Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Salomon Diego Alonzo in August 2019 along with nearly 700 other migrant workers at food processing plants in Mississippi. Immigration authorities sent the 26-year-old Guatemalan, who had lived illegally in the United States since 2012, to a detention center in Monroe, La., where he stayed in a shared dormitory.

Jennie Higgins is a 62-year-old employee at a Costco store near Houston, Texas, where she assists customers in the clothing section. Her husband, Randy, drives trucks to deliver stock to other Costco locations. The couple have worked for the retailer for years, but now, Jennie Higgins said, “We’re considered essential people.”

Craig Murray, a recovering drug and alcohol addict in Austin, Texas, relapsed once before. While dealing with the stress of multiple jobs, a new marriage, and his wife’s miscarriage, he stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous and checking in with his sponsor.

13th in a series on long marriages

Frustrated, Pastor Robert Hall walked into the hospital. He’d come to visit a dying church member but hadn’t been able to get the day off from his landscaping job. When he finally made it to the hospital, the man’s room was empty: He had already died.

“Something snapped in me,” Hall recalls. He told God, “I’m not doing what You’ve called me to do well. This is ridiculous.”

As the new coronavirus pandemic extends into another week, many Americans face reduced hours and pay or no jobs at all. Communities need the assistance of nonprofit groups like the winners of WORLD’s 2019 Hope Awards for Effective Compassion even more at this time. The spread of the disease makes it harder to help the poor, but the ministries’ reliance on God provides hope and clarifies their purpose.

12th in a series on long marriages

Mike and Pat Meierhenry both grew up on farms. They met in college at a fraternity dance, where Pat asked her date why Mike was dancing with one hand in his pocket. Her date explained that Mike had lost the use of his left arm from polio—but he still went home to farm on the weekends. Pat wondered how he managed farm work with only one arm. Later, Pat and Mike double-dated, and in September 1960 they married, “between haying and corn-picking.”

By early March the novel coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 respiratory disease had spread to more than 110 countries and topped 118,000 cases worldwide. Three-­quarters of its 4,000 deaths had occurred in China, but non-China cases began multiplying.

COVID-19 first struck the United States in the Seattle area. After the first deaths came at a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., in late February, authorities decided to close schools in an “abundance of caution.”