Personal contact helps simplify complex refugee issue

It was so simple. A few days ago I enjoyed an extended afternoon visit with El Heide and Somia in their small South St. Louis apartment. The two are recently arrived refugees from Sudan, one of six countries that are singled out under the temporary refugee moratorium.

El Heide, Somia and their two young children arrived in the United States a few months ago after seven years in a refugee camp. During their brief time here, both of them have made significant effort to learn English and their considerable progress allowed us to communicate sufficiently.

I first met El Heide weeks ago while visiting their neighbors, an Iraqi refugee family living in the same apartment building. At that time, I greeted Somia only from across the small yard in front of their apartment. At a distance she seemed like “just another” Muslim woman-- alien and slightly mysterious under her traditional head covering. Today it took only a few minutes of chatting with the couple to be taken with their warm smiles and friendly demeanor.

As we talked, it occurred to me how simple and straightforward was our personal experience together compared to the complex debate over public refugee policy.

Those on one side of that controversy focus on the crucial task of keeping the country safe and assuring that terrorists are not included in the refugee stream. Others emphasize our rich heritage of welcoming those in need. Determining the proper governmental course seems complicated, unlike my personal experience with this Sudanese couple.

As we sipped juice and talked about their circumstances, El Heide told me he has no family in Sudan. Whoever was left may have been killed in the ongoing civil war there. He’s not sure.

My mind drifted to an experience some months earlier with another refugee, a thirty year old man named Abdu Shakur, also from Sudan. Through OASIS International, a vibrant Christian organization serving refugees in St. Louis, I and several other volunteers helped deliver donated furniture to the barren apartment of this deeply appreciative African man, just arrived from his war torn country.

When one of the delivery volunteers innocently--perhaps naïvely--asked him through an interpreter about his family, this tall, previously smiling young man stood still. In the awkward silence that ensued, tears began to flow as he buried his face in his hands and convulsively wept in front of us all.

A few days later, during a subsequent visit in which a friend and I delivered a few practical items, Abdu Shakur appeared overwhelmed by our simple gestures of goodwill. Assuming a serious expression, he looked at us intently and managed to say in halting English, “One day I will get married. I will have children. I will tell my children about you.”

As I focused again on my current conversation with the Sudanese couple, El Heide commented that he was happy for our extended conversation because it forces him to stretch his English. He indicated I am the only English-speaking person with whom he’s had opportunity to converse.

I have the impression that I, and others to whom I may introduce him, might be the only English-speaking friends he’s likely to develop. Statistics show that less than ten percent of refugees are befriended by an English-speaking American.

This unfortunate reality hardly seems helpful to the process of refugee assimilation, touted as essential by all who fear the European dynamic of isolated enclaves of foreign refugees.

More significantly, that statistic constitutes an affront to our Judeo-Christian heritage. The prophets of the Old Testament declared, “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself…”

Jesus upped the ante for those who claim to follow him by correlating our kindness toward outsiders--or lack of it--with our true disposition toward him. He said pointedly, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” and, “as you did it to the least of these…you did it to me”.

During our visit El Heide told me he currently has a night job cleaning machinery at a food processing plant. He expressed his desire to eventually go to college, perhaps get into nursing. We agreed this would be a challenge as he would have to pursue it while working and supporting his family. But I told him, “In America you can do this.”

As I departed, I gave El Heide my phone number and told him I would visit again and that, in the meantime, he should call me if he needed something. I anticipate a growing, personal friendship with El Heide and Somia as well as with their Iraqi neighbors.

The current intense controversy over precise public refugee policy seems complicated.

But for those of us who follow Jesus, extending ourselves to refugees like El Heide and Somia, and pursuing warm friendship, doesn’t strike me as complicated at all. As personally challenging, perhaps. As an experience that might stretch us as people and help us grow as Christians, probably.

Still, it strikes me as something actually quite simple and basic. I’ve been telling myself the same thing I told El Heide about the challenge of him going to college while raising his family in America – “I can do this.”

So, perhaps, could you. If you do, eventually the children and grandchildren of once desperate refugees may be passing on their family stories of the Christian love and friendship you once showed.

Leviticus 19:34 Matthew 25:35, 40

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Contact author at bob_levin@sbcglobal.net