We have volunteered at CAME – Centro de Atención al Migrante Exodus, the migrant shelter in Agua Prieta, Sonora, MX – for over 10 years. With CAME’s staff and other volunteers, we’ve served more than 7,000 migrants. We knew most of them only in passing, but others – those who stayed at CAME for an extended time – became our friends. A few of them, after acceptance into the asylum process, spent their first night in the USA at our home in Douglas, Arizona.
At CAME, we encounter people in extreme poverty, traumatized by unimaginable persecution and violent oppression. We walk beside them for only a tiny part of their long, arduous journey. We offer them food, shelter, safety and – more importantly – compassion, respect, and opportunities for physical, emotional, and spiritual healing.
It is not easy to hear countless stories of how families can no longer survive by growing corn, or that someone’s child was kidnapped, or that a father was assassinated, or another was driven off his land.
It’s not easy to see the bullet scars on a child’s arm or feel the intense pain of a woman describing what she has endured and still fears.
But the horror of what migrants experience is far from being the whole story.
The people we meet at CAME have not let those things destroy them. They continue to live their lives – cooking and cleaning and washing. They have not yielded to the people who would hold them down or defeat them. Despite a hopeless situation, they still have hope.
At CAME, we see people who are carrying profound and intense pain rise above that to remember and celebrate the joy of being alive. We have parties to celebrate holidays, birthdays, weddings, and the birth of babies. People danced for hours after one wedding. One of the biggest celebrations happened when several families left CAME at the same time to go to Nogales, where they where they were being accepted into the asylum process – lots of laughter, tears, hugs, and kisses when they left.
People who can live like that have become our heroes.
- Pray for the lives of all those who have passed through the CAME shelter on the way to another life that they have found what they were seeking.
- Give thanks for all those who have accompanied these people on their journey.
