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Refugee Stories from Across the Decades: CWS Celebrates 60 Years of Refugee Resettlement
Samka and Emsud Deumic, refugees from Bosnia.
Photo: Pamela S. Thompson photo courtesy of L Magazine
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View our timeline of CWS refugee resettlement stories.
Erika, Virginia, Trang, Frank, Emsud, Samka, and Margreat have more than a casual interest in the 60th anniversary of Church World Service. So do Gebremicael, Florence, Marwah, Kpanah, Hawo, Yunis, Hassan, Laurence, Mekonen, and Nuradin.
They are among the more than 450,000 refugees whom CWS has helped to begin new lives in the United States since the agency was founded in 1946.
Church World Service was the "first inclusive, ecumenical, and coordinating instrument for overseas relief and reconstruction in the history of the Protestant Churches in the United States," wrote Ronald E. Stenning in his 50th anniversary history of CWS. In 1946, CWS provided 80 percent of all relief goods shipped from U.S. voluntary agencies to Europe and Asia. And it was deeply involved in refugee work.
"With the War Relief Service of the National Catholic Welfare Congress, CWS appealed to the Intergovernmental Commission for Refugees for a far more expansive resettlement policy ... that would use voluntary agencies for resettlement of refugees," Stenning reported. "Before the end of 1946, CWS had resettled 1,488 refugees" across the United States.
Over the past six decades, CWS programs of disaster response, development, and refugee assistance have touched -- and continue to touch -- countless millions of lives in more than 80 countries. In celebration of CWS's 60th anniversary, we offer these brief stories of lives touched – all former refugees resettled under the auspices of Church World Service.
View our timeline of CWS refugee resettlement stories.
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