Close to Home: Intense, gratifying work with asylum-seekers

We just returned from two weeks in El Paso, Texas, ground zero of the humanitarian tsunami rolling across the Rio Grande. As former Peace Corps volunteers who speak Spanish and know Central America fairly well, we wanted to return the hospitality so frequently extended to us in these countries. We also wanted to see the border situation firsthand instead of relying on conflicting media accounts.

We volunteered at Casa del Refugiado, the most recently established refugee shelter operated by Annunciation House, based in El Paso and operating a network of “hospitality centers” stretching to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Their motto is “not one refugee to the street.” In this spirit, each person is warmly welcomed by Spanish-speaking volunteers, given food and a place to sleep and helped to contact their U.S. sponsor to initiate travel plans. The average stay in the shelter is one to three days.

Casa del Refugiado occupies a large warehouse in the city, currently able to accommodate up to 500 people with plans to expand capacity to 1,500. Local artists have painted brightly colored murals to make the refugees feel welcome. The shelter is staffed by volunteers from all over the country.

Between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., Border Patrol agents drop off asylum-seekers recently released from detention. There may be 40-100 people in a group. Each family, hungry and exhausted, arrives with the clothes on their backs (but no belts or shoelaces).

Most of them are sick from the journey and their time in detention, the room often filled with the sounds of children crying. Each person carries an asylum petition with the future date and location of their hearing. The average journey to the U.S. border takes between two and four weeks. Families have traveled on foot and by truck, bus and train.

During their short stay, they are served three meals a day provided by the Salvation Army, given a clean set of clothes, the opportunity to shower and a cot with a Red Cross blanket. Diapers, baby formula and general hygiene products are provided as well. Volunteers make five daily trips to the bus station and two to the airport. Departing families are given sandwiches, snacks and fruit for their trip. The shelter depends on donations of food and clothing to meet its needs, and miracles do happen - items appear just as the cupboards seem bare.

Most of the refugees come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They're families with two or three children; single parents with one child; single mothers with several children. Family separation is common. Part of a family may arrive at the shelter not knowing where other family members have been sent.

There's much misinformation about who's coming to seek asylum. We met subsistence farmers whose crops have failed due to climate change or whose land has been expropriated by the government. Parents bringing teenage sons and daughters to escape gang conscription. Violence. Corruption. Poverty. Crime. Political instability. The people we met were risking everything so their children could have a better life.

Each day was intense, the work non-stop, the emotions heart-wrenching. However, the satisfaction of being able to help, if only for a short time, was gratifying. Soft voices spoke their thanks every day: Que Dios te bendiga (May God bless you).

Thea Evensen was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru from 1964-66. Anne Fitzgerald was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Costa Rica 1964-67. Long-time friends, they both live in Santa Rosa.

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