Russell and Eileen's Church Missions: TRAINING AND REFUGEES IN GREECE

This last week we have been in Athens Greece. Elder and Sister Hawkins arrived just a couple weeks ago from their home in northern California. Elder Hawkins is an attorney and Sister Hawkins a nurse, both recently retired. They will be filling a position that has been vacant since before we came. Their primary focus, associated with the Church’s humanitarian efforts in Greece, will be to work with the refugees. Our role was to go and train them on the office/logistical side of their calling. While there, we had the privilege of accompanying them to meet with one NGO partner organization and go to one of the refugee camps.

On Tuesday morning we went with the Hawkins and the mission president, (President Heder) and his wife to Mars’ Hill. This is a little hill just under the acropolis of Athens where tradition tells us that Paul spoke in the Book of Acts, Chapter 17. There we met another missionary couple, as planned, who were there with their family just prior to their release and returning home. President Heder has a practice of taking both new missionaries and those just about to be released to Mars’ Hill, finding a quiet spot and letting them express their testimonies in the place Paul did so many years before.

Visiting the refugee camp was more than just a memorable experience for me (Russell). I have seen people living in difficult circumstances many times before and while those living in the camps do have many temporal needs, it is their emotional or social needs that seemed to me even harder to be met. While the world acknowledges they exist, the relatively few countries that have the economic ability to actually help them in a meaningful way are not really ready to let them resettle there. Greece, Turkey and Italy are overwhelmed at the enormity of the crisis and aside from Germany, relatively few are willing to open their borders.

One of the men I met had a wife and young child. He was helping conduct the signup within the camp for the annual U.S. visa lottery. He has done it himself for several years knowing that the odds of his being selected are almost as slim as winning a big cash lottery. This man was from Afghanistan. Prior to his leaving he had been employed as an interpreter in support of the U.S. military presence there. After the U.S. withdrew from this man’s area he fled the country to avoid reprisals from the Taliban. Because he had fled to a neighboring country first and then later to Greece, he and his family are labeled “economic” refugees rather than “war” refugees like those from Syria. Economic refugees do not get the same priority as war refugees when it comes to resettlement opportunities. Somehow I think almost all “war” refugees in Greece, or any other country in the Europe made a prior stop in Turkey before making their way west in search of a better economic life for themselves and their families. It was particularly troubling to me that because someone helped my country’s military personnel that they now cannot live safely in their own country and that the U.S. has closed it’s doors to them living in my country.