The Silver City Rotary Foundation has announced a $10,000 matching grant campaign to help immigrant shelters in the State of Chihuahua in Mexico.  

A local Rotarian has pledged to contribute up to $10,000 to this project if matching monies are given to the project from this community and its surrounding areas. The monies raised will be given to a not-for profit, Dormir es Poder, which will use the funds to pay for healthcare costs (both treatments and medicines) for migrants currently sheltering in Juarez, as well as for emergency relief such as basic food supplies, shelter, propane in the winter months, transportation, and other basic emergency needs.

When the Rotarian providing the monies to underwrite the grant challenge was asked what motivated him, he said he had been hearing about immigrant shelter needs at Silver City Rotary club meetings, and had recently visited a shelter and hospital in the Juarez area. “These programs are doing so many good things to help these immigrants,” he said.  “At the shelter I visited, I heard of a woman, the wife of the pastor at the Oasis Del Migrante Shelter in Juarez, who needed and could not afford a biopsy for a suspected malignant tumor.

The procedure would cost 4,000 pesos—but that’s just $200 in American dollars,” he noted. “When do you ever get a chance to do so much good for so little?” he asked. He also recounted an incident while he was at the shelter, when a woman there volunteered to braid his girlfriend’s hair. “Before the braiding was completed, another 25 women from the shelter had joined in and they were all talking and laughing and immensely enjoying the moment, the braiding of an American’s hair—after all some of them had been through just getting to the border! I was impressed and humbled. I feel honored to be able to do something to help these people,” he said.

Anyone wishing to know more about this challenge grant should contact Peter Falley at 575 519-4300. To make a matching fund donation, donors can send a check made out to the Silver City Rotary Foundation with the notation “Asylum Shelter Matching Fund” in the memo line and send that check to Silver City Rotary Foundation, P.O. Box 867, Silver City, NM, 88062. Alternatively, credit card payments can be made by going to foundation.silvercityrotary.org and clicking on the “Donate” button on the home page. When redirected to the PayPal page, the donor should choose the “Asylum Shelter Matching Fund” option for the donation. Donors can pay by credit card and need not be PayPal members.

Dormir es Poder, a 501 (c  (3), was started by another Silver City Rotarian, Doug Winter. When Winter first arrived in Silver City, he participated in a class in El Paso, which had participants walk over the border to Juarez one afternoon.  He was appalled to find dozens of people sleeping on the sidewalks while they awaited word about whether their request for shelter in the United States had been granted. He immediately started up Dormir es Poder, which means Sleep is Power in English. After handing out more than 500 sleeping pads, the non-profit recently switched its focus to helping migrants in the shelters. “I’ve talked to so many people in border shelters in the past three years,” says Winter, “and I’ve realized most of them are trying to escape real persecution in their home countries,” he says. “These are people who are looking for a place to raise their children where they can grow up with honor and dignity, and not look over their shoulders with fear every time someone calls out one of their names.”  

After hearing from Winter and others about what so many migrants had already gone through, members of the Silver City Rotary Club began to look for ways to help. They donated clothes and cash and other needed items to some of the shelters. For example, one of these Rotarians began accompanying Winter to some of the shelters and doing whatever he could to help out at the shelters, also donated $15,000 to Dormir es Poder, That Rotarian commented: “While some of our Rotarians have been moved by the happiness of the refugees, after all they have been through, I was moved by the sadness—especially in the children. They missed living in a home and experiencing that kind of family life.”  After a moment’s reflection, he added: “As the opportunities for immigrants to be admitted into the U.S. have now improved, immigrants are happier and more hopeful, but there is a second kind of sadness that I sense and that is the result of the sufferings they have endured in the form of emotional scarring.” He added, “The resulting damage from being robbed, beaten and raped is terrible, and the knowledge of some immigrants who knew others who died in a tractor/trailer vehicle headed for San Antonio that was then abandoned by the driver who left the bus locked and on the side of the road with no air conditioning--those immigrants find their dreams haunted night after night.”

Any Silver City Rotarian will be glad to take your matching fund donation and get it to the Silver City Rotary Foundation.