Copyright © 2003 The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee

By Sharon Rasmussen
Communication Director

“Refugees are ordinary people, but they are caught in extraordinary circumstances.” This quote from a United Nations official illuminates the situation of a whole class of immigrants whose plight tugs strongly on the heart: There but for the grace of God go we.

The evening news is filled with images and stories of people who have been uprooted from their homes by reason of persecution related to their race, religion, politics or ethnicity. Refugees are in desperate need of help; their lives are in danger, but they are not dangerous.

“Refugees are the most examined class of entrants into the United States. No one who has come in has been found to be, for example, a terrorist,” says Mary Lieberman, executive director for Bridge Refugee and Sponsorship Services. Bridge is an ecumenical agency that works with Episcopal Migration Ministries of the Episcopal Church USA.

An EMM brochure estimates there are between 16 million and 22 million refugees in the world today. While perhaps 90,000 of those came into the United States over a year’s time at the start of the decade, Lieberman said the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 resulted in an abrupt reduction by nearly two-thirds.

She considers those numbers in light of the change in a single community, saying, “In a good year, Knoxville would get 15-20 families, or about 80 people. In a bad year – like this one – eight families, or 30-35 people.”

Responding to Need

Lieberman says the process of resettling a family begins when her agency enters into a sponsorship agreement with a church. Ideally, the dozen or so people from that church who will carry the most responsibility for the family agree to support them fully for a period of three months.

However, Bridge is flexible: “Anything a church is willing to do to enter into a partnership with us – we want to partner with them,” Lieberman says. “We understand that there are lots of things competing with our ministry,” but the need is so great, she says, that if “someone could hold a furniture drive and collect enough to furnish an apartment, we’d be thrilled.”

A number of churches in East Tennessee have done that and more in partnership with Bridge, which has sub-offices in Chattanooga and Bristol.

In the Chattanooga area, Anne Curtis, resettlement coordinator in the Bridge sub-office, says Grace Church is the most current participant. The church is co-sponsoring with a Congregational church a Croatian Serb mother and adult son who arrived three weeks ago. Curtis counted 31 other refugees Grace has sponsored since 1986 and celebrates this ministry of the parish where she formerly worshiped.

“This is a hard ministry” for churches, she said. “It demands patience and understanding. People have to have a space in their lives for it.”

According to the Bridge-Chattanooga Web site, St. Thaddaeus, Good Shepherd, St. Alban, St. Luke, St. Martin, St. Paul and St. Timothy as well as St. Paul in Athens are among those South East area churches that have worked to resettle refugee families through Bridge.

In the Tri-Cities sub-office of Bridge, Resettlement Coordinator Carolyn Miller works through Church World Service rather than Episcopal Migration Ministries. When interviewed in early September, she said that although she has not worked with an Episcopal congregation in some time, she has been very impressed with the dedication of small churches who take on sponsorship.

There’s “always a great need for household goods,” she said, but mostly the family units she has brought in over her eight years of service “need someone to be their friend.”

Last year in Knoxville, Church of the Ascension sponsored a family from the Ukaine. The family of Danica and Heath Myrick spearheaded the sponsorship and continues its warm relationship with the couple and their children.

Myrick said her daughter and son especially enjoyed their new friendship. “Even though there was a language barrier for quite awhile,” she said, “they always enjoyed one another’s company and still celebrate birthdays together.”

Lieberman adds that including young people in the ministry enriches them greatly. “It’s a way of serving youth: the youth born in a camp somewhere and our youth, by broadening their world.”

Other church sponsors in the Knoxville area have included St. Elizabeth, Good Samaritan and Resurrection, Loudon.

A Sponsor’s Mission

Lieberman talks with passion and practicality about the work of her agency and its church partners.

“What a church does is mentor a refugee family and guide them along until they’re on their feet – and “on their feet means until they’re able to get on the bus or in the car and go to work to make enough money to support their family,” she says.

“It’s a transcendent ministry in the sense that when a church sponsors a family and watches them arrive at the airport and experience a new kind of freedom – maybe the only freedom they’ve ever known – it’s like giving birth, because these people are as vulnerable as babies. They often do not speak the language … they are quite helpless to do anything unless they have guidance.”

Bridge frequently is able to assist with translation services.

In a full sponsorship, Lieberman says, the church works with Bridge to find an apartment for which the refugee family can pay rent after church support ends. The church furnishes the apartment, pays three months’ rent and covers startup fees for utilities and a telephone.

She pauses and then elaborates on what furnishings are required. “Church people have to look at an apartment through different eyes and say, ‘how does this look to a person who has lived behind barbed wire for three years?’ ”

Then the sponsoring committee looks at the family’s educational and occupational history. For example, perhaps one person “has a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Juba in Sudan. … Somebody at the church may know someone; maybe we can find him a job that pays ten bucks an hour to start until his English gets better,” Lieberman says.

Parish representatives meet the family at the airport and take them to their new home. They give assistance in setting up and getting to doctors’ appointments – which often are covered by TennCare – to the dentist, to get a driver license and food stamps, to arrange for the children to attend school. They help them learn English. Sponsors provide the family with a donated car or show them how to use the bus.

“It’s looking at your community in a new way,” Lieberman says. “Probably 95 percent of the people who help a refugee find out how to take the bus have never taken one – you do see things through new eyes.”

‘Part of Us’

That care from strangers, over such a brief period of time, gives hope to ordinary people who have found themselves in seemingly hopeless circumstances.

“At the end of that three-month period, they don’t have that deer-in-the-headlights look anymore,” Lieberman says. “They are part of us, and they always will be. Everything you worked for and all the tasks that you do, it all leads to that moment when you realize that you have fulfilled profoundly a Christian mission.”

She recalls a Polish man named Yarvic. “He didn’t know anything except cars. He started working in a repair shop, and he’s doing incredibly well,” she said. “When he became a citizen, he changed his name to the name of the chairman of his sponsorship team, so now he’s Yarvic Hall. He has a child at MIT, he has a child at Princeton … he’s just done fantastically well.”

Those who come through the program often go on to contribute in their own ways. Their success stories, Lieberman says, “telegraph the message that refugees have the potential to become valued members of the community.”

ECUSA, Bridge protect refugees' rights

• The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, at its April 28 - May 1, 2003, meeting, adopted a resolution that in part “opposes any further expansion or extension of the Patriot Act of 2001 which would further curtail the civil rights of ethnic and religious minorities thus threatening our nation’s revered and fundamental respect for civil liberties,” and asked ministries that “serve and advocate on behalf of refugees and immigrants and other minorities work to oppose unfair and unjust treatment of racial and ethnic minorities.”
• This summer, Bridge Refugee Service joined in a constitutional challenge of the Patriot Act’s Section 215 with the American Civil Liberties Union and several other groups, according to Reuters news service. Mary Lieberman, executive director of Bridge, had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury last December and to surrender all records relating to “Iraqi-born people who have been assisted by Bridge.” She is awaiting federal response to the suit.
• Later this summer, Lieberman learned Bridge would receive the ACLU-Tennessee’s Bill of Rights Award for guarding the rights of its clients. Richard Parkins, executive director of Episcopal Migration Ministries, congratulated the Rev. Larry Beach, Bridge chairman of the board, on the honor, and noted EMM’s pride in its association with Bridge.

A statement on the Episcopal Migration Ministries Web site reminds us, “Even if our Biblical injunction to welcome the stranger did not exhort us to reach out to others, our commitment to our spiritual family certainly would.” In this issue, we look at human rights, the plight of refugees and their impact in our own communities.

Related stories in this issue:

• Liberian who fled home finds new one in Knoxville
• Poor People's March honors Martin Luther King's 'dream'