A Christmas to remember: How a single migrant mom built a home for the holidays with the help of these Chicago women

December had never felt jovial for Yohana Moreno and her two sons despite the colorful bright lights adorning the streets and Christmas trees all around them. The single mother first ran away with her children from a turbulent relationship, then they ran away from poverty and misery in their native Venezuela.

Last year, she said, Christmas Day was bittersweet, maybe a little sorrowful when the family made it to the U.S. southern border after several months of travel. They were hungry and felt lost, the mother recalled. But more than anything, she was desperate.

Immigration authorities took her oldest son to a different detention center, separating them without communication for days.

“The hours and days felt endless,” Moreno said.

That pain, she said, has been compensated through the good people she credits God with putting on their path upon arriving in Chicago after New Year’s Day. They were among the hundreds of buses sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as a political stunt to draw attention to strained resources in border cities handling surging numbers of migrants.

For the first time in years, her heart feels at peace, the mother said. The family is together now and has created a home in a small apartment in the Homan Square neighborhood. The two boys are enrolled in school, including one in a private school.

But more than anything, she said, they have found an extended family made up of Chicago residents who have made this December feel warm and joyful for the family.

On a recent Sunday night, three of the Chicago women — a mother, a teacher and a librarian — who embraced Moreno when she arrived in the city with no place to go, gathered at her apartment and put up the family’s Christmas tree, sealing their friendship and closing a chapter of uncertainty in the family’s lives, Moreno said.

“God has placed every single person I’ve met here on my path to get to where I am,” Moreno said. “Fue Dios quien nos mandó esos ángeles.” It was God who sent us those angels.

It was a cold Wednesday in January when Moreno arrived in the city with her youngest son, Ali Isaac Moreno Yousef, 11. The two walked around the city amid winter without jackets, looking for shelter anywhere they could, she said.

The mother felt hopeless.

Then she knocked on the door at Adalberto United Methodist Church, where the Rev. Jacobita Cortes had begun to take in migrants after shelters in the city were at full capacity. Cortes would post pictures of families on social media, asking neighbors to take them in temporarily and connect them to jobs and apartments.

That’s how Cynthia Nambo met Moreno.

Nambo was on her way to Chicago after spending the holidays with family out of town when she saw the call for help from Cortes.

“It was faith,” Nambo said. She never imagined that Moreno would become a good friend, and the children like two of her own. When Moreno’s oldest son, Juan Angelo Yosander Lugo Moreno, 18, finally made it to Chicago to reunite with his family, Nambo drove his mother to O’Hare International Airport to pick him up.

Nambo knew that it was up to them — ordinary Chicago residents — to come together to help migrant families like Moreno’s because the city infrastructure to welcome migrants was flawed. As a child of immigrants, Nambo said she understood the support they needed to settle down, find a job and learn English.

That’s what her parents did, she said. So she did not waste time and quickly reached out to her network.

Maureen Kelleher, who she’s known for over 20 years, responded. She offered Moreno a room in her house in the Brighton Park neighborhood, where she quickly helped Moreno to enroll the boys in school and Moreno in English classes at the local library.

“It’s easy to help someone so good at advocating for themselves,” Kelleher said about Moreno. Her intention of helping the family though is based on “solidarity and charity.”

While Moreno and her older son, Juan, took English classes at the library, Kelleher, an English teacher by trade, would go to the children’s section to find books with Isaac.

That’s where they met Corina Pedraza, a librarian at Brighton Park Public Library, who saw the boy’s eagerness to learn and recommended him to B.I.G. Baseball Academy, a nonprofit organization that teaches empowerment to South Side boys through baseball.

Moreno recalled the day the two boys attended the academy and one of the coaches quickly pointed out their talent.

Suddenly, life felt a little lighter, she said. The three women, Nambo, Kelleher and Pedraza, would take turns bringing the boys to practice while their mother, Moreno, went to work as a maintenance worker.

One of the boys’ coaches, Mario Morales, connected Moreno to a program under the Chicago Low-Income Housing Trust Fund that landed her an affordable apartment in Homan Square over the summer.

“Everything began to fall into place, they’re my angels,” Moreno said.

Moreno said that Morales also helped her enroll Isaac at Altus Academy, a private, nonprofit elementary school that provides a tuition-free college preparatory education to students from minority groups and low-income households in the Chicago area.

It’s a life she dreamed for children, but one she never imagined would become reality, Moreno said.

Nambo shares the same sentiment and is still in awe of how a single action from one person can change the course of the lives of others forever.

When the women gathered to put up the Christmas tree, it had been the first time they had been together in a while, Nambo said. But that was their goal, Nambo said, to help Moreno make Chicago her home.

And she did, Nambo said.

“I’m proud of her and of us, of my network and how we were able to come together to make a difference in our city,” she said.

When she got the tree for Moreno and the boys, she invited all the women, including Moreno, Kelleher and Pedraza, to help buy ornaments and decorations.

The three put up the tree, no longer as strangers or as Chicagoans helping a migrant mother, but as friends.

“I’ve been so honored to witness the family make their way. I hope that Yohana and her kids will carry on that tradition of coming to Chicago and building a life and building the city.”