Inside the Safe House: Where Restoration Begins

Most of El Pozo de Vida’s work leads here — to the safe house tucked in a quiet neighborhood of Mexico City, where girls under 18 who have been rescued from human trafficking begin the fragile work of healing. It is the heart of their restoration program: twenty-four hours of protection, therapy, education, structure, and the steady presence of adults who dedicate their lives around restoring the girls' trauma.

One of the girls I met is seventeen. Her younger sister also lives in the safe house. Their mother sold both of them when they were small. When the older sister reported the abuse, she saved her sister — but it cost her the love of her family. She carries the weight of protecting someone else while being abandoned by the very people who were meant to protect her.

Stories like hers were everywhere.

But the strange, stirring part was this: inside the safe house, the girls smiled. They teased each other. They braided each other’s hair. They danced to music on a speaker. It was easy to forget what they had lived through. Yet the pain lived beneath the surface: in the girls who battled depression, in the ones who woke up nightly from nightmares, in the ones who had attempted to run away or harm themselves. Their trauma didn’t vanish inside the safe house; it simply had space to breathe, to be tended to, to loosen its grip one day at a time.

There is no quick fix. Healing here looks like routine — therapy, schoolwork, chores, cooking nights, prayer circles, conversations with staff, and moments of joy stitched between long stretches of hard days.

What Restoration Looks Like Up Close

Every day I visited, I would hear new stories — sometimes through tears, sometimes through laughter that came out too quickly. But I also saw something else: the daily devotion of the staff.

Janice, who oversees the program, told me story after story of moments where prayer and patience persistence carried a girl through a crisis. Benny spoke quietly about miraculous breakthroughs — the ones that make no sense outside the language of faith. The team prays over the house constantly, trusting that transformation often begins in invisible ways.

The Weight and the Hope

When you spend time at the safe house, two truths hit you at once:

The suffering is deeper than you imagine. And the resilience is stronger than you expect.

The girls I met in the safe house should be in school, going to sleepovers, dreaming about their futures — not trapped in court cases, government restrictions, trauma therapy, and a fight to rebuild trust in the world.

But they are here.

They are healing.

And El Pozo de Vida is walking with them, step by step, day after day, for as long as it takes.

If You Want to Support This Work

The safe house is El Pozo’s most resource-intensive program — and also its most transformative.

If you’d like to help sustain the care, therapy, education, meals, and protection that the girls receive every day, you can give through Viva Fonte’s campaign for El Pozo de Vida’s restoration program.