The first volunteer cohort showed up with backpacks and a willingness to be useful. Six people, average age 24, drawn from three states. We gave them aprons and a four-week curriculum we were writing as we went.
Mornings are café. Afternoons cross the bridge to spend time with ABM's partners on the Mexican side — kids' programs, food distribution, friendships that are years old now. Evenings are shared dinner in the volunteer house, and most people are asleep by ten.
Mornings at the bar. Afternoons across the bridge.
It's harder than the website makes it sound. The work is real, and the heat in May is real, and learning a Mara is humbling. But everyone in this first cohort wrote in the closing journal that they'd do it again. Two of them came back for a second season.
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