moon rise on the same stretch of road later in the month.

Arizona Heat : Experiencing the Desert on Foot

Here’s what I’ve been up to – to see the rest of the my team’s updates, go here.

Amid southern Arizona’s vast landscape of dry foothills, valleys and mountains it’s easy to feel very small.

The people that I’m writing about move through this land, sometimes on a daily basis — they include hikers and hunters, law enforcement and humanitarian volunteers, and the people illegally crossing Arizona’s section of the U.S.-Mexico border.

With the land playing so much of a role in the stories I'm reporting, I decided early on that I needed to see it and experience it for myself. On my first trip I was confident that I'd kept track of where we'd parked the jeep — only to be completely wrong. During the second trip I witnessed dramatic shifts in weather and vowed to be better prepared next time. Most recently, exhausted from the heat, I felt my head swimming despite all my efforts to stay fit, rested and hydrated.

There are rewards — glimpses of elusive wildlife, the fiery wildflowers, unforgettable sunsets. But people who underestimate the harshness of this area are taking a huge risk.