Class at Kanembwa Camp School in Tanzania's Kibondo district. CWS supports the only post-primary education available at refugee camps in the district. Photo: Erol Kekic/CWS

Welcoming the Stranger

Story by Carol Fouke-Mpoyo/CWS

Committed to welcome the stranger (Matthew 25:35), Church World Service has helped nearly half a million refugees from around the world begin new lives in the United States since the agency was founded in 1946.

From the start, CWS also has urged the United States to be generous and fair in its assistance to people fleeing persecution and violence. And its concern for all refugees has led to a growing "Durable Solutions" program to help them live free, dignified, and productive lives, whether they spend long years in camp, eventually return home, or permanently resettle elsewhere.

U.S. refugee resettlement

From the beginning, Church World Service was involved deeply in refugee work. "There had been refugees in the past," wrote Ronald E. Stenning in his history of CWS's first 50 years, "but nothing to compare with the numbers of displaced persons and refugees during and following the years of World War II.

"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," he reported.

In 1946 and 1947, Church World Service resettled almost 2,500 refugees across the United States, working with participating denominations to provide congregational sponsors for new arrivals. Arrival numbers grew rapidly; in 1949, CWS brought 7,563 refugees to the United States.

That experience laid the groundwork for CWS's response to future waves of refugees, among them Indochinese, Cubans, Somali Bantu, Sudanese, Meskhetian Turks, and now ethnic Karen and Chin from Burma.

Along the way, Church World Service helped shape such milestone U.S. policies as the 1948 Displaced Persons Act and the 1980 Refugee Act, which established a comprehensive policy for refugee admissions into the United States and created a domestic policy of refugee assistance that was the same for all groups
of refugees.

Today, Church World Service resettles about 8,000 refugees and entrants each year through a network of local affiliate agencies in 24 states, and has helped develop that network's capacity to help resettled refugees with such immigration legal services as citizenship applications. Denominational support and congregational cosponsors are as important as ever, helping refugee newcomers get established in their new communities.

In 1990, CWS entered into a cooperative agreement with the U.S. State Department to prescreen refugees in sub-Saharan Africa for possible resettlement in the United States by CWS and nine other agencies. Today, its offices in Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, Ghana, prescreen and process cases for more than 25,000 refugees a year.

Former refugees helping new ones

In the tradition of immigrant America, former refugees whom CWS helped resettle in the United States over the decades have themselves helped "welcome the stranger."

	Erika Heppner, a baby when she came with her parents as refugees from Germany in 1957, now teaches oral communication to non-native English speakers in Queens, New York.
	Virginia Finale, who fled Cuba with her husband in 1961, took a one-week assignment with the CWS Miami Office that ended up lasting 35 years. From 1965 to 2000, she helped Cuban and Haitian refugees, along with Vietnamese, Ukrainians, Russians, and asylum seekers from Nicaragua.
		Trang and Ahn Nguyen of Union City, California, regularly contribute funds to help other refugees through Sacramento's Bethany Presbyterian Church, which cosponsored them in 1981.
	Yunis Gabow, a Somali Bantu refugee who resettled in Houston, Texas, in 2004, now works for Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston, helping refugees from Somalia, Russia, Iran, and other countries find jobs and adjust to U.S. culture.

A refugee woman carries supplies to her new thatch home on a steep hillside in the Mae Ra Ma Luang camp. She says she fled Myanmar one month earlier after the Burmese army destroyed her village. Photo: UNHCR/J. Redfern

Durable Solutions for Displaced Persons

Of the world's 12 million refugees, fewer than one percent will get the chance to resettle in a third country. Nearly eight million have spent five years or more "warehoused" in camps or segregated settlements, according to World Refugee Survey 2006.

These people are unable to work or study. Despair and apathy are common and take their toll on mental and physical health. Some long-term encamped refugees, especially the young ones, become recruitment targets for paramilitary groups, gangs, and drug traffickers. For many, the second or even third generation of a family knows no life outside the camp — a tragic waste of human potential.

CWS is addressing these refugees' needs through its Durable Solutions for Displaced Persons (DSDP) program. DSDP's vision is to help warehoused refugees move beyond mere subsistence. It provides post-primary education and vocational training, health education and care, and access to information, and advocates for refugees. Working with both refugees and their often impoverished host communities, and in consultation with community advisory groups, it seeks to leave behind infrastructure and to complement existing programs.

For example, most refugee children have no access to post-primary education. In Tanzania, refugee youth from war-torn Burundi are receiving a high school education with help from CWS. The Kibogora Secondary School, where Burundian children study next to their Tanzanian hosts, is the first of its kind in Tanzania's Kibondo Region.

Several refugee graduates have gotten scholarships and gone on to university. "If Burundi is to rebuild its shattered economy," one student commented, "people with secondary and university education will
be vital."

Wholeness in policy and practice

In all of its programs, Church World Service strives for a wholistic response to need, including not only emergency assistance
but also work to prevent and/or mitigate emergencies, address root causes, and foster social and economic development.

A case in point is CWS's response to the massive displacement of Burma's people, including opposition parties and ethnic minorities targeted by the country's ruling military regime. At least 700,000 refugees have fled Burma, and another half million of Burma's more than 50 million citizens are internally displaced in eastern Burma alone.

Church World Service is a founding member of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), an alliance of nongovernmental organizations working together with displaced people of Burma for 22 years to respond to humanitarian needs, strengthen self-reliance, and pursue dignity, justice, and peace.

CWS provides major support to the TBBC through its Durable Solutions for Displaced Persons program. In a widely recognized
"best practice" in refugee protection, the TBBC and United Nations collaborate to strengthen self-reliance among the 150,000 refugees who have fled Burma's repressive military regime for the relative safety of border camps.

Since the regime mounted a new offensive in late 2005, driving thousands more civilians into hiding in the jungle and across the border into Thailand, CWS has stepped up its pressure on the regime, through the United Nations and U.S. government, to stop attacking ethnic civilians, release political prisoners, and move toward democratic government. And, now that the U.S. Refugee Program has opened its doors to Karen and Chin refugees from Burma, Church World Service is helping them resettle in the United States.

Thank you for your prayers and support for the work of Church World Service -- whether directly, or through your local CROP Hunger Walk.

Would you and your congregation like to help a refugee family? To find out more, visit the CWS Refugees section.