On the last day of our trip to El Salvador, my friend and fellow El Salvadoran adoptee Marla and I traveled to Santa Ana, along with my cousins Darwin to meet with Ana Julia and Pamela - representatives of Asociación Pro búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos - the organization that is directly responsible for finding my birth mother Alba Garcia Osorio in 2018. Through DNA testing, Pro búsqueda also found Marla for her own birth family in a similar investigation several years prior.

Since 1992, Pro búsqueda has done the same for hundreds of El Salvadoran adoptees around the world, impacting thousands of people who have been searching for children who were disappeared or separated from their birth families during the El Salvadoran Civil War.

While they continue to reunite adoptees with their families, they have also begun working with organizations that work with children and young adults who have gone missing at the Mexican and Texas border. Many of the disappeared are asylum seekers who have been sex trafficked, kidnapped, or held for ransom by drug dealers as they attempted entry into the United States. Sadly, many of these cases end in death when their families can't afford the ransom demands.

Although this nonprofit organization was initiated by the government after the 1992 peace accords, Pro busqueda is regularly targeted by both the American and El Salvadoran governments as they continue to fight for social and economic justice, as well as human rights for asylum seekers and migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

If you enjoyed reading all about my trip, and want to help other adoptees like myself, or asylum seekers from Central America find their families, I ask that you to join me in donating to this resilient organization so they can continue with the extremely important work that they do. They have not only completely changed my life in so many ways, they also helped bring me closure as I continue to come to know my family and my home country. Both Ana Julio and Pamela, as well as investigators like Montse Martinez have coached and counseled me every step of the way - standing in my corner throughout this entire difficult journey.

Any amount of money will help - please remember that $1 is equal to $8 in El Salvador, so your money - even if it's a small amount here in the States - will have a huge impact on what they can do to help families and other nonprofit social justice organizations throughout Central America.

In the words of Pamela: "Not knowing what happened to your loved ones has a lasting affect. It's like a form of torture and the pain is as prevalent every day as the first day they go missing. There is no closure. You can not close the cycle of pain if a person has disappeared. Even when a loved one is found we see that there is a double mourning. The first one is when your child goes missing or you live through the separation from your chid. The second is when you find the child and he or she is not a child anymore. It's not the person they thought they would meet. So the whole process is overwhelming, but that is what we are here for and we follow our cases through even after families have been reunited. Because that is not the end - it's actually the very beginning."