LEAVE YOUR MARK: A Ray of Sunshine
— -- In a drab, eight-story brick building in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, 28-year-old Elizabeth García strolls the halls of Covenant House New York, a social service agency that helps young people who have fallen on hard times get their lives straight. As the organization's director of advocacy, Elizabeth speaks out to local and national politicians on issues impacting these kids, most of whom are homeless, runaways or at high risk of getting into trouble with police.
On this day in late June, she pokes her head into the free health clinic and asks the handful of kids waiting for appointments if they are okay. Back in the elevator, she greets a young man and asks, "Everything's good?"
While she is not much older than many of these young people, she cares about them as if they were her own children and in the six years she has been at Covenant House she has done everything in her power to help them improve their lives.
Just the way people helped her when things appeared most desperate and bleak. Someone was always there to ask, "Is everything good?" or "Do you need help?"
Growing up in Medellín, Colombia, in the early 1980s, Elizabeth learned at a tender age just how violent and dangerous the city was. She was only one when her father, Sigifredo, a 29-year-old police officer, was gunned down during a bank robbery. Over the next five years, two uncles were killed in random acts of violence.
That was enough for Elizabeth's mother, Martha Correa. In 1985, she took five-year-old Elizabeth, her only child, and fled to the United States. They ended up living in a basement of a small house in Hackensack, N.J., because that was where the one person Martha knew in the U.S. lived. They were soon on the move. "For the next year we bounced around Hackensack from place to place," recalls Elizabeth.
It was a challenging time. In Colombia, Elizabeth had been surrounded by a large and loving extended family and had lots of friends. Now she was in a new country where she didn't speak the language and was being moved around all the time as Martha struggled to feed and clothe the two of them. "I was forced to grow up very fast," says Elizabeth. "I understood the realities of life at a young age."
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