You’ve seen the pictures. Vast refugee camps of makeshift shelter shrouded in dust: Darfur, Gaza, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan. About the most elegant thing one might call them is ‘tented hope’. Given the misery, it begs the imagination to think how this could ever be seen as ‘refuge’. Could they possibly have fled anything worse than this? Too often the answer is ‘Yes’.
A winter morning in southern Africa plucked just a single soul from this cast of millions. I found myself gazing into the angular, almost princely, face of ‘Jean Claude’. His home was once the Great Lakes of central Africa where villages midst mountains and rivers erupted in fury, turning quiet lives into breathless flight. He recounted that story calmly to me, as though he had relived it daily: the long trek through thorny country, the hungry days and crouched nights, the brutalities, the humiliations, the suicidal despair and soulless camps, the triplicate forms, the tears of pleading. And, yes, now and then, the kindness of strangers.
thousands of Darfuris (from Sudan) who have fled serious war crimes – some say
genocide – in their home settlements. It may qualify as the worst – and least known –
humanitarian calamity on the planet today, involving displacement of unnumbered
thousands. Like crises in the eastern Congo and in Haiti that have festered for
years largely ignored, analysts could be forgiven for pointing out the race factors
underlying this pattern of neglect. For twenty years, bloodshed has roiled the
western Sudan in what some have called the Land Cruiser War. Particularly telling
above is the foreground donkey trying to graze on rocky ground. In the background
are the walled homesteads of Chadians whose backyards now serve to host the
dispossessed and traumatized. photo credit: VOAHenryWilkins.
But emotion began to clutch at his voice as he told me about the one he had left behind: his betrothed. They were soon to be married, he said. But the nightmare folly that overwhelmed them flung them apart. She was carried east on the rip tide, he to the south. So it was, that I found him beside a construction site hoping to find day-labor to pay his past due rent. Meanwhile, she was pursuing doctoral studies in Switzerland.
A letter had come recently, he said. It was tenderly written. It told him that she could not leave her new home without forfeiting her right to asylum there in the Alps. She confessed that their lives, however once entwined, were now parted. She begged for his understanding, saying that she had come to care for someone in her new home who had asked for her hand. But before she could assent, she knew she had first to tell the one she innocently loved long ago and to whom she had promised herself, a promise now achingly beyond reach. There was a long pause as he fought back a tide of feeling. And then he told me without a trace of self-pity that he had replied to her saying, ‘It is as it should be. You must not turn away from your happiness.’
Jean Claude goes weekly to worship with a small Pentecostal community where he is sometimes asked to speak. He tells his neighbors, ‘My life feels like a school of the spirit. We are all students enrolled there. And my lessons – demanding though they have been – have brought me face to face with Heaven. Is this not a gift: to have left a foolish, heedless life for the one of dignity and hope that found me here?’
No sign of squalor there. This life, however spare, and whatever its misfortunes, brims with wisdom and strength. There is likely only a little truth to the adages that tell us suffering produces nobility and character. As often, it can leave brokenness and stubborn wounds. But the humanity it does sometimes yield is irresistible.
How could I help but aspire to figure midst the ‘kindness of strangers’?
Thank you, Jonathan, for reminding us that refugees are indeed dear souls seeking God’s promises in places they never envisioned… sadly, so many have lost families, homes and hope until they are able to tell their stories to compassionate listeners.
Hello, Jean! I know you are writing out of personal encounter with these communities. I was moved some years ago to learn that refugees from these camps had been invited to compete in the Olympic Games whose modern motto is ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’ (swifter, higher, stronger). It occurred to me at the time, that no others could compete with that refugee contingent for the practiced exertions of body and heart that are their daily lot. I’ll be watching for them in Paris this summer!
Beyond bitterness ….. indeed, that is “home”.
Thank you, Jean Claude. Thank you, Jonathan.
Thanks be to God!
Hello, Mary Mae! Lovely of you to take the time to write. I had a whiff again of this trek through loss and bitterness last week when I turned up at a public march of families of murder victims in our town (Durham, NC). Most of their loved ones had fallen victim to gun violence. Their stories had this same quality – a step or two beyond rancor and retribution. Which made the stories more compelling – eyes fixed on a horizon that beckoned toward purpose.