Search and Rescue with Union Gospel Mission
Union Gospel Mission (UGM) is a Christian organization in Seattle that runs programs that help homeless people. One of their programs is Search & Rescue in which volunteers and UGM staff go out in vans and bring food and supplies to the homeless.
I went out with Search & Rescue this evening. I used to go out with them a lot before the pandemic. When I arrived at their facility and met with one of their staff, they said that I had last volunteered in 2021(!) I hadn’t realized that it had been that long.
We went to at least five different homeless encampments. All the norms and procedures for volunteering came back to me very naturally. It was great.
One thing that I noticed was the number of people who spoke Spanish. When I went out with Search & Rescue previously, I don’t remember anyone speaking Spanish. There was another individual on our team, Melanie, whose parents were from El Salvador. Melanie became our unofficial translator for the evening.
At the end our shift, I told Melanie that I heard it could be difficult, even for people who spoke Spanish well, to understand Cuban Spanish speakers. She said yes, it was true: The Cubans had a strong accent and spoke very quickly; and also, they used slang that was hard for non-Cubans to understand.
I asked if it was possible for her to tell where someone had come from based on the way they spoke Spanish. She said that it was, and so I asked my follow up question: Was there a country–in her assessment–where most of the Spanish-speaking homeless people were from?
She said yes: Venezuela.
Published: Sat 02 Aug 2025
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