Olga Sanchez's refuge of hope in the south

Ms. Sanchez has cared for more than 2,500 migrants who have been injured on their journeys to the US.

from the July 31, 2007 edition

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"In the past six months [Sanchez] has given me the chance to learn new things," he says. He sells beaded bracelets that he makes, too. "I didn't lose my head, it was my leg."

Sanchez says she draws inspiration from a near-death trauma of her own.

When Sanchez, the third of 11 children, was 7 years old, she says her intestine hemorrhaged and she spent three months in a coma. Doctors told her family to take her to their ranch to die. But when she arrived, she was craving a bean stew simmering on the stove. "I want to eat," she told her mother. Her mother replied, to no one in particular, "Oh, she is going to die, when they are going to die they want to eat."

Instead she woke up hungry, and ate. She says she believes the beans saved her life, but it was only the beginning of a lifetime of special diets and hospital visits.

During one such hospital stay 17 years ago, Sanchez met a couple from El Salvador that had fallen off a train in their attempt to get to the US: one had lost an arm, one a leg. It was impulsive, but she brought them to the home she shared with her husband and nursed back their wounds and spirits. Then she met more. Then she started scouring hospitals looking to bring amputees home. "I focused on migrants because they were all alone," she says. But they were also giving back to her, she says: giving her the courage to face her own health problems.

Her job, she says, is to instill in them the assurance that grew in her as a little girl, to show them that they can overcome their physical loss.

"They came to this country whole, I want them to go back whole," she says, dressed in all white in the pews of a church built on the shelter grounds. "Anything is possible, through faith and love of life."

Sanchez also relies on humor in her mission to make them feel useful. "Sometimes I tell them, 'run like a kangaroo,' " she says, laughing heartily, and then turns serious. "I think that legs and arms don't make us people. It's the heart."

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