Valley City North Dakota – Thur, February 1 at 7 pm Nancy Farnham will present “A Visit to the Border: A Humanitarian Crisis” at the Barnes County Museum on Central Avenue in Valley City.

The presentation is co-sponsored by What in the World Is Going On?  and the Barnes County Historical Society.

The Mexico-United States border is in the news daily. Attendees of this talk and power point will be able to hear first hand from Farnham what the situation is like at the border. She will share information about what she saw and heard while at the border, including her experience at shelters in Mexico, visits with local people who live and work along the border wall, and the people she met at the wall who had just crossed into the United States.

Farnham decided to go on this trip, which took place October 24th through the 30th of 2023, because there is so much in the news about the south border and she wanted to see first-hand what was happening at this time.  She had been on a previous border trip in October of 2019 which went to El Paso, TX and Juarez MX and was greatly affected by what she saw and heard at that time.  She wanted to see what had changed since 2019 and what was happening at a different location along the border.

Farnham travelled to the southern border with a group of 11 people from North Dakota and Minnesota.   The  ND Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the United Church of Christ Global Justice Advocacy Team organized the trip.

 Two experienced border trip group leaders combined efforts to take this group to the twin border towns of Nogales in Arizona and Mexico.  Vicki Schmidt, from West Fargo, ND, and Thom and Diane Haines from Eden Prairie, Minnesota were the group’s leaders, and members of the group came from Ellendale, Enderlin, Bismarck, and Fargo ND, as well as Moorhead MN and several from the greater Minneapolis area.

Nancy Farnham has been a resident of Enderlin for the past 32 years.  She and her husband, Tom, a retired Enderlin High School teacher, have two grown sons and one granddaughter.  Nancy had a career in health care which began when she worked as a nurses’ aide at a nursing home while in college.  She became the first registered and board certified music therapist in N.D. in 1981, later became a licensed social worker, and then became a licensed nursing home administrator, working the last 27 years of her career at Maryhill Manor in Enderlin as the administrator before retiring in 2019.  Nancy has multiple volunteer roles in her church and community.

The Barnes County Historical Society is one of the co-sponsors of the evening; this is the 23rd season of their Lecture Series.  The other co-sponsor is

“What in the World Is Going On?”, a campus-community group jointly sponsored by VCSU’s Departments of Science and Social Science and members of the Valley City community.  “What in the World” was begun shortly after 9/11/01 for the purpose of addressing issues of local, national and international importance.  For more information call 701-845-7321. 

The presentation is free and everyone is invited to attend.