Please don't feel the need to donate if you already have. We are hoping to reach new friends and family with this fundraiser for the last piece of the puzzle.

As some of you may already know, the little girl in the cover picture is named Eduney, and she lived with me and my partner, Huck, for 6 months this past winter and spring while her mom worked and was in a bad relationship.

Mom (Nelilin) and Eduney's desire eventually became to return to their hometown in Venezuela because of how difficult things had been for mom here, and Eduney was missing her 2 sisters and brother at home very much. 2 years ago, they left everything behind in search of a better life in the U.S. because of the political and economic climate in Venezuela at the time. The journey here was very difficult, but they both expressed their strong desires to return home, and we wanted to make that happen for them, especially with the unknown possibility of deportation and/or separation for them.

We raised the money to get them home, and we thought we had enough to buy them a very small house at home too so that Nelilin could live there with her 4 children. However, the journey home with no passports had to be done by taking a bus from Detroit to El Paso, and then bussing through 7 more countries and taking 2 boats to get home. All of the countries they went through up-charged migrants returning from the U.S., and their bus tickets even said "migrant" on them. Hostels wouldn't host them, and that journey home was excruciating and scary for mom and daughter. There are thousands of others doing the reverse trip back to their home countries because of the immigration policy in the U.S. right now, but sadly the journey can cost upwards of $5,000! And we ran through most of the money we had raised previously, including the cushion we had built-in and the money for the small house.

To learn more about the situation I highly reccommend checking out these eye-opening articles that are pretty much exactly what they went through to a T. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/world/americas/mexico-venezuela-migrants.html (I was so scared when they told me they were going to this town)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/26/world/americas/panama-boats-self-deportation.html?searchResultPosition=12 (one of the pictures I shared shows them on these boats)

So we are raising money to buy this single mom and her 4 children, one of whom is like a daughter to us, a small 2-bedroom home in Venezuela. Thank you so much. Anything at all adds up and means so much to them and us. They are desperate right now in their messages with me. They're living in a 2-bedroom house right now with 8 children and roughly 4 adults, and there are very few ways to make money back home.

We just want to give them the security of providing this one last thing: a home for hopefully generations to come.