Journey and Community

An update: 'B' got out of Greece successfully and is currently in France. It appears as though her journey to Belgium is well on its way, but please continue praying, for it is certainly not over yet.

It really is unbelievable the lengths these refugees have to go through in order to escape the violence and poverty that has tormented their home countries. After teaching English on Tuesday I was able to chat with a man from Sudan. College-educated and very good with his conversational English (he learned it all from American movies), this man has dreams of making it to Norway. He made it to Turkey and lived there for 8 months before coming to Greece. He's been here 2 months, but after a failed attempt to get to Italy (by hiding in the storage of a cargo ship) he was fingerprinted and thus has little to no options left. He has decided to look for work and save up the 2000 Euros necessary to get the proper paperwork to leave the country (aka a fake passport).

This is a man who has a degree in communications, can speak two languages and likely had quite the life going for him until all was disrupted and he was forced to uproot. Had he (or any of these refugees) been born in another place and another time, their life would be completely different. Recognizing this, it's hard not to empathize completely and then get totally overwhelmed. I mean, we all have it so good. Life in the US is easy really.

We had lunch with Kallie today, a Greek woman who works at our ministry. Her own father was a refugee from Turkey in the 1920s. His sister died along the way from hunger and then also his father (a Christian minister, he decided to bury a Muslim man who died from cholera because no one else would and died from the same disease just 24 hours later). His mother, once a wealthy woman in her home country, was forced to work as a servant for a Greek family to earn a meal for herself and her son. She talked about how her father came out of something so devastating to realize real success all because his mother decided to make a place for them and they were warmly welcomed into the community.

Kallie reminded us that there must be a reason for this mass movement of people to Greece (estimates say there are now 3 million refugees in Greece, making them a third of the population). Of course, we are not going to grasp why this is all happening, but we must trust that God has a hand in this moment of history. We also have to recognize that while our ministry is here to provide, it is also the responsibility of the community to embrace these strangers and help them to make a their "place". I can't help but think about how I will continue to address these issues when I get home. Who are the refugees, the placeless, those in transition in our own community?