“It almost like refreshes you,” she said. Saturday’s "Posada Fronteriza" in El Paso gives her added strength. Assistant director Anna Franklin said running the shelter can sometimes be overwhelming. The El Paso Community Foundation has a page on their website that directs monetary donations to Vision in Action.īethel Orphanage has multiple ways to receive donations on their website. “Our electric bill alone is more than $1,000 per month.” “To be honest, we need money,” Galvan said.
He said he gets some government funding, but the shelter mostly survives off of private donations. They enrich me.”ĭaily care for each of his 120 inhabitants costs roughly $15 a day, Galvan said, without medication. “It’s a sea of imagination and I love to sit and talk with them. “We have here a fount of extraordinary minds,” Galvan said of his residents. Major news outlets including VICE, National Public Radio and the Toronto Star have produced profiles on Vision in Action. One former gang member, who arrived moribund when the shelter first opened in 1996, is now a licensed nurse who cares for the shelter tenants. Some have turned to art in an effort to recover and their work has been featured in U.S. Among them are those suffering from drug addiction, former convicts or severely traumatized victims of the drug violence that permeates the city. Residents range between the ages of 16 and 86. Galvan houses 120 people in his shelter, located along the mostly desolate Casas Grandes highway, not far from the Bethel Orphanage. “I minister to those discarded by the rest of society,” Galvan, an evangelic pastor, said. Vision in Action, describes itself as a “mental health sanctuary” for the thousands of Juárenes who suffer from untreated mental illness or trauma. Pastor gives a home to the "discarded"īefore landing in Jose Antonio Galvan’s non-profit shelter, his residents might have wandered the streets of Juárez destitute, psychologically injured and ignored. "On Christmas Day, we walk to the neighborhood houses and give to the kids in the neighborhoods," Franklin said. The same neighbors who got blankets from Bethel during February’s freeze, sometimes benefit from private school scholarships and backpacks that the shelter provides. The shelter employs single moms from the surrounding neighborhood in the southwest outskirts of Juárez, which Franklin said is inhabited by mostly factory workers living in poverty. "These are the kids that don't have anywhere to go," Franklin said. Most have known abuse and neglect from a very young age.
Franklin said most of them are delivered to the shelter by Mexico’s equivalent of child protective services. Forty-four kids, from diaper-aged toddlers to college-age teens and young adults, currently live there. The shelter is a privately-run Christian organization that, according to Franklin, is solely donor-funded. Franklin’s mother, Sandra Flatow, is the main fundraiser and is often traveling between the U.S.
ALL THE OTHER KIDS SONG FULL
Franklin, 34, is the assistant director of Bethel and lives there full time with her grandmother, who’s now 82 and a recent survivor of breast cancer. Now the shelter is run by three generations of women. I mean, it just happened,” said Valencia’s granddaughter, Anna Franklin. “She would just make extra food and then the kids just started living with her and she just started. Three generations of women run a Juárez shelterīethel Orphanage began four decades ago when Josefina Valencia, a Juárez university secretary, started feeding kids in her neighborhood. The cover fee will be a material or cash donation that will go to the Juárez orphanage or another nearby shelter for mentally ill adults called Vision in Action. A group of local bands will play a benefit concert at a central El Paso bar this Saturday with the goal of collecting toys and supplies for the Juárez kids.Īrtists like Carla Riojas, Fools Like Me, Hot Shot Kixxx and others will trade their usual repertoire of indie pop and rock for Christmas songs starting at 8 p.m. The shelter director recalls some of the most desperate neighbors burning furniture to keep warm.Īs winter approaches again, the children at Bethel Orphanage may be the ones receiving gifts from neighbors on the El Paso side of the U.S.-Mexico border. When temperatures fell below freezing and the electric grid went dark in parts of Texas and northern Mexico this February, a group of orphaned kids in Ciudad Juárez ventured outdoors to pass out blankets to neighbors living near their shelter. View Gallery: Photos: Celebration of Lights Parade 2021
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