Who are the heroes?

In my book Entertaining Angels Unawares: Welcoming the Immigrant Other I tell many stories. The point of the stories is on one hand to praise those who selflessly tried to help those who have been either refugees or IDPs. I have been so impressed by some people who though they had little tried to help those who had less. On the other hand I hope to spur us to consider what we can do.

I mentioned our mothers, Pat Gottschalk and Sylvia Stuckrath, and how they cared for a Vietnamese family who were refugees back in the early 1970s. They taught us to have compassion on refugees.

When I was in seminary in the early 1980s I worked with a small ministry called the Russian Emigre Ministry of the Slavic Gospel Association. Slavic Gospel was aimed at Russian speaking people at a time when the Soviet Union and its allies were not open to evangelism. However, President Jimmy Carter’s administration worked a deal with the Soviet Union to allow Soviet Jews to leave Russia. Many of these people were sponsored by HIAS (the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society). Most of these refugees were expected to go to Israel, but many made it to the United States.

Quite a number of these Soviet Jewish emigres settled in Chicago. I went to Chicago to help with this ministry of caring for and reaching out to these emigres.

My roomate and our team were very involved in helping these emigres practically. We rescued and cleaned second-hand furniture to help furnish the apartments of these emigres. We tried to help as we could with them getting jobs. We spent time helping them learn English and how to shop, where to wash their clothes at the laundromat, and how to operate the washers and driers.

One story I have told in the book was about a woman who was a Soviet Jewish emigre. She was told by her landlord that he was increasing the rent. She refused to pay the increase and kept on paying the previous year’s rent. She reasoned that the government only gave her so much money and he could not be allowed to ask for this rent increase. We tried to explain that the landlord had this right. She continued to pay only the previous year’s rent until one spring day when it was legal for the landlord to evict her summarily, she found her belongings on the street (what was left of them after the landlord took what he figured would cover the money she hadn’t paid). She was heartbroken and confused. “How could he do this?” What makes sense to us often does not make sense to an immigrant. We did what we could to help her.

Immigrants are often confused, uncomfortable and even lost in the new settings they find themselves in. We need to help care for them. They are usually people who have left everything behind to find a new life, a life where they are free and not discriminated against. How sad it is when they find themselves considered suspicious and dangerous when they need compassion and understanding most of all.