How Wellspring helped turn around a family’s fortunes
Darkness filled Helen Zegeye’s first days in Seattle.
In December 2018, Zegeye and her husband, Dr. Wendwesen K. Lemma, arrived in America with their two small children, a then-2-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. They didn’t speak much English. Zegeye was eight months pregnant. She remembers those early winter weeks in town as very gray and very, very quiet — so different from their home in Ethiopia.
A year ago, Elizabeth Perez was living in a homeless shelter with her 2-year-old son after fleeing an abusive partner. The space, she said, was a “human soup,” hectic and cramped with families hunkered down in bunk beds. At the time, it was difficult for Perez to think about what life could be like outside of the shelter’s walls.
As Sombath Khem walks down the central staircase inside Seattle’s Asian Counseling and Referral Service, the pair working the counter at Cafe Hope looks over to her for help.
When we close our eyes, we can focus our attention inward.
In December 2018, Cheré Bautista was forced to confront a fear that had haunted her since she was a teen.
Alejandro Quintana could have used someone, an older brother perhaps, to lean on when he struggled in high school.
In the middle of Valerie Carlton’s living room, a small blue hammock hangs from the ceiling. That’s where her son, Benton, almost 2 years old, laughed for the first time.
TUKWILA — Everything in Robert Frederickson’s life was going fine. Until it wasn’t.
Reshell Wilson of Auburn, 56, was in line at the dollar store with her grandchildren in fall 2018 when she got a surprise that changed their lives: an invite to join a peer group for grandparents caring for young children.
Pair makes their own kind of family as ‘sisters’
MOUNTLAKE TERRACE — It was starting to feel like the holidays in Lindsey Greenlee’s house.