Stories from the Shelters:
SAPC EXPERIENCES WITH ASYLUM SEEKERS OVER THE SUMMER
- STORY ONE I wanted to take a moment to share a remarkable God story! My husband and I flew to see our son in Minneapolis two weeks ago. At the start of our journey, we missed our connecting flight in Dallas as our plane sat on the tarmac waiting for an other plane to leave the gate. After many customer service lines and deliberations on the best way to get to our destination, we were given a hotel voucher and the possibility of getting on a flight the next morning at 10:00 am as stand-by passengers. We headed outside the Dallas airport to wait for a shuttle to get to our hotel.
We waited in another long line at the hotel. It was getting late, and her little 2-year-old boy was so tired. She only had a backpack and a small travel bag. She reached into the travel bag and pulled out a peanut butter sandwich for her son. It dawned on me then that she might have been an asylum seeker. As I talked to her, it turned out she was an asylum seeker from Guatemala. She was on our flight from Tucson and also missed her connection to Chattanooga where her sponsor was living. She had no idea what to do to get a room using her voucher, how to use an elevator, how to get in her hotel room with the plastic card, how to get to her plane the next morning.
As we were standing there, a woman and her little boy came up trying to figure out what this small voucher in her hand meant for them. She spoke only Spanish, and as it happens, I speak Spanish too. I looked at her voucher and realized we were going to the same hotel. After waiting another hour, our shuttle arrived and we helped her get situated and stay with us as we traveled to the Holiday Inn Express.
With no cell phone or clock, we set up a wake up call for the next morning. I left to find Jay, and it turned out our rooms were right next to each other, making the next day much easier as we went down to breakfast and got on our shuttle to the airport all together. As we were driving, I couldn’t imagine how she would find her gate at the Dallas airport (I can barely navigate the Dallas airport) but we did it! Got her
through security, down a maze of moving sidewalks, escalators, and detours, and finally arrived at her gate. Also happened to find another woman going on her flight and asked her to make sure Alba and her son got on the flight to Chattanooga. I did text her sponsor later that night and made sure they arrived safely, and they did! This was so incredible. I had done some volunteering with my son-in-law’s youth group earlier in the summer at a local shelter for migrant guests and also at the monastery in Tucson. Alba and her son had stayed at that same monastery in Tucson and had all the paperwork that I had just learned about. She had her travel bag with snacks and toys for her little boy—the very same types of supplies that we had packed two weeks earlier. I can’t imagine what this young woman has been through. She and her little son had walked from Guatemala and had been on their journey for 30 days! I am so humbled and grateful that I got to be a tiny grain in her journey. I really felt God was apart of this crazy set of circumstances! - BY LYNN GUYOT