SOME PASTORAL REFLECTIONS ON THE WORLD
July 21, 2014
In the spring of 1989 my wife, Mary, and I were licensed foster parents. Our last placement had just been returned to their parents and we had some spare room in our house. We got a call from our caseworker asking us if we could take in two boys who were a special case. You see, these boys werent in the system because they came from a bad home situation, but because they had no home. They were refugees.
Sometime in the previous year Hoa and Sahn had fled from their respective homes in Vietnam and escaped to freedom. Sahns family had smuggled him aboard a boat that ended up adrift in the South China sea before they were rescued and taken to a refugee camp in Malaysia. Hoa had simply walked to freedom, across Vietnam and crossed the borders of Laos and Cambodia before arriving in Thailand where he was apprehended and placed in another refugee camp.
Both boys were lucky in not only being able to escape undetected for had they been caught what awaited them in Vietnam was horrific -- but in that they did not die on their journey as many did and managed to be placed in a refugee camp. And they were especially lucky in that their status was determined to be that of a refugee.
You see there were then (and still are now) special laws with respect to refugees in our world. Because they were seen as refugees, international law recognized them as having certain rights not as citizens of any country, but simply as human beings. Taking lead from our American Declaration of Independence, the UN recognized that all such persons had a right to life and liberty, and that any country where they ended up was both morally and legally bound to preserve this for them by not returning them to the situation from which they had escaped.
The US, as one of the signers of these UN resolutions, known as the Unaccompanied Minor Refugee Act, even agreed to take some of these refugee children and place them in homes in America. And so it was that Hoa and Sahn made their way to Peoria, IL where they became enrolled as students at Tha Huong, a halfway house operated by Catholic Charities. And after some time learning a little English we got the call asking if we would accept their placement with us.
Mary and I were barely 30 ourselves at the time, and here we were bringing two teenage boys into our home. In time Sahn would grow up, move out on his own, and cease to have contact with us. But Hoa would stay in contact. He became a US citizen, married and has two children who call us Grandma and Grandpa. A few years ago we were visiting Hoa and his family where they now live in Charlotte and met his mother for the first time. I can still remember Hoas introduction: Mom, Dad, this is my mother. Mother, this is Mom, Dad. Then she came up and gave me the biggest hug of my life ever. It wasnt till that moment that I realized the importance of our having said Yes to that phone call so many years before. You see, in this womans eyes we were the people who had saved her son. The Yes we had given as individuals and as a nation had been the very literal difference between life and death for one who was now son to both of us. For those who made such decisions in Washington or when paying the few cents ones taxes were probably increased it might have been about all sorts of other issues: national sovereignty, economic advantages, doing the right thing and loving ones neighbor. But for me in that driveway it was about a person, my son.
Sadly, there are always other sons and daughters who find themselves in similar horrific conditions. The country they live in is unsafe because of war, drug cartels, human traffickers, gangs or other forms of violence. Does it really matter the exact reason? And only rarely does it ever involve the US such as when hundreds of thousands of refugees crossed the border from Iraq into Turkey, a secondary collateral damage sort of consequence of US attempts first to free Kuwait and then a few years later to liberate Iraq from Sadam Hussein, or when the US did accept many of the Lost Boys of the Sudan as unaccompanied minors and refugees in the same way that Hoa made it into my family.
Today, however, the violence is not on the other side of an ocean. Today it is very near our borders just to the south of us in Central America. There, children as young as 8 are being targeted by gangs, human traffickers and drug cartels as surely as Hoa was targeted by remnants of the Viet Cong. And in those places like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala parents are again saying to children that they love Good-bye. It isnt safe for you here. We dont want you to go. We dont know what will become of you, or even if youll make it. We only know that you cant stay here, and so we have to take the risk. For many, their first options were neighboring countries relatively close to home like Belize, Costa Rica and Panama. For others it has involved a long and dangerous journey, like Hoa, crossing many borders to arrive at a refugee camp, this time in the United States.
Now, I need to pause to correct some misinformation that is out there. These children are not coming here as immigrants. It is true that there is a great migration going on at the present time, but it is not immigration as one normally thinks of it. It is not people seeking to get into the United States as much as it is to escape from something else. All that they are looking for in the US, or anywhere else they happen to land, is simple safety. We can see this difference in the fact that the first act by most who make it is not to avoid detection of INS officials, but to turn themselves in to them. A second correction is with regard to their legal status. These children are not here illegally. Oh, yes, I know they did not follow the normally proscribed process of VISAs and immigration documents. But that is because, we need to remind ourselves, they are not immigrants. They are refugees. And that refugee status is what makes all the difference.
Those same UN resolutions that the US was a signatory to that allowed Hoa to find a place of safety in Thailand where he could stay until things were resolved for him are equally applicable to these children from Central America who are crossing our border. Only, we are now the country who needs to provide them a place of safety until things can be resolved for them.
I dont know what the end result will be. Will conditions improve so that they can return home? Will we need to find families who will open up their lives to them in the US and other parts of the world? I suspect it is too early to know the answers to these questions. But, I think it is clear what our present responsibility is. We need to celebrate that at least these children have made it out, away from the horrors which would lead them to leave home and flee for their lives. We need to provide that place of safety for them to which they are both morally and legally entitled, not as citizens, but simply because all people are entitled to such. And, as the operative government of the land to which they have fled, it is incumbent on us to provide the necessary resources to keep them safe.
(from a Facebook note, also posted in my August 2014 newsletter)
A bit of clarification here.
