"Doesn't anybody carry a compass?"

The question was out of my mouth before I really meant to ask it.

We were seated at a couple of folding tables in a back room of a church, slurping posole from plastic bowls and listening to stories from a trio of residents in Arizona's Green Valley.

The retirement community about 40 miles north of the border between Mexico and the United states is one of the places I visited in January to learn about immigration.

"No," said the preacher, a smiley guy in a guayabera. Of all the people he's encountered on searches for migrants in distress, he said, he's never seen one person with a compass.

And even if they had one, it probably wouldn't be any better than the North Star.

My traveling companions on the weeklong trip were 10 adults ranging in age from 18 to 81, all friends or members of the United Church of Santa Fe. Twice now, church leaders have taken a group of teenagers to this region, but last month a group of adults went instead.

The perspective on immigration that I brought with me came from what little I had read and what I thought I knew, not anything I had seen or touched or smelled.

So a few days later, when we trekked up and down rocky arroyos and stepped gingerly around towering cactuses, it really dawned on me how little I understood.

I picked up fairly quickly on the idea that humanitarian-aid efforts along the border represent a minority. Lots of area residents are angry and fearful about the situation. They want the borders secure, and they trust the government's rules implicitly.

It seemed like the more I learned, the more blurry were the lines in the sand.

How could someone survive walking through this hostile terrain each night for nearly a week? Are things really that bad in Mexico that it is worth it to take such a risk to come here? Can't they come legally and safely on a bus or in a car?

Many who make the journey on foot from one nation to another have no idea what they are getting into: a long and arduous walk in the shadow of death, under the fear of discovery and the threat of unknown consequences.

Day after day, my head and heart got heavy with all the information. At night, after cooking a meal in our "vacation rental," I wrote in my journal, but I couldn't really get my head around it.

What I heard over and over again was that people who cross the border illegally don't really have another choice given that they can earn at most only a few dollars a day for hard work at home. The process to gain legal entry takes decades and still leads to denial for many.

Women who make the crossing expect to be raped. Men expect to be robbed. The Border Patrol uses high-tech equipment that sometimes can't distinguish between a cow and a man walking through the desert at night. Contract bus drivers and jail keepers transport and detain people as if they are livestock.

Agents at roadblocks who stop every car on the Interstate are only looking for brown skin, and when they find it, they want to see papers too.

One of the most fascinating characters I met on the trip was Raymond Daukei, a Kiowa whose roots are in the Tohono O'odham tribe. Daukei is studying medicine at the University of Arizona, but in his spare time he works with Humane Borders and other humanitarian advocacy groups in the region.

"In this human trafficking, everybody loses," he said, as he prepared to lead a group of high-school students into the desert to pick up trash left by migrants. Earlier, at a water station, he pointed to the spot where he found a woman's decomposing corpse last year.

"This is years and years of foreign policy that are coming back to haunt us. It's hard to point a finger and say, 'You guys did it.' Everyone is frustrated and burned out and they want it to stop, but there is no easy fix."