June 19, 2006

Our Bear Cares on the Columbia River

Friday I visited the Union Gospel Mission in Pasco. I had prearranged to meet my contact for the past year, Mark Heritage. The building, which is the old telephone company building, is clean and swept-up, but tightly secured so we had to ring a bell to be let in. We received a tour of the women's/children's shelter and the store rooms of donated clothes and supplies. We met the children you see in the first picture who, in this case, have been staying at the shelter. All the migrant workers staying there had their children out in the fields with them that day. The second picture shows the playroom for the children and the third picture shows some of the donations the workers can take from. There are three woman from a local church who have come every week to sort donations for the past 10 years. If donations come in dirty they take them home and launder them.

We learned that the majority of the migrant families are either Hispanic or Russian, with the Russian families having many children - up to 18! They come to the mission to get clothes, personal hygiene supplies and to take a shower. During the school year, they drop their kids off there to eat and shower and a bus picks them up and transports them to school.

In the mission donation room downstairs, each person is allowed six articles of clothing each month, so six shirts, six pairs of pants, etc. They can come back the next month for other clothing for as long as they are there. All of the clothing has been donated, nothing requires payment, and anything that will not be used by the mission is donated to another charity but never sold.

Meg Riley, Women's Shelter Director, is my contact for working with the migrant workers' children. She will be using our donation to purchase the school supplies the children will be needing in the fall. We will be in touch, but she plans on taking pictures of the children with the supplies that have been purchased for them, which may include a pair of shoes. They often get up to 45 children coming through in the fall and over a hundred through the course of a year.

They were very grateful and surprised by the donation and we will be in touch over the summer to see how things are going. One thing I want to be sure is understood. When people come to the shelter for help they must show legal documentation before the mission can help them. Every migrant worker they work with is in this country legally and trying very hard to make a living.

I asked them what they have the highest demand for but never have enough of - bras and shampoo and a new toy for each child at Christmas.

Stand by for more.

---

Gail Manahan is the Communications Manager for Cruise West. She is also a volunteer member of the Our Bear Cares Committee and our liaison for the Union Gospel Mission in Pasco, Washington. 

The Our Bear Cares Committee raises money by selling photo CD journals to our guests while they are traveling with us.  We are pleased to have distributed $2500 from our spring cruises on the Columbia River and British Columbia to the Union Gospel Mission.  As Gail mentioned, the funds will assist in their efforts to help children in need in the Tri-Cities area of Washington.   This is an ongoing relationship for us and we look forward to learning more about how we can make a difference in the lives of these families.

Other organizations that we support include the La Paz Orphanage in La Paz, Baja Sur, Mexico, an Embera Village in the Darien Jungle in Central America and native organizations in Alaska.

Posted by Gail on June 19, 2006 10:46 PM

---

TrackBacks

TrackBack Link for this entry
(Right-click on this link to copy the URL)

---

Comments