While trying to reach the United States illegally in December, the bright-eyed 25-year-old Salvadoran fell from a Mexican freight train and her legs were mangled between tonnes of moving steel.

“A friend was helping me off the roof of the train as it slowed to be checked by migration officials. He slipped and I fell,” she said.

Belen is now a resident of a refuge in southern Mexico run by Olga Sanchez Martinez, a seriously ill woman whom some have dubbed Mexico’s Mother Teresa.

Sanchez started knocking on doors and stopping cars in the streets 14 years ago to raise money for injured immigrants. She says she was inspired to help others after God answered her prayers to reduce the pain of her intestinal cancer.

Sanchez recently won Mexico’s top human rights prize for her work with injured immigrants at her centre in a converted tortilla factory near the rail tracks in the town of Tapachula close to Mexico’s border with Guatemala. The injured, who have everything from broken bones to amputated limbs, stay until they are well enough to leave, which can take months or years.

Sanchez estimates that 5,000 people have passed through her shelter since she opened it eight years ago when no more amputees would fit in her family home.

Every day, hundreds of poor Central Americans like Belen fleeing grinding poverty jump on freight trains leaving Mexico’s southern border and head for the United States.

Immigrants fight exhaustion, hunger and thirst, clinging for dear life to the swerving and bucking “iron snake”, the cheapest route to the United States.

Many make it and live the American dream, but others go through a nightmare. Hundreds die or lose limbs every year on trains heading north, trying to board carriages moving too quickly or falling asleep and slipping off precarious perches.

Takes the pain away

At Sanchez’s Jesus El Buen Pastor refuge, double amputee Donaldo Ramirez sits under a gaudy green and red plastic relief of Jesus and the Virgin Mary and reads a black bible.

Ramirez lost his legs running to board the train as it passed through the steamy lowlands of Mexico’s Oaxaca state.

“At first I was so bitter and ashamed, I hardly spoke to anyone,” he said.

Behind him, a young Mayan Indian boy getting used to his new prosthetic legs manoeuvres past a pair of wooden crutches hung on the wall alongside a large wooden cross and a mural of a freight train passing beneath green mountains.

Shortages of blood and medicines in local hospitals mean he and Belen would have likely died in the hospital without the tireless work of 47-year-old Sanchez, who runs the refuge almost single handed.

Despite the scarcity, Sanchez somehow manages to get the necessary blood and medicines and takes them to the hospital for her patients. When they are well enough, she transfers them to her shelter.

Sanchez, who dresses all in white and has hair to her waist, works 18 hours a day, finding food, visiting hospitals and buying medicine.

Her cancer is so advanced some doctors say she should be dead. She says her work nourishes her.

“I began visiting the sick and it was like a pill that took the pain away,” she said.

Many of the refuge’s residents are missing an arm, a leg or a foot, but a spirit of optimism prevails, and most leaves walking on false limbs, each one costing $4,500.

“Trying to block the sun”

In January, Mexico’s President Vicente Fox awarded Sanchez the country’s first ever-national human rights prize.

The $22,000 prize money will help build a larger house but is not enough to finish the construction, urgently needed as the flow of wounded increases every month.

Last year, Mexico deported 200,000 Central Americans crossing its territory illegally, up from 147,000 in 2003. In the same period, the amount of money sent home to Guatemala and El Salvador from migrants in the United States increased by around 25 percent.

Sanchez believes that the only way to stem the flow, and the injuries, is to provide more legal ways of immigrating.

“They are trying to block out the sun with one finger. They are not providing the solution to this situation ... If the United States gave more work visas, people could travel legally and safely,” Sanchez said.

Until that day, Sanchez says she will keep cleaning up after what she sees as a failing migration policy.

“I just obey God,” she said, “and the time for rest is still a little way off.”