Episcopal Press and News
Church's Ministry to Refugees Threatened
Episcopal News Service. January 15, 1993 [93012]
Nan Cobbey, Features Editor of Episcopal Life.
Refugee Stanley Strzlec needed a friend with connections when he tried to get his ailing wife out of Poland.
The Sava family, fleeing Romania, had nothing but the clothes on their back when, speaking no English, they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport without sponsors.
The three Nkosi brothers from South Africa, one with a bounty on his head, needed a new home when a mix-up forced them to camp out in a Baltimore church.
These refugees and many more found what they needed -- welcoming parishes, furnished apartments and experienced volunteers with know-how and connections -- through an Episcopal Church ministry that some in the church fear is threatened both financially and spiritually.
Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM), in operation in one form or another for the past five decades, is facing a time of trial. It was exactly one year ago that its director, the Rev. Canon Burgess Carr, warned that church budget cuts were "hindering our ability to support our workers in the field."
Staff cutbacks at the Episcopal Church Center as a result of General Convention mandates, plus two unfilled vacancies on its staff, reduced the EMM office by four people. That reorganization curtailed the ministry's services and, some charge, reduced its effectiveness. Now, changes in the way the government will finance private refugee programs are altering the way EMM must do business.
The depth of feeling about the cuts and changes surfaced repeatedly last month at the refugee ministries' annual conference in New Orleans. National church executives including Carr, Diane Porter, senior executive for program, and Treasurer Ellen Cooke met with EMM staff and the more than 50 diocesan refugee coordinators (DRCs) who annually resettle as many as 3,000 refugees -- 2,619 this past year. The diocesan programs, which range in size from a few cases a year to the 700-plus handled by the Diocese of Olympia, Washington, receive much of their funds from the federal government by way of the national office. They, in turn, involve hundreds of parishes as sponsors.
"Who do I call now when I have a refugee from Somalia who is in Kenya?" asked Sylvia Robles, coordinator for the Diocese of Indianapolis, who has been working with EMM since 1982 and resettles 40 or more cases each year. Robles said that jobs once performed by national staffers are now left undone.
The Strzlec, Sava and Nkosi families, for instance, were all resettled through the Diocese of Indianapolis, with the financial aid and staff support of EMM.
The changes in the past year, and those ahead as the government shifts responsibility to private local programs, signal trouble to many working with EMM. Coordinators in the smaller diocesan programs, often volunteers with no support staff, worry that the new regulations, forcing more paperwork and accounting on their shoulders, will push them out of refugee resettlement or force them to curtail their operations. Some fear that they won't find the support in the national office with advocacy, backup information and emergencies that they've counted on in the past.
The diocesan refugee coordinators spelled out their fears in a list of questions compiled in New Orleans. They wanted to know why more of the money that the church accepts from the federal government doesn't get passed on to them. They asked why the church doesn't put more of its own money into the ministry the way the Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Church World Service programs do. They stated their fear that the church is no longer treating its refugee program as a ministry but as a business.
Porter and Cooke assured the coordinators they share their concerns, want to keep communication lines open and hope to provide as much money as possible in tight economic times to the resettlement programs.
Cooke explained that 60 percent of the U.S. State Department's allocations for refugees is being passed on to the dioceses, a higher percentage than in the past. The State Department, one of several federal sources of funds for refugees, provides $630 for every refugee assigned to one of its 12 "partners," including the Episcopal Church. The rest goes to train coordinators, pays national staff salaries and other administrative expenses.
That is the only money there is, according to Porter. "When we had to make program [budget] cuts and we looked at all the things we were doing, this [Episcopal Migration Ministries] was one area that looked like it could be self-supporting... could stand on its own two feet."
Financial support is not just an issue for the diocesan coordinators. Lori Seymour, the national program's resettlement officer, who resigned last month, is concerned about the depth of the church's commitment to the refugees who seek its help.
Real commitment, Seymour maintained, means "backing up every single refugee who arrives here." That is also required under the "cooperative agreement" the national church signs with the State Department.
The backup Seymour described can mean substantial financial outlays, and they must come from the sponsoring agency. The emergency money is not provided by government contracts.
In years past, the director had a discretionary fund of $100,000 per year to cover such emergencies, according to Sally Dresser, interim director before Carr was appointed in 1990. That is no longer the case.
In 1992, the national church budget provided $10,670 for "unpredictable refugee crises." That sum will be cut to $1,000 in the 1993 and 1994 budgets, although "enabling" grants and loans for individual refugees in need, budgeted at $3,300 in 1992, will increase to $5,000 in 1993 and 1994.
"Frankly and honestly, I cannot tell you if the Episcopal Church will back up every resettlement," Carr said. "I want to say yes, but the funding available now is the $630 per capita. That's the only money I know about."
Asked whether any national church funds were used for migration ministries, Porter said that "technically, yes" because she and other salaried employees not part of EMM devote some of their time to refugee matters. (In the past, the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief, where refugee ministries got its start, contributed to the operation. It no longer does.)
Asked about the perception that EMM is becoming more business than ministry, Carr said, "It is for me still a ministry, but I hear the anxiety from the DRCs. It's not a business because the Episcopal Church is not making money from it, but those who ask the question hear us describing ourselves more in corporate terms than ministry terms."
"I was appointed," Carr added, "to keep before the church the vision that this is a ministry of hospitality that derives out of Scripture, and we can't let go of that. I'm not going to let go of it."
The changes are causing anxiety at the diocesan level. Joyce Booth, a resettlement volunteer in Indianapolis, said that she has watched support dwindle in the past year. "We are not sure from minute to minute if contracts are signed," she said. "I've never seen a program so vital and alive... and it's withering on the vine because of a lack of direction from our national office."
Seeing threats to a program that "so opened our minds and our hearts to a larger world" saddens Booth. "When you meet the young man who has tied his wife and child to the underside of a truck and driven them across mine fields to freedom, it means something to you," she said.
The Rev. James Lemler of Trinity Episcopal Church in Indianapolis said that "when people realize they are called to a ministry of hospitality and compassion...and exercise that...it is transforming." Even Lemler's 700member parish, considered wealthy by many in the church because it has received a substantial endowment from the Lilly Foundation, has benefitted from its involvement in refugee ministry.
"You can't do this ministry without getting some view of those global issues of justice, which are not always comfortable for folks in middle America," Lemler said.
Trinity Church resettled the Strzlec family from Poland during the tumultuous period when the Solidarity union was under attack. Today, the Strzlecs live in Palm Beach, Florida, where Stanley, who keeps in constant touch with his friends at Trinity, is a successful and well-paid engineer.
For Godfrey, Raymond and Charles Nkosi, Zulus from South Africa who were brought to Indianapolis from their temporary home in Tanzania four years ago, Trinity's resettlement help meant more than schooling and safety.
"Here it is better," said Godfrey, 32, "because people have opportunities. In my country, because of apartheid, even after education you remain a servant."
Godfrey learned that lesson the hard way. He was imprisoned for protesting the change in language at his school from English to Afrikaans, which would have curtailed his opportunities. He was forced to flee soon after his release because he learned that there was a bounty on his head. He left his younger brothers and father and went to finish school at an African National Congress institution in Tanzania. Raymond joined him later.
For 12 years, the two older brothers lived in Tanzania, Swaziland or Mozambique. Their younger brother, Charles, joined them only after their father died in South Africa.
"America is great for us. People are so open. Teachers are so open. We are free to ask anything we want," said Godfrey Nkosi.
The three brothers now live in a two-bedroom apartment in a huge wood-frame house in one of Indianapolis' racially mixed neighborhoods. All three are in school. Godfrey, who works full time providing nursing care for a retired doctor from the parish, and Raymond, 30, who works part time as a janitor, both study computers and accounting at Ivy Technological College. Charles, 20, will finish his senior year of high school this spring. His schooling had been interrupted in Africa.
A team of 30 parishioners of Trinity helped with the brothers' adjustment to life in the Midwest. As with most cases, that meant teams of volunteers to provide transportation, find housing, training, jobs and supply necessities such as clothing, food and furniture. It meant intangible things like being there when frustration and loneliness set in and practical things like explaining the laundromats, the self-defrosting refrigerator and American measurements.
For Romanian Florica Sava and her family, whose first sponsors backed out, the decision by 85-member St. Peter's Episcopal Church to resettle them in Lebanon, Indiana, was the first good news that she'd had in months. "You can imagine coming from a foreign country, not knowing the language, not having money and not having anybody, no place," said Sava, who, with her husband and son, arrived at Los Angeles airport to find nothing arranged.
After a day on the road from a refugee camp in the Austrian mountains and an 11-hour flight, "There was nobody waiting for us. It was evening. It was dark."
"Great!" was how she described the day that they finally arrived in Indiana to find "all these people and cars" at the Greyhound bus station. "Everything was done. They had an apartment, they took us to our apartment, and there were more [St. Peter's] friends. Everything was there. The refrigerator was full. We cried."
Sava will no longer talk about her life in Romania. She had to tell the story too many times to camp officials and government interviewers. The Rev. Mary Campbell, her priest at St. Peter's, fills in the details: Florica's husband, John, a political prisoner who still bears the scars of his torture, had been released from prison and the frightened Florica wanted the family safely out of the country before her teenage son followed his father's lead.
At 42 and working full-time, Florica said that she thinks she will go back to school. A registered nurse, she has hopes that she might be able to earn a master's degree in nursing and public health. "It's never too late," she said.
Supporters of the church's migration ministry also expressed hope that it is not too late for the refugee program.