Stand with Emily’s Family: Aid for Medical Bills

Emily’s story is told in an article published by The New Yorker on Dec. 5, 2024:

“One afternoon, in November, 2022, Emily was on her way to church, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, when she received a video call from her husband. It had been two years since they’d seen each other in person. He was a policeman who had fled the country after refusing to arrest pro-democracy demonstrators. Emily and their two children, who were seven years old and eleven months old, had stayed behind. Travelling north was expensive, and the journey would have taken the family through the dangerous jungle of the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama. “We didn’t have a visa or a legal way to enter the United States,” Emily told me. “I couldn’t subject my kids to that trip.”

“Emily worked as a lawyer and lived in the same neighborhood as her father and one of her sisters. Within months of her husband’s departure, she started seeing patrol cars circling her block. Men called to say they’d kill her if her husband didn’t return. One day, a group of armed agents broke into her house looking for her husband. They shut her crying children away in another room, and beat her, demanding that she reveal where her husband was.

“Now, as her husband appeared on the screen of her phone, he was in a hospital gown, with cords attached to his chest. He took short, shallow breaths. Doctors in North Carolina, where her husband had been working in construction, had just given him a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Emily had spent the past two years researching visas that might allow them to reunite, but there was no U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, which made the task nearly impossible.”

You can read the full article here .

When I read this story last week, my heart broke for all that Emily’s family had been through. I reached out on Facebook to her sponsor and was connected to Emily. All proceeds from this fundraiser will go directly to the family (I will not be an intermediary), and will go to help pay off the medical bills that piled up during her husband’s leukemia treatment.