
Looking for an easy, yet very meaningful hands-on mission project for your children, youth or family to do during this pandemic time of all-too-much time at home or in “virtual reality”?
This project is simple but very meaningful because it will provide some 5000 asylum seekers (many of whom are children) in detainment at Eloy Detention Center in Eloy, Arizona with the only Christmas present they are going to receive.
This project is undertaken in partnership with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project which provides free legal and social services for adults and children in immigration. FIRRP hopes that every detainee will receive a greeting! They successfully achieved their goal last year. We are blessed to be able to help them make their goal this year!
This project is the direct application of the maxim “it’s the thought that counts” because in addition to a holiday greeting and lots of cheerful images you are asked to include the message (in Spanish):” Do not be discouraged. You are not forgotten or “No se desanime. No esta olvidado.!” Before you begin, please note, that the flat, unsealed cards and envelopes must be sent to the person collecting the cards for us before the middle of November: Karen Kohl, 2130 Leisure World, Mesa, AZ 85206.
How To Get Started:
REPORT: CHRISTMAS CARDS FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS SUCCESS
Dear 2020 Asylum Seekers Christmas Card Project Participants,
Selena Seesecker and Karen Kohl
Thank you so much for your contribution to the Christmas Card Project for Asylum Seekers at the Eloy Detention Center in Eloy, Arizona! Our personal Arizona based “card gatherer,” Karen Kohl, who has been deeply involved with asylum seekers for several years wants us to know that the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project – based in Tucson) annually seeks to distribute a hope-filled handwritten Christmas card to each of 5000 detainees at the Eloy Center.
Thanks to a number of Disciples youth groups and congregants Karen and her friend, Selena Seesecker, was able to collect almost 900 cards for detained asylum seekers. Each of your cards included handwritten cheerful, caring and hopeful messages (written in the detainees’ native language) which we feel sure will lift the spirits of these asylum seeking detainees as they await their court dates which determine their fate.
In case you didn’t know, the asylum seeking process is one which is totally legal, however, at this time it is sadly backed up and families must often wait for many months to learn whether they will be released into the care of family already living in the USA or be deported back to the countries from which they once fled, fearing the loss of their life and limb.
We hope that there will be fewer asylum seeker being detained next year, but whatever the numbers of detainees, we expect to run this project again next year. So…we invite you and your friends to save the fronts of this year’s Christmas cards so that we can send them out to asylum seeking detainees in the same manner again next year.
If you have any questions about this project or the work of volunteers such as Karen Kohl and other volunteers involved with the Florence Project please contact Rev. Dr. Sharon Stanley-Rea, sstanley@dhm.disciples.org