Jesuit Journeys
Winter 2002
More than 45 million refugees and displaced people worldwide,
most of them women and children, look to Jesuit Refugee Service
workers for hope, advocacy, and signs of God's love.
Above:Senior secondary school students, staff and teachers gather at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees camp at Adjumani, Uganda.
BY DANIELLE VELLA
All God cares about is that we love – nothing else.” Fr. Pierre Ceyrac, SJ spoke with animated passion unlike his customary
gentle manner. His words were nothing new, but his emotion impelled me to listen as he addressed a meeting of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in South Asia.
Fr. Ceyrac was so moved he cried as he expressed his regret that he had not done enough.
That Fr. Ceyrac, of all people, should think he could have loved any more!
Lifelong service among the destitute in India and elsewhere has earned the French-born, 88-year-old
Jesuit worldwide recognition, including the Legion of Honour from his native country. His current
endeavors involve procuring food daily for 25,000 children, mostly dalits (untouchables).
PHOTOS BY FR. JIM STRZOK, SJ
PHOTO BY JAN COONEY/JRS |
Top photo: A woman washes her child in a stream at the United Nations High Commission on
Refugees camp at Adjumani, Uganda. Middle: Fifth-grade students are eager to learn in their
dirt-floor classroom at the refugee camp. Bottom: Fr. Pierre Ceyrac, SJ with children at a refugee
camp in Phanat Nikhom, Chonburi Province in southeast Asia.
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Fr. Ceyrac embodies for JRS the spirit of accompaniment central to our mission, fundamentally to be
with refugees. Present in over 50 countries, JRS workers face widely disparate challenges. Some work in
refugee camps, others in prisons and detention centres, often assisting refugees in frequently hostile
cities.
In the early 1980s Fr. Ceyrac took time out of India, where he had been since 1936, to serve Cambodian refugees in camps in Thailand.
“We try to create a climate of friendship in the camp,” he explained. “The refugees are broken and pushed about. We try to rebuild in them an image of human dignity and new hope – new joy and human growth.” Fr. Ceyrac and his companion, American Jesuit Fr. John Bingham, SJ, would spend hours just walking around the camp and meeting people.
Nearly 20 years later, it is the same closeness that JRS workers have to refugees that strikes me. Take John Kleiderer, an American volunteer who worked with refugees from Burundi in Tanzania. Driving into a camp one time, he stopped to deliver spare parts for a makeshift guitar-like instrument some men had put together. He enthused over their handiwork and held it up for us to admire. The refugees were thrilled.
I often think how hard it must be to live alongside people who have been forcibly uprooted from their homes. Their experience of loss easily surpasses the imagination of those who have not faced such misery. But in their pain refugees are clearly encouraged when others approach them with gestures as simple as John’s appreciation.
Many miles away from Africa, an elderly Jesuit brother, Bernard Eliot, SJ has worked with refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom since JRS was set up in 1980. Some live in towns and cities like everyone else. Many asylum seekers, however, are arrested and kept in detention centers until their applications are either accepted or rejected, in which case they are deported.
Br. Eliot has many reminiscences of his ministry. Some are joyful, weddings small and large among them. He has been to “African weddings in cramped registry offices” where he was one of only a few guests, and “Vietnamese wedding
receptions [after asylum had been granted] where there are many tables of 10 guests with a wait for the meal of nine or 13 courses.”
There were also incidents of tragedy when refugees, overcome by their loneliness, took their own lives. One of Br. Eliot’s regular jobs these days is phoning asylum seekers who are in prison pending the outcome of their application for refugee status. He calls so they know they are not alone.
At times I marvel at the dedication of people who spend hours, even days, attending to the needs of one refugee. Antonia comes to mind as someone helped in this way. I met the Sri Lankan widow in India, where she lives as a refugee in a camp. But I had heard
about her before, after her daughter Ida was dragged from their home in Sri Lanka to be gang-raped and murdered, probably by members of the Sri Lankan army. Militias had killed another two of Antonia’s seven children previously. Another, tortured by both
army and rebels, is currently held in a special camp, in reality a detention center in India.
Antonia wants only to save her son. Two JRS workers (one had met her in Sri Lanka only days after Ida was killed) managed to stop her son’s deportation to Sri Lanka, and they are now doing their utmost to find third-country resettlement for him. They travel long hours by train to embassies, or to help Antonia fill in forms, or just to visit her. I do not know if Antonia’s son will eventually get the chance to start a new life, but I do know the help she receives is of solace to her.
I find remarkable the combination in the same network of such devoted assistance to one refugee on the one hand, and largescale
projects supplying food, medicine, shelter, and education on the other. To my mind, the acts of friendship are worth arguably more  than the relief services because they reveal the recognition that the world-wide problem of 50 million displaced people is the story of 50 million individuals and their courage and will to survive.
This commitment is by no means limited to JRS. It is a way of working to which all people who love refugees and other rightsless people are dedicated.
And it is a way of loving that would make Fr. Ceyrac proud.
Danielle Vella is Information Officer for Jesuit Refugee Service
in Rome, Italy.
For more information about Jesuit Refugee Service,
go to their website at www.jesref.org
Return to Winter 2002 issue
Previous Article: Cover Story: Fr. Ray Bucko, SJ and Tammi Buffalohead-McGill help multicultural students adjust to Creighton life.
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