Calvary Memorial Church is providing shelter, food, temporary employment, English classes, and more to a group of 18 migrants who arrived in Oak Park at the end of last October.
The individuals and families, who came to Calvary in mid-November, are staying in an open area of the basement of the church and sleeping on cots or air mattresses.
Manfred Karolyi, pastor for care and mission opportunities, said Grace and Peace Church in Austin reached out to the church asking for shelter for this group of migrants. The next day, they were staying at Calvary.
“It was the right thing to do,” he said. “We just decided to start building the plane as we were flying it.”
Karolyi, a migrant from Costa Rica who moved here in 2018 to work at Calvary, said he understands the journey of migrants is complex and his work to help this group of migrant families has been shaped by his own experiences.
The church does not know how long the individuals staying with them might need to be there, executive pastor Jonathan Cummings said, but the goal is to help them find sustainable living situations by the end of February.
“We intentionally took what we thought was a manageable group,” he said. “This is what we could handle in a way that would be safe for those staying here.”
Cummings said it would be great to keep the migrant kids who are already enrolled in Oak Park schools where they are. Oak Park might not be able to solve housing issues for everyone, he said, but focusing on a small, targeted number of families who are already assimilating into the community with kids doing well in school might be a more realistic goal.
Volunteers from the congregation stay overnight with the migrants at Calvary to help with any issues that may arise, Cummings said. A few women from the congregation do weekly grocery shopping for the group, who can cook in the kitchen located at the church. Laundry is also available in the basement at Calvary.
On Calvary’s website, there is a platform for giving where people can donate money to help provide services to the migrants, Cummings said, and they have already raised roughly $9,000 within the congregation.
Recently, the church hired a woman from the migrant group to do cleaning and they plan to hire a few others to do grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning in the kitchen, Cummings said. The church has given their guests set times to use the kitchen and access to one of the fridges.
“It’s mostly to give them a sense of purpose,” Karolyi said. “If you’re just resting or laying on your bed, that contributes to some sort of numbness.”
The church has also provided one bicycle per family for them to go out and try to find employment or cash jobs in the area, which some have had success with. However, only Venezuelan migrants who arrived before July 31, 2023, can qualify for Temporary Protected Status, which allows migrants whose home country is unsafe to live and work in the United States for a temporary period of time.
The individuals staying at Calvary have faced a deep trauma by having to leave their country and find shelter in a new one, Cummings said. It can be a challenge to help them manage ways of responding to that trauma, he said.
“Life’s hard,” he said. “We as a church and a congregation and a community need to just be aware of that.”
Some of the migrants came here with an idea of how their lives could be, Karolyi said, but experienced disillusionment when those dreams didn’t come to fruition. The church has been trying to provide holistic care for them, especially those feeling depressed about their situation, by coordinating counseling services.
Volunteers at the church have organized an English class a couple times a week for anyone interested, Karolyi said. The church has also worked to transport individuals to medical appointments and connect with social workers to help the migrants produce a clear path for their next steps.
Providing showers has been another story.
Calvary is trying to organize traveling showers once weekly at the church, Cummings said, but there are not permanent showers in the building.
“There’s a vulnerability around showering,” he said. “In our experience in our church building, nobody takes all their clothes off. That seems safe. If we put showers in, that changes it.”
Cummings said if they were to install showers at Calvary, it would have to be with rules implemented to ensure safety such as locks, shifts for access and time limits. The church inquired about buying memberships for the migrants to shower at the West Cook YMCA, he said, but the facility requires background checks that would be difficult for the migrants. One congregation member is allowing the migrants to take showers in her home on Fridays, Cummings said.
The congregation and church as a whole have also been learning a lot from the migrants, Karolyi said, because of the exposure to their culture, world view, language, food and way of doing things.
When people in need are in front of you, you can either do something or turn your back, Karolyi said, and while they can’t help everyone, Calvary responded to the need in the community to help these migrants.
“This is more than a religious response,” he said. “It’s just what any human being should have been doing.”
Oak Park is overall open-hearted when it comes to helping people in need, Cummings said, and he’s thankful to be in the community.
“Our national identities are not our primary identities, our human identities are more important,” Cummings said. “There’s the basic, basic human dignity that is assumed and granted to all human beings. They deserve to have a decent life. They deserve to have food and housing and safety.”