Eye-Opening First Day

Hello everyone!  My name is Ilona Regan, and I just graduated from Northbridge High.  I will be attending WPI in the fall, and plan to continue service work during my time there.  This is my fourth and final YNIA trip as a youth.  Since this is my fourth trip, I've fallen into a sort of routine with these trips.  You wake up early, arrive on your work site about 9 am, work for the day, leave the worksite around 4, and then have programs and prayer with the entire group of youth.  However, this year has been far from routine.

This week, I am working at Casa Alitas.  It is a two bathroom, five bedroom house where families can stay while they sort their paperwork after crossing the border.  Typically, people present themselves to Border Control, are processed by ICE, and then are dropped off at a bus station with no food, water, money, or method to contact their family member that is a U.S. citizen.  Casa Alitas was founded so that ICE can bring these people to a house where they can shower, change their clothes, and enjoy a meal rather than buy a bus ticket while dealing with a language barrier.

When we arrived in the morning, there were two families staying in the house.  One family consists of a mother and two-year-old daughter from the Congo.  The other family is from Cameroon and consists of a mother and twin infants about six months old, whose father was apprehended and detained after crossing the border, leaving the mother and children with Casa Alitas.  During the day my team and I played with the children, and started to plan and paint a mural of the Lady of Guadalupe.  In the afternoon, we received news that about eighteen families were processed by ICE and needed a place to stay.  However, the families that Casa Alitas would receive were not arriving until about five p.m., so YNIA would be off site for the processing.  However, when three new families arrived at Casa Alitas this evening, they needed extra hands.

A couple girls and I helped with the process of intake at Casa Alitas this evening.  The paperwork was intense, and the families only spoke Spanish.  Luckily, some of the youth and chaperones speak some Spanish, so we were able to help with the intake process and enable the families to feel more at home.  It is hard to fathom leaving your home country to arrive in a strange one, with the hopes of escaping poverty, only to be presented with a language barrier and a stack of papers to fill out in an alien language.  Although this is only the first day of service work here, it is safe to say that it has impacted me immensely.  In a single day, I was exposed to more cultures, policies, and ideas than I feel I ever have been.  The amount of information that has been presented to us is overwhelming, but I feel as though through hard work and prayer, we can stand in solidarity with those who are experiencing difficulties in their lives.