October Newsletter Update

I am in my second month of volunteering with the refugees in Greece. Working in the Kara Tepe refugee camp has been a challenge.  Every day I learn another person’s story.  It is never a happy story.  I have heard how a Congolese man ran away from his country after he found his wife’s stabbed body in the marketplace after a political riot; I watched a man who did not know the English words act out his wife’s and daughter’s murders by the Taliban after I asked about his family, and I tried not to cry when a woman held out her trembling hands to me as an explanation to me why she could not come to English class; she was too scared to leave her house.  She hasn’t left her house since she arrived, three months ago. Her hands have not stopped shaking, either. I have never known that level of fear.

There is never anything I can say when their stories are finished.  I have no ability, no experience, to help me understand what they are suffering.  I can and do pray.  I ask God to give them peace and reassurance, to take away their pain, to help them start their lives again.  And I keep asking Him to use me to help.  There is little that can be done here.  As one person said, “This is not a home.  It is a glorified prison.  I want to be a person again.”  

How do you help someone become a person?  I have met an electrical engineer, a beautician, an English professor, a business owner, and many others during my time here.  All of them now just called “refugees’ and all of them just sitting and waiting for someone else to make a decision about their next step in life.  I don’t want to just help make the waiting easier.  I want to help them work again, earn a paycheck so they can provide for their families, help them feel like they are a positive part of society again.  I want them to feel their value as children of God.  And that starts with prayer.  I hope you will pray with me that the people here can move forward and find joy and self worth again.  I also ask that you pray for me, that God will show me how He wants me to help here and renews my spirit each day so I have to strength to do His will.  Thank you for all the support you have shown!