Lament for the Refugees

I have a friend, Jewel - 22 years old, he fled Bangladesh after troubles of which he dares not speak. Disowned by his family, unwanted by his government (including his embassy in Cairo), he is in Egypt as a stranger. Not an "exotic" stranger like me (white and rich by Egyptian standards), but a poor, dark-skinned stranger who speaks only a little English, and even less Arabic. Unable to find a job amidst the hundreds of other unemployed (Egyptians and others), he floats from flat to flat, never begging, but accepting what grace he is given. Two weeks ago, while moving from one apartment to another, everything he owned was stolen, including his passport. Now he is faceless, nameless - no official identity. His life consists of his cell phone and the clothes on his back.

Zechariah is perhaps 60, maybe 65, and his dark black face is a map of wrinkles. He fled Sudan over 10 years ago now, and works with what strength and might he can to educate some of the Sudanese children who are his fellow refugees. When I helped in his classroom two years ago, he would ask me to teach his little students songs in English and we would all sing "merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream" together, as if songs could mirror reality. Now when I go back and visit he shakes my hand vigorously and says to anyone within hearing distance, "This is Dena. She's the best music teacher I ever had" (which says much more about his grace than my musical abilities, or lack thereof). To the Egyptian government, he is just another one of the many Sudanese and sub-Saharan African refugees who crowd the streets of Cairo and fill up the name lists at the office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Abdel Aziz was 16 when I saw him last - bearing proudly the tribal marks of his Congolese people. We sat going over an English lesson one day and I asked him to use the word "family" in a sentence. He looked at me with a face no different than any other day and said, "Family? What is there to say about family? My father is dead, my mother is dead, my sister is dead. I have no family. I am alone here in Egypt."

These are real faces, faces I know, and yet they are only three of many. In Cairo alone there are thousands of Iraqis, millions of Sudanese, and many others from countries ranging from Ethiopia to Eritrea to the Congo to Palestine.

One definition of "refugee" is "one who flees", and under this definition, it becomes obvious that the refugees are not simply the faces I see here, but also the millions in Canada and the United States - refugees not only of war and political crises in far off countries, but also North American born refugees of poverty, drugs, alcohol, and domestic violence.

As someone said to me the other day, "may these faces forever disturb us." Not "disturb" in the sense that we become helpless in the midst of suffering and pain, but "disturb" in the sense that we feel called to remember always that things are not as they should be: there is not yet justice, and God's kingdom is not come - but we are to be the hands of the Lord. If we are to blame God for what we see, then we also are to blame ourselves - for our apathy, our ignorance, our tendency to embrace the fact that it is easier to forget about the refugees and those like them, or simply say "I will pray for them," then it is to try and do something... anything...
So may we always ask, in the midst of these faces, what does it mean to "love our neighbour", to care for the "least of these", to "prepare the way of the Lord"?



www.refuge-egypt.org
http://www.maadichurchstjohn.org/catalog/index.html
http://biblelands.org.uk/project_partners/by_location/egypt/st_andrews_refugee/index.htm