A member of our admin team is volunteering for two weeks in June at Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, one of the organizations running respite shelters for people seeking entry and asylum at the southern border. The goal of<\/span> Annunciation House<\/span><\/a> and similar organizations is to provide sanctuary and hospitality to refugees and the migrant poor, and to help them get to their loved ones in the United States. This is an account of her time there, which we hope will give others an up-close view of this humanitarian crisis and the wonderful organizations working to address it. Click on the links below to read each entry and check back daily for current installments.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n DAY 1<\/a> | DAY 2<\/a> | DAY 3<\/a> | DAY 4<\/a> | DAY 5<\/a> | DAY 6<\/a> | DAYS 7-11<\/a> | Day 13<\/a> | Day 14<\/a> | Day 15<\/a> | Day 16<\/a> | Day 17<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The “coloring wall” at one of the Annunciation House sites in El Paso. The pictures were drawn by children whose families came to the center for help with travel to their family sponsors in the U.S.<\/p><\/div>\n Our government is forcibly deporting people across the border to Juarez, so every day hundreds of people we would have been getting in our network of shelters in El Paso are being simply let off just across the bridges with no money, no food, no shelter, no water. They will be easy prey for traffickers of various sorts. The number of arrivals at our shelter has gone way down, so we are not frantically busy helping new people. All of us agree that the less crazy days are kind of a relief, but that we\u2019d rather be full and know that all these people are safe with us.<\/span><\/p>\n With no big buses arriving, the day seemed marked by \u201cweird things.\u201d Things we wouldn\u2019t have time for if we were in a constant frenzied state with new arrivals. While on phone duty, I took a phone call from a guy who is the contact for a woman and a kid at our shelter. He\u2019s also the contact for the husband and a daughter, who are still in detention. The guy was calling because he\u2019d been contacted by DHS or by this guy in detention and had been asked to send picture of the father\u2019s birth certificate and the daughter\u2019s birth certificate, to prove that he\u2019s the parent. But this guy on the phone said he didn\u2019t have the email address he\u2019s supposed to send this to, and he didn\u2019t know what to do. I gave him the Border Patrol number for El Paso (from a list posted on the wall), where he said his friend\/relative was detained, and I also called that number myself. I asked what the address was to which they were having people send these documents. The guy said it could have been any one of lots of addresses, so he couldn\u2019t say. I asked if he could find out if I gave him the name. Would it be in their case file? He said no, tell them to call their consulate and the consulate would help them. I called back to tell the man this news (although another volunteer tells me that the consulates don\u2019t actually do anything to help), and he said, \u201cWell, I have the email address. It\u2019s just that it doesn\u2019t work.\u201d Then he read me what he had, and he had a period after the \u201cat\u201d sign and also at the end of the whole thing. I told him to take out those periods and try it again. He didn\u2019t call back, so maybe that worked. I thought, \u201cWow, I might have helped prevent a kid from getting separated from her dad just by knowing that!\u201d But then another volunteer told me that they always lie to these people and tell them \u201cwe just need this one thing and then you\u2019ll be released,\u201d but that\u2019s not the case. There will be some other reason they don\u2019t release them. But this was the first time I\u2019d had that particular question from someone.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Joe had a more difficult issue to solve. He\u2019d been trying to help a family staying at our shelter to change their court date. The court date had been scheduled for New York (I think) in just a few days. But the woman had been hospitalized for a few days, and it looked unlikely that their Greyhound trip would get them there in time. There is a number on the DHS forms to call if you need to change the court date. It doesn\u2019t work. Either there was no answer, ever, or there was a recording saying the number was out of service. He called several other numbers we have for different offices or numbers he found on the paperwork for some other thing. Many of them didn\u2019t get through or had an \u201cout of service or disconnected\u201d recording, including a number that two other offices had both given him. It just shouldn\u2019t be this hard to do a basic thing. Why can\u2019t they put accurate phone numbers on their forms? How can people who don\u2019t speak English and aren\u2019t used to navigating any government bureaucracies be expected to navigate this? It\u2019s worse than getting an answer to a tax form question from the IRS, and there are lives at stake.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Then there was the missing guy, Francisco (not his real name). This man and his teenage son had been at our shelter. We got a call from their sponsoring family member (using the number he\u2019d used when calling us back to let us know of reservation details) asking if they\u2019d left. I checked, and yes, they had. We had a yellow slip for him in the yellow slip box (for guests who\u2019d left, with a note about his departure time for the airport run on it). But he hadn\u2019t turned up at the final destination. Yes, he had a layover somewhere, in a big airport. I had visions of this guy and his son just getting lost and missing the connecting flight. I gave the sponsor the confirmation code again and encouraged him to ask the airline if they\u2019d been on both flights. He seemed to like that idea and said he would. But then he called back a half hour later and asked the same question again, seeming to not have registered (or done) what I was suggesting. So I called the airline, sat on hold for about half an hour, and at least learned that they did make both flights. But they must have found each other because the sponsor didn\u2019t call back. But how <\/span>do<\/span><\/i> you connect with someone at a huge airport if you don\u2019t have a cell phone, especially if you have never been on a plane and have no idea where to go to meet those who are picking you up?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n So it was a day of weird issues, issues we couldn\u2019t have taken on if we\u2019d been crazy busy.<\/span><\/p>\n Today was the last day for Brittany, another volunteer I\u2019ve come to like a lot and will miss when we go back to our normal lives. Brittany is one of the Peace Corps alums here. She served in Cambodia. After her volunteer stint, she\u2019s actually headed back to Cambodia for a little while to train incoming Peace Corps volunteers who will be teaching English there. Brittany arrived here thinking there would be a place for her to stay at the shelter she was assigned to (like me, she had started at another one but that one had been closed down so she was reassigned), but when she arrived, there was no room there. So one of the Catholic sisters working there arranged for her to stay at their convent. It was on the way to the shelter from where I was staying, so I gave Brittany some rides, and we went out one evening for margaritas to celebrate her 30<\/span>th<\/span> birthday. I\u2019ll miss her. She was fun.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A drawing from the “Coloring Wall” at one of the Annunciation House sites.<\/p><\/div>\n This afternoon the woman I took to the ER last night left with her family for her 3-day Greyhound trip. They were waiting for their volunteer driver in the <\/span>comedor<\/span><\/i> (our \u201cstaging area\u201d for departures) on one of my trips into the building. They greeted me and thanked me for my help last night. Even the kids looked delighted to see me, like we were old friends, even though I didn\u2019t actually interact with them all that much last night. Their mom looked like a whole different person. I guess that doctor was right that she\u2019d be OK to travel after all. I wasn\u2019t sure the food bags that we give them for their trips contain the healthiest food in the world (or enough food, frankly), so I had brought in a bag of those little oranges that I had bought and didn\u2019t expect to finish before I had to leave town. I had been hoping to connect with them and give these oranges to them, so I\u2019m glad that happened.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n But mostly today was all about airport runs. I did two runs to two different bus companies, too, but the really memorable parts of the day concerned airports and getting our guests to their flights.<\/span><\/p>\n When I arrived, I learned that last night someone had forgotten to notify our shuttle drivers of the next day\u2019s airport ride needs, so it was all hands on deck for volunteers who had cars to get 26 people to the airport at once for multiple flights. We just hoped we didn\u2019t get another bus with new people arriving while so many of us were gone. Out came all the car seats and booster seats, and off we all went. Not all the drivers spoke Spanish well enough to explain things once we got there, so I did a lot of that, while another volunteer dealt with the thankfully very helpful TSA agent who was handling all these arrivals, whose travel documents were the immigration papers issued by the Department of Homeland Security when they were released from detention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We managed to print everyone\u2019s boarding passes at the machines with the confirmation codes \u2013 except for the three parties (all of them women traveling with kids) for whom there\u2019d been weather delays that meant a complete change of their travel plans. Those people all had to return with us to the shelter until tomorrow for their new, rebooked flights. After their arduous and dangerous journey to get this far, hearing that it would be one more day before they could see their sponsoring family members, was hard. One mom looked especially disappointed when I broke this news to her (although she quickly rallied), but the other two took it in stride and said that with everything they\u2019d already been through, this one-day delay was nothing. None of the people in this group had ever been on a plane or in an airport. I had done a couple airport runs before today, but never with a group this size and never with people who had so many questions and fears. When you get to thinking about it (which you typically don\u2019t), there really are a lot of complicated details to know about flying and airports.<\/span><\/p>\n Among those things:<\/span><\/p>\n And since our guests come from countries where the police are in bed with drug traffickers and murderous gangs and since they\u2019ve recently been in detention here, where people took their shoelaces and personal effects and dumped out their prescription medication in front of them:<\/span><\/p>\n The fear and anxiety over flying surprised me, after everything else they\u2019d survived to this point, but then I realized it probably shouldn\u2019t. This was, as I tried to tell the fearful people, the least difficult part of their arduous journey. They would be in comfortable seats, be out of the hot sun and weather, not preyed upon by any gangs or traffickers, be served drinks and maybe meals, and then in a few hours they\u2019d be in the arms of their loved ones. But of everything they had experienced in the course of getting to this point, this was probably the least familiar setting and some of them probably felt the most disoriented by it. Everything else was more dangerous, but at least more familiar.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Today a really surprising thing happened. I was working on the intake process, meeting with people newly arrived to us to call their sponsoring relatives to tell them their loved ones are with us and explain the process for buying a ticket for her transportation. And there was a single woman, 72 years old, traveling alone. This is the first time I have met a guest who wasn\u2019t crossing the border with minor children. People never come to us alone. The first thing she wanted me to know was how important it is that we are here doing this work, and how she wants to volunteer herself someday because this is such a great thing. But first she has to learn English, she said. I told her that there were places she could volunteer and help people without knowing English, so maybe she could look for them as soon as she got settled.<\/span><\/p>\n The next thing she wanted me to know was that she almost wasn\u2019t here. And actually, her 40-something-year-old daughter, who was traveling with her, had been sent back across the border. She told me that the women guards were meaner than the men, and the Mexican law enforcement meaner than the Americans. But she seemed to be the beneficiary of several people who simply cared and did what they could, and she was marveling at it all. She wanted to tell me about that, too. First there was a doctor who saw her in detention and had a fit and demanded that the guards take her to a hospital. Whatever she had going on medically (or maybe just the trip itself and the small amount of food in detention?) caused her to lose 20 kilos, which meant that her clothes, which were in tatters, then no longer fit, either. So a different doctor, a woman who treated her in the hospital, went out and bought her some clothes so she\u2019d have something to wear when she left the hospital. Then she was in a line or on a bus for people being deported to Juarez, and a (male) guard saw her standing there and told the others, \u201c\u0130S\u00e1camela!\u201d (\u201cget her out of there (for me)!\u201d) and told them she would never survive being dumped on the streets of Juarez and could not be sent there. So THAT explained her highly unusual presence among our group of new arrivals\u2014a troubled DHS employee who wasn\u2019t comfortable sending an older woman to her death. Well, that\u2019s encouraging. And interesting.<\/span><\/p>\n She also said that some DHS agents she encountered were actually encouraging people to get lawyers to help with their cases. I heard that from people yesterday, too. Some of the people arriving yesterday told me they had been treated well and had been urged to get lawyers. We hear all kinds of stories: horror stories about hostility and gratuitous cruelty on the part of the government workers and sometimes these other stories of people being decent. I think it must be incredibly hard to be a decent person and work in that environment and see what is happening up close all day and feel powerless to do much against it. And part of me thinks there\u2019s no way a good person could do this for a living, so all good people should quit and refuse to be a part of this. But then the stories we hear about how everyone is treated in detention would only get worse. It\u2019s important that people who are humane and treat these traumatized people with dignity remain in their jobs, right? It\u2019s hard to wrap my mind around. Most days there isn\u2019t enough time to ponder this dilemma.<\/span><\/p>\n Today also saw my third call to Dr. Gutierrez, but the first one in which he recommended that we take someone to the emergency room rather than bring them by his office. This was a 20-something-year-old woman who was clutching her abdomen, just under her right front ribs, and having trouble standing up due to the pain, which she said wrapped around her side to her back. She said it was a pain she\u2019d never had before, and that it started right after eating. She looked pretty miserable. He said he\u2019d rather not take any chances on this, so take her to the university medical center, which has the local emergency room. I was told that it is Annunciation House policy not to separate families, EVER, so the entire family had to go to the hospital. Such a nice family\u2014mom, dad, two little kids\u2014and I felt so badly for them that on top of fleeing a horrible situation and enduring this trip, now they were dealing with this, too. I dropped them off at the entrance and then went to park and walked back. In the meantime, she threw up in the garbage can outside the door to the emergency room. The dad ended up staying with the little kids in the waiting room while I went in with her. I also filled out the registration forms at the desk for her.<\/span><\/p>\n One of the first things to observe about our new surroundings was how calm the emergency room was compared to the warehouse that was serving as our hospitality center. Everything was so orderly and quiet! The second thing that struck me was how kind everyone was. The nurse who greeted us at the arrival desk came back to check on her after her shift was over, before she went home. All the other people we dealt with (nurses, ultrasound tech, doctor) treated her with respect and kindness. One time when I went out to update the husband on what was happening, he and the kids were eating, and he told me that nurse at the check-in desk had bought them dinner. After a blood test and a whole bunch of ultrasound pictures, they ruled out anything really scary and the doctor said it was most likely gastritis, which was a process-of-elimination diagnosis. He thought this was very likely the problem, but if she didn\u2019t get better in a couple days, she should be re-evaluated. He said the remedies were over the counter, like Pepcid and another one I can\u2019t remember, but when I said they didn\u2019t have any money, he said he\u2019d prescribe them and then they\u2019d be covered at the hospital pharmacy.<\/span><\/p>\n It turned out that the pharmacy he\u2019d told us to go to had just closed for the night, so we had to go to a different one elsewhere in the hospital, which said they\u2019re not supposed to give out meds directly (??). But when I explained the situation, the kind pharmacist said that since these are OTC meds and cost pennies on the dollar anyway, he would just put some in zip-lock bags for us. He said it wasn\u2019t even worth doing up the paperwork to dispense them normally, in this case. When I told him they had a 3-day bus trip that was starting the following afternoon, he put 5 days worth in the baggies. The hospital printed out an explanation of her diagnosis and its remedies in Spanish and English, and I pointed out to the husband that the Spanish was behind the English in that packet. (The patient was three sheets to the wind and not fully with it.) And explained the dosage of the meds, too. Since those were just in the zip-lock baggies, they didn\u2019t have bottle labels, but I showed him where in the instructions it said how often to take each one.<\/span><\/p>\n Given how miserable this poor woman looked and how much trouble she had being upright and how little energy she had, I was skeptical when the doctor said she should be fine to travel the next afternoon. She didn\u2019t look anywhere close to fine to me, and her bus trip would start in about 15 hours. He said that she should avoid fatty and spicy foods, and that gastritis could be caused or aggravated by not eating enough, too. When I told her this, she said that they had been in detention for five days, during which they were given an apple, a bowl of brothy soup, and a piece of bread per person per day.<\/span><\/p>\n She had given hers to her kids.<\/span><\/p>\n So many acts of kindness that I witnessed or heard about today. It felt like the whole day was an extended meditation on kindness and its impact.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n More drawings from the “Coloring Wall” at one of the Annunciation House sites in El Paso.<\/p><\/div>\n The very hardest parts of doing this happen when you\u2019re meeting someone who had a family member who was separated and taken away. And today we had two of these. Two that I was involved with\u2014maybe more at our center today in general.<\/span><\/p>\n The first one was the 19-year-old daughter of one of the women who arrived at our shelter with a younger child. She is so worried about her daughter, who has been deported to Juarez, and she is right to be worried. Her daughter has a<\/span> good chance<\/span><\/a> of being kidnapped or assaulted. The migrants are very vulnerable, and probably especially a teenager\/young woman on her own. Her mom was streaming tears as she asked if we could do anything. I hate it that we can\u2019t. But maybe if they can find a pro-bono lawyer who will work with them, they could get the daughter here. Maybe I\u2019m just telling myself that to make this more bearable. I have not seen anyone 18 or older allowed to enter unless they had one or more kids.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s so hard to sit with someone whose loved one was taken away, especially their kid. These parents face a wrenching choice of which child to save: the younger child, who\u2019s still with them and who will be much safer in the U.S. than in Guatemala or El Salvador or Honduras, or the older one who is now in a dangerous predicament in Juarez on their own, but who, being older, might be able to manage and eventually join them. So they sit in front of you and weep, and you tell them how incredibly sorry you are that they are suffering this. You give them the list of pro-bono legal groups around the country and encourage them to contact them, but you don\u2019t know if there\u2019s anything anyone can do, and you don\u2019t know if someone that devastated can even take in information like that. So you sit. And you just be there.<\/span><\/p>\n The second separated person we learned about was the 72-year-old father of one of our guests. The man has prostate issues and high blood pressure, and of course they confiscate all medications when they take people into detention, so his daughter was worried about that, too. Our guest didn\u2019t want to make travel arrangements to join their family sponsors because she wanted to wait until she was reunited with her father. Her kids and husband were at our hospitality center. She was convinced that her father could not still be in detention because surely they wouldn\u2019t do that to an older man with health concerns, right? We tried to be gentle as we told her that actually, yes, they would. They often don\u2019t allow the grandparents of the kids to stay, just the parents.<\/span><\/p>\n She thought he might be at a shelter like ours now, and she wondered if we could find out where he is. But all of the area hospitality centers for migrants and asylum seekers use the same system we do, where they call the sponsoring friend or family member. So if he was at one of them, her family in the U.S. would have heard from them by now so they could make his travel arrangements. She told us that her dad had talked to her sister, in fact. But no one had made or asked about any travel arrangements. Someone had called her and said, \u201cHere. I\u2019m giving the phone to your father. He\u2019s crying. Talk to him.\u201d And then her father had cried on the phone for a few minutes, and then the phone call ended. So that couldn\u2019t have been one of the hospitality centers in our network. But she said it couldn\u2019t have been a detention center because they tried to call the number back and got a private person\u2019s number, and no one answered it. It sounds like one of the workers at the detention center felt some compassion for this elderly man and used his personal phone to let him call his daughter. That probably breaks all kinds of rules, but it certainly intrigued us as a possibility. Someone on the inside trying to be humane? What would it be like to have to enforce these separation policies as your job? What would it have been like for a daughter to get a call like that from her father? And will either of these sisters see their father again?<\/span><\/p>\n That family had another mystery connected with them. We have gotten several calls from a guy asking for them and offering to drive them to Florida, for a fee. He also offered to drive any Cubans staying with us to Florida (only Cubans). The sister in Florida, who\u2019s sponsoring them, has never heard of this guy and has no idea how he knew them by name and knew to call us to ask for them. She\u2019s alarmed. So are we. The family members staying with us have never heard of him, either. He called back again today. We put a notice up on one of the bulletin boards we use to post travel slips that no one should give any information to this guy about any of our guests. He might be just a concerned person who genuinely wants to help\u2014or he might be trafficker. The whole thing has all of us unsettled.<\/span><\/p>\n One of the volunteers here, Kim, is a first-grade teacher and relates really well to the kids even though she speaks hardly any Spanish. She bought one of those bottles of bubbles that you blow. It was a big hit. I mean, a REALLY big hit. A lot of the little kids have come up to us volunteers today, hours later, asking for the \u201cbubble lady.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I had some fun today with a little girl who was sitting with her family in one of the small rooms in which we do the phone calls to the sponsors. The room had been decorated with pictures of animals taken from a wall calendar or something. She was touching each picture and naming the animal in it and we were saying the animal names together. Until she got to one and turned to me, totally mystified, and said, \u201cWhat\u2019s <\/span>this<\/span><\/i>?\u201d And I realized I had no idea how to say \u201cmanatee\u201d in Spanish. I told her the name in English and told her I didn\u2019t know how to say it in Spanish. She repeated the word a couple times and told me she\u2019s going to learn English.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n And so it goes. A day of sitting with grief-stricken people afraid for their loved ones\u2019 lives, manatees, and the bubble lady. It feels surreal that all of this could be part of one day.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Such an easy matter for us to cross the U.S. border (other than traffic). So much effort for all the migrants and asylum seekers.<\/p><\/div>\n We had quite the day today in Juarez. Joe asked to come with us, and we were glad to have him. Joe just finished his sophomore year at Saint Louis University and is majoring in physics and philosophy. He\u2019s here as a volunteer all summer. The three of us first had breakfast at Denny’s to kind of get on the same page about what our plans and goals were, and some ground rules, such as that if any one of us is not comfortable with a place or a course of action, we would stop and not do it, and that we would be open to whatever seemed to unfold, and that our goal was simply to learn what we could about what was happening with the migrant crisis on the other side of the border.<\/span><\/p>\n Without any assistance of a phone or GPS (both not working in Mexico), we managed to find our way to Casa del Migrante, which I’d read about online. It’s a diocesan shelter (and it looked quite nice) for migrants. They have tight security there, as they should. (Migrants are in acute danger of becoming victims of trafficking.) We talked outside the gate with a woman who was coming by to volunteer, and then someone went and got someone to talk to us. We explained that we were volunteers at a shelter helping migrants in El Paso, and we’d been hearing about many more people being dropped off in Juarez. We all had the day off, so we decided to come and learn more. She told us where the Mexican border people usually drop people off (at a couple specific offices\/places just over the bridges) and what they could most use for their work (underwear, both men’s and women’s) and gave us an email to contact if people want to volunteer to help. While we were there, some American lawyers came by for a weekly talk or meeting they did on how the process works to apply for asylum here. We were glad to know they were doing that.<\/span><\/p>\n Then we headed to the downtown area, since the woman at the Casa del Migrante said most of the shelters for migrants are downtown in the churches. While we were there, we checked out the cathedral, and as we left there, we were actually approached by a guy who said he’d been deported from the U.S. that morning at 6 and hadn’t eaten. Could we help him and his two brothers eat? We took them to Wendy’s for lunch\u2014since we didn’t have any pesos and we thought Wendy’s looked more likely than the other places around to accept credit cards. So we sat and ate with them and asked them about what they had experienced, if they didn’t mind talking about it. They didn’t. They had been headed to Kansas, where they’d heard about a center that helps immigrants, but they got arrested and were detained for a month, although they were glad they hadn’t been separated, at least. They were told that they had been entered in the system (photos, etc.) and that if they entered again within 5 years, they would be imprisoned for 3-6 years. They were hardly given any food in detention. Very little every day.<\/span><\/p>\n The bus that dropped them off at the bridge that morning in Juarez had people on it from lots of countries, including Cuba. The Cubans are able to apply for political asylum, but Mexicans can’t. They said there are LOTS of people at the bridge. There were people there before they arrived. They were heading home, which was a town in the same province as Ciudad Juarez, about 8 hours away. The people at the diocesan office at the cathedral had told them there were trucks leaving for their town at Monument Square around 7, and for about $20 each, the truck drivers would take them. (Did we have any work they could do?) They did not know what the people from Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador who were on their deportation bus were going to do. They had nothing. We asked if anyone is helping the people being deported with food or anything, and they said there were some Christian Brothers who came and gave out food, and also just different people from Juarez. They had people form a line. These guys had gotten there later than most, and there wasn’t any left, though.<\/span><\/p>\n While we were sitting in Wendy’s, another customer came up and said she wanted to give them money for their travel back home to their kids. We asked how she knew, and it turned out that they had approached her back at the cathedral before us (she’d brushed them off then, apparently), and then they’d all ended up in the same Wendy’s together. So she gave them enough pesos for two of the bus rides. We decided to give the ~$20 for the third one, and we found an ATM so we could get pesos and do that. We also gave them what was left of our own bottles of water that we got at Wendy’s. They were incredibly grateful and kept asking God to bless us. I told them that God had already blessed us plenty and there was really no reason that we should have such good lives and these guys shouldn’t.<\/span><\/p>\n We also went to the market just off the cathedral, just because I like to explore markets when I travel, and my wonderful travel companions were up for it. There were both indoor and outdoor sections of the market, with the usual fascinating and eclectic combo of produce, ceramics, plastic statues of Jesus and various other figures, luchadores action figures and masks, small animals, herbs with signs promising all kinds of medicinal benefits, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n It took us FOREVER to find our way back to a bridge to come back to the U.S. because the tourist map we scored at the travel agency (one of many places we stopped to ask directions) didn\u2019t designate one-way streets (our apologies to all the drivers we freaked out by going the wrong direction somewhere!), and there were a lot of roads cut off with construction or something. We felt so jubilant and accomplished to find ourselves finally in the long line of cars going for one of the bridges (we didn\u2019t even care which one we crossed at, by that point). Since we\u2019d bought nothing other than the lunches at Wendy\u2019s, crossing back over was so easy for us, other than waiting in traffic at the bridge. The contrast between the ease of our arrival in the U.S. and the dangers faced by everyone we\u2019ve been working with in order to cross that border was striking.<\/span><\/p>\n Tomorrow Sister Pam and Joe are meeting at 4 a.m. to go back over to Juarez to try to check out the scene when these deportation bus drop-offs take place. I told them I don’t feel up for that (physically and also emotionally, I suspect), but that if they do that and then decide to go back and bring food or something another day, I’d be up for that. Sister Pam knows someone who wanted to donate to precisely this kind of effort, so she has access to some funds for this if they can find out exactly where to go. (We have a pretty good idea from what the people at the Casa del Migrante told us and then these guys we met, too.)<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A girl from Honduras drew this for me as I helped her mother. \u201cDios es amor.\u201d “A gift from God.”<\/p><\/div>\n Sister Pam texted me and asked if I wanted to go to Juarez tomorrow to check out what\u2019s going on down there. Border Patrol or Homeland Security or whomever does these things has been arresting just as many people, but numbers in our shelters have been way down, so everyone\u2019s been wondering where these people are. We think they\u2019re being diverted to other U.S. places and also bused across the Mexican border into Juarez as part of this awful \u201cremain in Mexico\u201d policy, but we really don\u2019t have a sense of things. Am I interested in going to Juarez? Hell, yes! We agreed to touch base to plan this later today at the site.<\/span><\/p>\n The big \u201cOh God\u201d thing that came up today was that one of the local volunteers who\u2019s been coming to help three days a week for the past year alerted us to an issue with the papers from Homeland Security that people are coming with. I don’t always look at those papers when I\u2019m working with someone because so often things on them are inaccurate anyway, and I just ask people all the information we need (name and sponsor\u2019s address, full names of people traveling, and their birth dates, etc.). But we\u2019re now seeing different-looking papers than when I started doing this (not all that long ago!). The new paperwork doesn\u2019t contain any photos of them. Which means it can\u2019t be used to get on a plane. So when we call to tell their family members that they\u2019re here and that we need them to purchase tickets to get them the rest of the way, we have to tell the relatives of anyone who has this kind of paperwork (the other kind, with photos, is still in circulation, too) that the travel can only be by bus (or train, but that\u2019s rare). So I had to tell this poor woman with little kids in tow, who was expecting to be traveling somewhere up north by plane, that it would have to be by bus. But apparently there have been cases where we\u2019ve taken someone to the airport for a flight, and they\u2019ve been turned away because of the lack of a photo ID. So this is important.<\/span><\/p>\n Speaking of God, though, God seemed to be a major theme of the day. When I arrived at the shelter, Joe (one of the shift coordinators) asked if I minded sitting outside in the little hut that\u2019s at the gated entrance way to the warehouse. My mission: If any press people come with cameras, chase them away. If any new volunteers come, or people with donations, show them where to go. If any new buses with migrants and asylum seekers come, call the phone number of the shift coordinator and alert that person that we have a new bus, and then unlock the gate for the bus to come around the building. And if we got any new buses, I\u2019d be off guard hut duty and be needed for phone calls, so come back inside. He asked me to sit there for a couple hours and offered to bring a book if I wanted. There were a couple book possibilities, and I opted for the one Joe said he is reading now, too: <\/span>Following Christ in a Consumer Society<\/span><\/i>. It seemed relevant to my realization in Las Cruces that I really didn\u2019t need anymore place mats or handbags. It was good enough for me to write the title down and then get it on my Kindle once I came back to my friends\u2019 digs.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n We did get another bus eventually, so I went back inside to do phones. I typically invite the next family into the phone room and welcome them and just acknowledge that it\u2019s been a long and hard trip, huh? Then I explain what we\u2019re going to do here and that the next stop is one where they\u2019ll get a bag of things like toothpaste and shampoo, just so they know what\u2019s happening, so everything doesn\u2019t feel all unexpected and strange. As I started this conversation with one person, she looked me straight in the eye, and she said, \u201cThe trip was not just long; it was extremely dangerous. I swear to you that the only reason we even arrived was by pure grace of God.\u201d And that she just needs to thank God for her and her children\u2019s safety. I told her that we have a little chapel on site that\u2019s been set up in one of the rooms between the main office and the dining room, if she\u2019s interested. She kind of laughed and said, \u201cSeriously?! Yes, I am interested!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Then later two of the little girls from Honduras who\u2019d been at our coloring table as I talked with their mom presented me with drawings they had made, as a gift for me. One of them has a heart with wings on the side of it and it says \u201cDios es amor.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 “God is love.” I will treasure them forever and will frame at least that one, although I expect that every time I look at it, I will worry about them and wonder what happened to them. Asylum cases are hard to win. Most of these people will be deported back to these countries (including Honduras) where Doctors Without Borders has said conditions are similar to what they normally see in war zones. God, please protect these kids.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A drawing by a young person in detention at the Tornillo detenction center, part of the “Uncaged Art” exhibit at the University of Texas\u2013El Paso\u2019s Centennial Museum.<\/p><\/div>\n This entry will span the highlights of the past few days, which have been kind of a blur. I\u2019ve arrived home (i.e. my friend\u2019s place) each night exhausted and without much energy to write anything. Today I found myself home a little earlier than usual because they needed someone to take a woman and her 13-year-old son to the bus station, and it\u2019s on my way home and was close to the end of my shift, so it didn\u2019t make sense for me to return to the shelter after that. More on the bus station run later.<\/span><\/p>\n Day 7 was my day off, so my friend and I went to an exhibit at the University of Texas\u2013El Paso\u2019s Centennial Museum of art done by young people, aged 13-17, who were in detention at the Tornillo detention center near here. It was open from June 2018 to January 2019. The exhibit, called Uncaged Art<\/em>, included drawings, paintings, and handicrafts that were produced when a couple teachers were allowed in to Tornillo to provide activities for the students. The kids\u2019 work put me in a weird mood, joyful and celebratory to behold such resilience and creativity and sheer beauty, and fury and anger at their detention in the first place. The exhibit included some information on art produced by kids in one of the Nazi camps, and it explored common themes in the art from the two camps, like ways the art envisioned transcendence of the imprisonment. Now they\u2019re not allowing teachers or art in the camps, so kids in detention don\u2019t have access to this kind of expression. I hope they do prove as resilient as their art hinted because they have been brutalized by our system and by the violence and extreme poverty in their countries of origin. Yesterday I read a recent report by Doctors Without Borders, which said that the conditions they are seeing in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are ones they typically only see in war zones. I have no prior experience doing anything like this, but the stories I\u2019ve heard here have struck me as absolutely horrific. I can\u2019t imagine staying somewhere where things were as bad as I\u2019ve been hearing; no wonder they\u2019re leaving. It\u2019s sobering that Doctors Without Borders folks are comparing the situation to war zones because those people know what they\u2019re talking about.<\/span><\/p>\n Another drawing in the “Uncaged Art” exhibit at the University of Texas\u2013El Paso\u2019s Centennial Museum.<\/p><\/div>\n Then my friend and I went to Las Cruces, to the old town there, and just walked around a little and had lunch at a historic restaurant and browsed in shops and then spent time on different work-related things on our laptops in a coffee shop. We went in to exactly one shop in the historic district of the city, and it was full of handcrafted, fair trade items, many of which I really liked. Normally I have a soft spot for such things, and I spent a lot of time admiring and considering buying a woven handbag, some place mats, and a small Nativity set from Peru in which the figures are skeletons, from the Day of the Dead tradition. Back in the old days, before a couple weeks ago, I probably would have spent some money there. But I kept wondering what right I have to own more placements\u2014even though these were beautiful and way better than the chain store ones I now own\u2014or yet another Nativity set (for a while I actively collected these from different cultures) when the people I\u2019ve been meeting every day for the past week have basically nothing and are fleeing for their lives. Really, I should be downscaling my expenditures so I can divert more money to helping people like them. I wonder what other ways the experience of being here will change me.<\/span><\/p>\n There is something surreal about stepping away from the grief and trauma and just chaos of the world of the migrants and asylum seekers and walking back into the \u201cnormal world\u201d (or my normal, anyway), which involves browsing around museums and lingering over coffee with a friend. It messes with your sense of reality because it doesn\u2019t seem possible that both worlds can be real, or at least not so close to each other, and both of them experienced by one person within a 24-hour period. It\u2019s like I\u2019m inhabiting two parallel universes at the same time. It was great to spend this time with my friend, but my thoughts also kept drifting throughout the day to Maria and others I\u2019ve met. I wonder how they are faring and sent up good wishes for them as I browsed the handwoven handbags. And felt weird about having both of those worlds in my head.<\/span><\/p>\n Back at the shelter over the past few days, I\u2019ve worked the phones a lot. The busiest times for phones are when an ICE bus arrives with a new group of people. After meeting with another volunteer for intake paperwork (used in making transportation arrangements for our guests to join their sponsors, usually family members), the \u201cphone people\u201d meet with them and call their sponsors. You explain that you\u2019re here in this shelter in El Paso with So-and-So, and that you understand they are the person who will be buying their bus or plane tickets so they can travel to [their destination]. You explain that we take people to the bus stations and airports, and in order to do that, we need all the information, such as the airline or bus company, date and time of departure, and the confirmation code. Will they please make the reservations and then call this number back with the info? If they have no questions after you explain everything, you pass the phone to their loved one so they can talk a little while, and the next station they visit upon arrival is a little room where Brittany gives them a little bag full of items like toothpaste. After the initial round of calls, the paperwork goes into the main office on bulletin boards by alphabet so that when people\u2019s relatives call back, we can easily find the family\u2019s slip and write in the travel details.<\/span><\/p>\n As I have described it, it sounds pretty simple. But it isn\u2019t. Sometimes the person in front of you cries silent tears through all this because her husband is still in detention and she doesn\u2019t know if she will ever see him again. Sometimes the intake form notes (in the section on health issues) that the 30-year-old woman you are speaking with has high blood pressure, but Border Patrol took away her meds, and she tells you she\u2019s not feeling very well right now, so you end up placing a call to Dr. G., a local bilingual doctor who\u2019s kind of on call for the shelter\u2019s needs (pro bono, I think), who tells you to have a volunteer drive her to his nearby office. Sometimes you go running out the door of the phone call room to chase a 2-year-old who\u2019s bolted off and is halfway across the warehouse before you catch him and bring him back to his mom, who\u2019s nursing an infant. Sometimes you have to speak really slowly because the indigenous Guatemalan you are meeting with is a lot more comfortable speaking Quich\u00e9 than Spanish. When you pass the phone to one of the Guatemalans to speak to their sponsoring family member, almost always the conversation will be in Quich\u00e9.<\/span><\/p>\n The family and friends that you speak with by phone sometimes cry as they tell you how grateful they are to you for helping their family members. You commiserate with them about how awful this situation is and share the hope that someday, we will have no need for people to embark on the dangerous flight from their countries and no need for shelters like this one. Some of them speak English, tell you they\u2019re going online right now to look for tickets, and ask you for the airport code for the El Paso airport. Others seem bewildered by the process and need a lot of coaching and explanation. They tell you they don\u2019t know how to use a computer, and you realize that you don\u2019t actually know a good way to price shop for plane tickets without a computer. You give them airlines\u2019 phone numbers (from the laminated list on the table) and tell them to call around and ask about prices because they can vary a lot, and they seem surprised to hear that. They tell you their kid knows how to use a computer, and you tell them to tell their kid to try Kayak.<\/span><\/p>\n Yesterday I was on the phone for probably a good half hour with a guy who had called us back really worried because he\u2019d bought plane tickets for his niece and her family, and then he realized he\u2019d made the reservations with the wrong birthdate for his niece. So he was calling to get his niece to tell them at the airport and get the ticket changed because they\u2019d told him he couldn\u2019t change the ticket without paying more. I told him that his niece wouldn\u2019t be able to change a ticket any more easily, and she\u2019d already left for the airport, but let\u2019s just wait and see if the check-in people notice it because I bet they wouldn\u2019t check her documents that carefully. He wanted to know if she could then get stuck in Dallas in the airport because they would discover the discrepancy then and not let her board the next plane. I said no, if they don\u2019t notice it in El Paso before printing out the boarding passes, she\u2019d be good to go for the rest of the trip. So I\u2019d wait and see what happens and not buy another ticket and not bring anyone\u2019s attention to it at the airport. And he wondered what would happen if they did realize that her birth date was wrong and didn\u2019t let her board the plane\u2014would that mean he also had to buy all new tickets for her husband and kids? No. But it took a lot of convincing and explaining to allay his fears. Since we didn\u2019t hear anything else about it, I assume all was well and no one noticed that the birthdate on her ticket didn\u2019t match the one on her papers from ICE.<\/span><\/p>\n Usually we group people together who have a flight or bus more or less around the same time of day, and we do group departures for the airport or bus station. Yesterday when I was on phone duty we got a call from a guy who said that he bought a bus ticket for his wife and 2-year-old son for today and had called before to give the details, but they were at the bus station now, a day too early. (Oh, God. Not sure how that happened.) She had asked to borrow someone\u2019s phone and then called her husband, who called us at the number he had from calling back with the ticket details. So I went to go pick her up. Good thing I thought to bring the GPS with me here because it\u2019s come in handy. I apologized for not having a car seat for the child. She didn\u2019t know what I was talking about.<\/span><\/p>\n My run to the bus stop today was for a woman and her 13-year-old son. We learned about their departure with less notice than usual, so they weren\u2019t with a group departure. The bus station is about 20 minutes away. We chatted about the scenery going by, and she commented about how flat El Paso is. El Paso doesn\u2019t strike my Midwestern self as flat. There\u2019s a big ridge of mountains that was straight ahead, and the road we were on was pretty hilly. But this Indigenous woman was probably from the Guatemalan highlands, and her observation reminded me of the pictures I’ve seen of that region. And yeah, El Paso would strike someone from there as flat! I told her that she would see much flatter land than this in her journey to Indiana, and she was excited to learn that she\u2019d see huge fields of wheat and corn. She commented on how big the houses are here compared to back home, and I said yes, but these buildings here aren\u2019t actually houses\u2014they\u2019re stores (like Kohl\u2019s). When we got to the bus station, the agent printed out the tickets and asked the woman to sign for receipt. She said she didn\u2019t know how to sign her name, and the agent said just to put an X then. Her son explained that his mother didn\u2019t know how to write at all, even an X, but that he could do it. So he did.<\/span><\/p>\n We got the tickets and learned where they board and at what time. There will be four buses between here and Indiana, God help them. Just the first one, to Dallas, was 12 hours or so. The tickets came printed out in a huge line, all attached together with an itinerary at the end of it. I sat with them and explained the itinerary and wrote in Spanish (so the son could read it) the words for \u201carrival,\u201d \u201cdeparture,\u201d and \u201clength of stop.\u201d I circled the cities where they\u2019d be changing buses (the ones that required a new ticket) and explained that at all the other stops they wouldn\u2019t be getting off, just stopping so other people could get on. I told them that the water is potable in all the bathrooms, so they should keep filling the water bottle they had with them from the shelter and would not need to buy any more water. I showed them the screen on which the departures are listed with the times and gates (and explained gates\u2014and said that I think sometimes they might be letters and sometimes they are numbered) and told them that there would be something like this in all the cities in which they had to make a transfer and to look for it when they arrived at the station. And to ask people as needed because there are nasty people and kind people everywhere, and a lot of people in this country who speak Spanish. The woman looked pretty apprehensive about all this, but her son seemed to get it all and to realize that he was going to have to manage this. He looked proud and serious when I told her playfully to just consult with her son. Then I hoped that hadn\u2019t been offensive to her culturally somehow.<\/span><\/p>\n He\u2019s 13 and very reserved. I\u2019ve found that in general the kids around that age and older are quiet and wary and just taking all of this in. They\u2019re old enough to know how screwed up all of this is, how dangerous the trip was, and how precarious their lives are. They probably also realize that their parents chose to make this dangerous trip because of them. The parents sometimes tell me that they left because the gangs were threatening to rape their daughter or to kill their son unless he joined them. The younger the kid is, the less he or she seems affected by all of this. I\u2019m sure they must be, on some deeper level, but it always surprises me to be sitting with a parent and little kids and see the little kids seeming bright-eyed and curious and excited and happy. They play with any object around and sit with other kids happily coloring at our big coloring book table. Babies get excited if you give them a bright pink sticky note to play with while you talk travel arrangements with the parent. Yesterday a group of preteen boys (who at least aren\u2019t being killed or recruited into a murdering gang while they\u2019re in our shelter) had a soccer game going. From what I can tell, soccer balls have a kind of spiritual healing power.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Another day with no buses from ICE. After today\u2019s departures, we were down to only 10 guests for dinner tonight. So we weren\u2019t surprised to learn that Annunciation House will be closing our site\u2014possibly temporarily and possibly forever, depending on how things go\u2014in the near future. Probably as soon as the people currently staying with us depart. So we were told to \u201cgive away the store\u201d by feeling free to give out more than 3 items of clothing from the ropa room, give every kid a toy or two to play with while they\u2019re here (usually they get one only when they leave in case we run out and then a bunch of kids see other kids getting toys and they are not given one themselves), etc. Tomorrow we will learn more about whether we will completely pack up all our supplies (medical supplies, sandwich-making, basic essentials, serving utensils, water bottles, etc.) and move them out of the space in this hotel that they\u2019ve been renting for the shelter, or if they\u2019ll be leaving everything there for now but maybe releasing the rooms the guests have been staying in. Those of us volunteers whose time here is not ending will likely be assigned to other sites run by Annunciation House. I hope so. I hope there\u2019s a need for us and they don\u2019t have so many volunteers that they don\u2019t know what to do with us. If that\u2019s the case, I might see if I can be of help across the border in Ciudad Juarez, where more and more people are being kept as they await their hearings. The humanitarian groups must be overwhelmed down there.<\/span><\/p>\n Sometime around 1 pm or so today, Maria came to the office and was distraught once again because she had learned (through a lawyer\u2019s inquiries? we\u2019re not sure) that her three daughters had been deported and were in Mexico, and they were at a center there where they could stay only one day, and they had no money or anything. And then she thought they would be returned to Honduras, where they would be raped and murdered. She was considering going and finding them in Juarez and then coming across the border again with them and hoping that this time it would work and she\u2019d be able to enter with all of them. We didn\u2019t like the sound of that. Too risky. We thought she\u2019d be better off going to Florida as planned and then finding a pro-bono lawyer who does immigration law and working from there. But that meant a big emotional hit for us to hear about this development, too.<\/span><\/p>\n By 3 pm or so, we\u2019d learned that they were in Juarez, which is just across the border. They\u2019ve been given court dates in August and November for their asylum cases. They\u2019ve been taken in by a Catholic church in Juarez, and she even was able to talk to one of her daughters, who told her not to worry about them because they were safe and had just been taken out to a restaurant to eat, and they are together now, and also together with some other family members who\u2019d been in their group.<\/span><\/p>\n Maria and her family left our shelter at around 4 pm today for Florida. They are supposed to arrive on Saturday morning. When I was discussing with them how long this bus trip was going to be, they said they\u2019d already had two long bus trips of 15 and 12 hours to get to the border here, and they thought they could handle it. Maria\u2019s husband then chimed in and said that he\u2019d had to stand for those entire trips because they were only giving the seats to women and children. So at least I got to reassure him that he would be able to have a seat on this trip. He was so relieved. There is that, I guess.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s overwhelming to be close to this horrible situation, even close enough to hear about it. I can\u2019t imagine how Maria is still on her feet, and I told her that. She said she\u2019s not sure. And that the worst part of all this is that she feels so helpless about not being able to help her daughters. But she was so happy to learn today, after being freshly terrified for them earlier this afternoon, that at least for the time being, they are safe and well and together.<\/span><\/p>\n I am still worried about how this will go. Sexual assaults used to be grounds for asylum \u2013 before Jeff Sessions\u2019 tenure as Attorney General. Now it\u2019s not enough to be raped; you have to have been raped because of your religious or political beliefs in order for it to count. But I think if she can document that she and her family would be targeted because of her report of the first rape, that might improve their chances. But what do I know?<\/span><\/p>\n I guess one thing I know is that I will never forget Maria and I will always wonder what happened to her and her family.<\/span><\/p>\n Tomorrow I have the day off to spend with my friend Matt, with whom I\u2019m staying. Matt will be leaving on Tuesday, and we wanted to have some time to do some things in the area, so the site coordinator said I should take the day off. Especially because we have so few people anyway. Either she or the overall volunteer coordinator for A.H. will let me know tomorrow what will happen after that.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It feels like Santa came! “Geri’s toolkit” was getting low on Pedialyte, and some people stopped by and asked what we need, so we told them Pedialyte and they came back with this loot.<\/p><\/div>\n Today was an eerily slow day. We didn\u2019t get a bus from ICE, and I think none of the sites did. Something weird is going on. We know they\u2019re packed. There is a rumor that they\u2019re planning to release a whole lot of people on Saturday, \u201csaving them up\u201d for days in order to release them all at once, and then alert the media to come and film the utter chaos this causes so they can use it to bolster the narrative of some dangerous crisis going on. This seems especially cruel and devious, but given what we\u2019re hearing and seeing, it also sounds plausible. The people coming here are FLEEING danger, and the only crisis is the humanitarian one about how they\u2019re being treated. Rumors are interesting, and there are two parts to this one: that we\u2019re going to get slammed on Saturday and that this is intentional. Neither one of these came through official channels in Annunciation House leadership. So we\u2019ll see. Could be nothing. We ended the day with only 19 families staying with us.<\/span><\/p>\n The heat wasn\u2019t as bad as anticipated, so Geri\u2019s fears didn\u2019t come to pass. Which is good! This gave her more time to tend the poor woman who\u2019s having morning sickness in the midst of this madness and can\u2019t keep any food down.<\/span><\/p>\n Since we didn\u2019t have a rush of intakes from a bus, we were able to do a lot of organizing and cleaning. Both the main office area and the dining area got thoroughly vacuumed (carpeted sections) and mopped (floor sections), and all the folding chairs washed down. Some people who showed up yesterday wanting to help were given a shopping wish list, and they returned with a lot of items that we took out of their individual packages and put in our bins and bags that we grab from when assembling the baggies of essentials (like toothbrushes). Some volunteers who got moved to our site from another one that they temporarily shuttered because of this week\u2019s low numbers don\u2019t speak Spanish, but they\u2019ve been terrific about doing anything that needs doing around here. They did the vacuuming and went around to all the rooms that are empty now and took out any items that had been left behind. Michael, one of the college students here, sat with a group of little kids as they colored, and he propped up his phone on something at the table so they could watch cartoons (Tom and Jerry in Spanish).<\/span><\/p>\n The lawyer who was supposed to come and get Maria and her family did not show up, but she and her family are leaving here tomorrow afternoon for their bus ride to Florida. She hopes the lawyer comes in the morning so she can meet with her, but she\u2019s confident that they will have the assistance of a lawyer because her family is on it in Florida, too, so she will still leave here even if she hasn\u2019t seen that lawyer. We also send them off with a bag of food for the trip and a handout of organizations all over the country with lawyers who work on these cases (Maine\u2019s Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project<\/a> is on the list). Two of the three adult daughters she\u2019s so worried about are still together, but the other one has been separated from those two. But their father, who\u2019s in Florida and arranging their transportation, has been contacted about all of them (which is how she knows this), to verify that he will sponsor them, etc. So she knows they\u2019re still in the process. She will head to Florida without them and she feels relieved to know that when they are released, they will come to a shelter like ours \u2013 either ours or another one. I hope so. I hope they don\u2019t release them somewhere else in the country where the situation on the ground is not as well set up for this. Since El Paso\u2019s numbers in the shelters right now are low, it would make sense to bring them to a local shelter. But nothing about any of this makes any sense.<\/span><\/p>\n Some significant energy was spent today trying to figure out what to do with all the leftover food that we have. The people of El Paso have been amazingly supportive of all these shelters, including providing lunch and dinner for about 700 people a day who are in these shelters. Different churches and other faith communities, restaurants, families, and other groups sign up to provide these meals. But since our numbers have been lower than usual, the food has been way more than we can use in a single meal. We managed to get it all into the fridge somehow and will use it for breakfasts (which we always do) and just hope that we get more buses in in the next few days. Usually when a new group arrives, we feed them when they get here because they don\u2019t get much food in detention, and they\u2019re usually hungry.<\/span><\/p>\n I got to talk with more of the volunteers, including Noemi, a local young woman who works in healthcare advocacy as a navigator. Originally from Mexico and now living in El Paso, she comes by Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings and is really good at handling the phone calls that come in as relatives call back to give us the info on their loved ones\u2019 trip details. She\u2019s delightful.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.suitupmaine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/coloring-wall-1.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1\")
DAY 17<\/span><\/h3>\n
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DAY 16<\/span><\/h3>\n
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DAY 15<\/span><\/h3>\n
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DAY 14<\/span><\/h3>\n
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DAY 13<\/span><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.suitupmaine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/anne-marie-1.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1\")
DAY 12<\/span><\/h3>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.suitupmaine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/uncaged-art-exhibit-2.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1\")
DAYS 7-11<\/span><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.suitupmaine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/uncaged-art-exhibit-1.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1\")
DAY 6<\/span><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.suitupmaine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/pedialyte.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1\")
DAY 5<\/span><\/h3>\n