Ruth: Refugee With A Human Face

Kathy and I have informally adopted through World Relief a refugee family who came out of the Rwandan genocide. It was a horrible civil war between Hutu and Tutsi tribes. When the father of this family was a young man, he was staying with his grandfather when men came into his grandfather’s hut and bashed in his grandfather’s skull, right in front of him. He ran and hid in the bush until the attackers gave up looking for him, then made his way hundreds of miles to a refugee camp in Mozambique. At least he could be safe there. I asked google maps to tell me how far he must have travelled, from Rwanda to Mozambique, but Google Maps said it didn’t know any route. But I’m sure there are back roads.

As far as he knows his entire family has been wiped out. It could be up to a million who were killed before the fighting ended. In the refugee camp he married a nice woman who also had run for her life. They had a mud hut. The closest water tap was a 20-minute walk away and the water was unsanitary. They used community pit toilets nearby. When they had kids, the schooling that was available for them was of very low quality. That was their life for 2 decades.

What did they do wrong that all this tragedy happened to them? Nothing. And I have been awed at their resilience and hard work to make it as a family. He learned Portuguese and got a job as a laborer on a farm outside the camp in Mozambique. Four years ago, their application for refugee status in America came through and they were some of the very few who could come to the US. Now the husband works one full time job in a factory during the day, then 4 more hours in the evening in his second job. The wife is raising their 4 kids at home, plus when her brother went into crisis they took in her brother’s baby as a foster child. Besides raising 5 kids, the wife is taking GED classes online. And for a while she worked a part time job on top of all that. The kids are doing well in school. They are working to move out of their subsidized apartment and buy a real house of their own. Their resilience and hard work are amazing.

Why do people pack up and leave their homes? Some are running from violence, like Mary and Joseph. Some are running from famine, like Elimelech and Naomi. Some of my ancestors were religious minorities in Great Britain, Quakers and Puritans, who went to jail for their faith and left everything to come to the early colonies where they could be free to worship God in the best way they knew how. So, I am a descendent of refugees many years ago. Some of Kathy’s German ancestors were caught in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War and came to America to escape the bloodshed. In the middle of the 1800s there was a horrible famine in Ireland, the great potato famine as a blight wiped out the potato harvest. About a million Irish died and another million left the country. And they were often very unwelcome here in the US. They didn’t speak English. They drank too much. They were really, really poor. They were Roman Catholic. There was a day when the big Marshall Field’s department store put up signs that no Irish were allowed to work there or even shop there. What happened to all those Irish “invaders”? They just turned into normal Americans. How many here in this room have Irish ancestors? I do. Raise your hands. What do we think? Are they OK? Should we keep them? Of course.