Hispanic Outreach helps immigrants in Missouri find housing

Published: 2004-08-23

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (CNS) -- Leaning against a weathered wooden post, Faustino Barbosa looked out over a railroad spur on the south side of St. Joseph. "When I was a child in the 1930s we lived in a boxcar near these railroad tracks. My father worked the switches. There were four boxcars and four families living in them," he remembered. Barbosa, 74, is now a great-grandfather and involved in providing religious and social services to a new wave of Hispanics arriving in the area. "People cannot live in boxcars any more," said Barbosa, a member of Hispanic Outreach, a ministry team which provides community support for the growing Hispanic population in St. Joseph. The result is that finding housing is a main service of Hispanic Outreach, founded in 1997 by Hispanics and supported by Catholic Charities of Northwest Missouri and the U.S. bishops' Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Among those being helped to find housing are members of the Miranda family who clandestinely crossed the U.S.-Mexican border to settle first in Los Angeles before traveling halfway across the United States to St. Joseph.

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