Latest / Centrally Speaking / Entertaining Angels Unaware: A Discussion about Refugees

Transcript

Entertaining Angels Unaware: A Discussion about Refugees · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Centrally speaking, it is the central strength of the church's politics.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: In particular, if the dresses have a Christian worldview, intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the Middle Way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology of the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: We're very privileged today to have Dr.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: Phil Godshawk with us as we talk about refugees.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: And we've entitled this discussion, Entertaining Angels Unaware, a discussion about refugees.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: I've known Dr.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Phil for a number of years.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: He is a Penn State graduate from 1980, graduate in Russian studies.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: And he also attended KU Leuven University in Logan, Belgium, graduating with a Doctor of Philosophy in 2004 and a master in 1997.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: He's been on the mission field for many, many years, uh over 38 years, in communist uh Yugoslavia for three years, in Serbia for two years during the Bosnian War, in the Netherlands for 21 years as a professor of philosophy at Tyndale Theological Seminary.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then he spent uh several weeks in Greece on the island of Lesbos, where uh he also worked with refugees.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: He's married to Linda for now some 39 years.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: She also has her doctorate degree from the University of Leiden.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: They have together three children and two grandchildren.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: And Phil has just written a book called Entertaining Angels Unaware, Welcoming the Immigrant Other, which was published by Cascade of Publishers in 2021.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Phil, welcome to the show.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: We're glad to have you.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Glad to be here.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: And glad to talk with you about refugees, uh, something that's been in your family's experience for many, many years.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: How did you first start talking about or thinking about refugees and immigrants?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: What were some of the earliest memories you had?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: The first encounter we had with uh refugees came from the Vietnam War.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: So we're old enough to remember as just teenagers, preteens, the Vietnam War on television every night.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: And we watched the evacuation of friendlies from Saigon, people that had stood in the water for days.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, one of those families came to our home church.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: We were raised in a small evangelical Lutheran church, and technically our youth group sponsored this family, but in fact, I think it was more our mothers that did the work.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: But you can remember from that time meeting the immigrant family, the refugee family, and welcoming them into the life of the church.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: Any particular memories uh strike you?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe this is part of the heartbreak.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think they were welcomed into the church.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: They were welcome to come to the church, but I don't think the church as a whole embraced them.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: It was a small group that worked with them.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: The church we grew up in was a very ethnically German church, if that makes any sense to people who know about Pittsburgh, a very, very ethnic church, very small church, under 100.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: So it was really few people, the youth group sponsors and our mothers and some others who helped.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: But by and large, it was a difficult experience, I think, for the refugees because they didn't understand many things and people in the church weren't very understanding sometimes.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: They let them take a parsonage.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: There were two parsonages, so they let them have one of the parsonages, the old one.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: People from Southeast Asia are cold in the winter, so they turned the thermostat way up, which enraged the people that kept the books because this was crazy.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: Why was it so why did it keep it so warm?
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lack of understanding, I think, kind of on both sides.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: They were a Roman Catholic family by background.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: And so they came to our church once or twice to be kind, but they weren't comfortable there.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: And as well, they just didn't know the language.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: The children and wife knew no foreign language at all.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: The husband had learned French.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: He was a police officer in Saigon.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: His English was very limited, often mistakes between French and English.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: And he never really did learn English very well.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: Eventually left, went back to Vietnam.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_03: But the children and the wife learned English quite well.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: Linda's mom and my mom worked with her a lot, helped her with her English and other things, just how do you shop?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure it was an exposure to uh people that live very different than, let's say, those out in Pittsburgh, or we had that experience here in the church in the Philadelphia area, welcoming a Cambodian family as a young person, an entirely different, recognize an entirely different lifestyle.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: I still believe that they raised and ate a dog, but I've been corrected and chastised about that.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: But it seemed to me there was a dog and then the dog disappeared.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: People have different ideas about what it means to raise an animal to eat it.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: There were different different customs, obviously.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: They were far away from family members.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_03: So other family members that were brought to the U.S.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: went to California with a much warmer climate, much more like they would have been accustomed to.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: And eventually this family left the Pittsburgh area and went to California.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: But that was a contribution your church uh made at a time where maybe we're getting more uh accustomed to uh refugees in the world.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: How many refugees are there now in the world uh today, from the statistics that you've seen?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_03: 20.4 million refugees and 40 million in internally displaced people.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: So people that have been forcibly uh driven out of their homes and out of their countries, usually.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: What type of countries are they coming from uh generally?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, some come from Africa, places where there's been a lot of violence, like the north of Congo or Cameroon.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: But it's the Christian church that has the opportunity to really make a difference with refugees and has for a number of years.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm curious if you might share with us a few texts from uh the scripture that uh might be of help or a motivation for Christians or something that has motivated Christians to look after a refugee.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: I shouldn't speak evil of the church we grew up in.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: It gave us very good theological preparation for life.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things we obviously learned there was the two great commandments, the greatest and the second greatest commandment.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_03: And the second greatest commandment is love your neighbor as yourself.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: If you put yourself in the shoes of someone who's lost everything, lost their home, lost almost all of their possessions, and then have been forced to go live in another country where they don't know the language, they don't know the customs, it's it's all new.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: How would you want to be treated?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_03: How would you like to be helped if you were in that situation?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's just the beginning.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that verse really, I think, taps the main thing in that is compassion.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, if you have no compassion, you won't help.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_03: If you think they're potential terrorists or you think they got what they deserved, uh, you'll have no compassion.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: But if you understand that this Syrian family that you're looking at has had their apartment blown to bits, that there's nothing left of this ancient city at all because of the bombing their own government took against them, I think would move you to compassion.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_03: So that's the first one.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: I guess the second one, I hope I don't use this out of context with the New Testament professor, but Old Testament text, maybe you'll let me go.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: Foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native born.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: Love the foreigners as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: I am the Lord your God.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I know that's taken out of the Old Testament law, it's maybe not clear to us, but I found it very interesting that a Jewish rabbi used this text to explain why we should care for people that are different.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: And he said, you know, Moses tells them they have to treat these foreigners, the people that live among them, that are resident aliens, they have to treat them well because they lived in Egypt.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, imagine the life they had in Egypt.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't easier or wonderful.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: But the point is, God preserved you in that time and you suffered, but God preserved you.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: And so you ought to look at these people who are suffering and say, just as we suffered, they're suffering.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: And so just as we wished help, now we should help.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: So that that word foreigner is a word you can take throughout the Old Testament, and it gives a better understanding, maybe of what they meant.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: So, how did your church a number of years ago help out the foreigner, the one from Vietnam?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: What were some of the things that your church did at that time?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they provided them housing.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: They did provide utilities despite some complaints.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: They provided some money for food.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: I don't remember specifically how they were treated later on when I worked with some Russian immigrants.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: They were entitled to government subsidies, food stamps that they could get.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: So I assume somebody did that work for them and helped them to figure out what they were entitled to.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: Help to get children into school, help with learning English, help with taking them to the store.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think they had a car, recall that they were taught to drive while they were there.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: A little more complicated, maybe in Pennsylvania than some other places to get a driver's license and friendship.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: My mother and Linda's mother just made friends with the woman Ni.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_03: Their name was Win, N Y G E N.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: I don't remember how it's spelled.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: Just trying to be there and be a friend, be a comforting presence, get to know her, encourage her.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: They had five children and had one more before they left our church.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of responsibility for the wife.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: I don't recall whether anybody befriended the husband.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: He went through things that many men go through when they emigrate.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: He was nobody.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_03: He'd been a police officer.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: He'd even been a chief of police in Gray's area.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_03: And now he was nobody.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: He'd been somebody that knew French and could, you know, interact with international people, but now he found himself somebody who couldn't speak simple sentences and be understood sometimes.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: He couldn't find work.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: It was hard for him to find a job.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: And many refugees find themselves taking much more menial work than they had before.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: And that's often a shock.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: Some people accept it better than others.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: Usually they say, well, for the sake of my children, I'm willing to do this.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: But it does usually mean a come down in some respects.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it seems that one problem that some Americans or Westerners have today is the problem with refugees and terrorism being uh linked together.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: This has been in the news and this has frightened people away from looking after refugees.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: Can you speak to that at all?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, how have you seen that in your experience?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: There are several confusions.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: One confusion is who is refugee?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: And a refugee is not an illegal immigrant.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_03: A refugee is somebody who gains immigrant status through a long process.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's actually about 12 different steps.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: First, they're vetted by the UNHCR.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: Are they in fact refugees?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a coveted status.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: You don't get that easily.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: The UN does very careful background checks on your history.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: They do medical checks, they follow up your stories, make sure your stories jive.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: And then it moves on at that level to a country that's willing to take you.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: And in the US case, there are um refugee settlement centers, and they take the case the next step.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: They go through all that information again, biometric data, pictures, fingerprints, story, everything, uh, health checks.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_03: And then if they approve it, it goes to the next agency, which is the FBI, who verifies it all once again.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: And then if they agree, then it goes to an agency like Church World Service, which finds another smaller group to sponsor that family.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: And the whole process has to go through where there's a place for them to go.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: There are people prepared to take them.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's a long process.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: And from the point that they're accepted, it's a year before they actually land in the country.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: And they can always be rejected.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: If somebody at the border is told, watch out for that one, don't admit them, they can reject them.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: So to say that refugees are terrorists is not very accurate.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, before last year, there were no murders by a refugee since the 1970s.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: But in this past year, there was a fellow named Ahmad Aliwa Alissa who uh killed 10 people.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: So that's the first one since the 1970s, he killed 10 people.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: But the statistics without those 10 would be 1 to 3.89 billion the chances of you being killed by an immigrant.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't know how you fit in 10 more to one point, uh one to three point eight billion, but I don't think it makes a big difference.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: The point is if you look at a cost analysis, how much the country spends to protect us from terrorism, it they can't do any better.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_03: At a certain point, it it becomes impossible.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: Another confusion is uh that people confuse those who are homegrown terrorists.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe their parents were immigrants and they were not, and they became radicalized in the US, or people who were admitted on other visa, sorts of visas than immigrant visa.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: So all of the 9-11 bombers came in on other visas.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_03: They were not immigrants, any of them.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_03: They were on tourist business and I think one was on a fiance visa.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: So none of them were went through that whole process, that 12-step process.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_03: The case of the Boston bombers, the Sarnaev brothers, they were allowed in with their parents for reasons of political asylum.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: They came on a tourist visa and then were granted the right to stay, but they didn't go through the same steps abroad.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_03: And even then, the older Sornayev brother was radicalized in the US.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's just a mistake to say refugees are dangerous.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: I won't speak to the question of illegal immigrants that come across the southern border.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_03: There's a professor at Wheaton, Daniel Carroll Rojas, who's written a book on that called The Bible and Borders.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: If somebody wants to read a good book, a book you can trust by an evangelical, he answers those questions.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: I don't feel competent to answer those questions.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's misleading, I guess, is what I'm hearing from you about what one might hear in the in the media about how dangerous a refugee could be.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: And in actuality, they're no more dangerous than anybody else, I guess is what you're saying.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is that correct?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: Probably less.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: You're you're being murdered or greater.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_03: Your odds of being murdered by national is are greater than that you would be murdered by an immigrant.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: The problem is that this issue is so highly politicized that people want to push definitions one way or the other or push for one extreme or the other in in terms of what we should do.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: So you have on one side people saying, close the borders, let's just be isolationist, let's not let anybody in, let's just keep ourselves safe and not worry about this.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: And on the other extreme, you have people that are saying, open borders, let anybody come in.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_03: To my mind, neither make any sense.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_03: We need immigrants to help our economy.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's just the fact.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, in Germany, the German foreign minister or minister of finance said, if we don't have immigrants, our pull for Social Security, for our welfare program, our retirement goes smaller and smaller and smaller until we have no money.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: So we have to have people move in and take jobs and pay taxes.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: That may sound overly simplified, but we generally need people to take jobs that most people won't take.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: Immigrants usually take lower level jobs, unskilled labor kind of jobs.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: Those are jobs people don't want.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: So, and then the confusion about who's an immigrant is part of the those that are opposed to immigration and want isolationism, label every immigrant illegal or dangerous, terrorist, and they don't make a careful distinction.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: So it seems that there's a lot of disinformation out there.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_03: There are a couple other good books that I could recommend if listeners want to know.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: So a couple different heads of refugee agencies or agencies that help refugees have also written books.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: I could recommend them as well.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in your book, which I've been reading, uh you speak of Emmanuel Levina's The Other and in relation to uh refugees.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: Can you say something about the other and what that means and how he applied that uh to uh refugees?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, when you study philosophy on the continent, and particularly in a French-speaking Belgium, has at least roughly half of the people of French-speaking.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: You're exposed to French-speaking thinkers.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_03: Emmanuel Levinos was in fact a Russian Jew from Lithuania, but his family moved to France when he was young and then he did his studies in France.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: Levinos is known as an ethicist, although it wouldn't kind of fit your normal categories.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: But his basic idea is that when you see another, another person, you become ethically responsible for that person.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: That doesn't necessarily mean you need to feed them or house them, but it means you have some obligation, at least to recognize them as a human being.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_03: I used some of my philosophical training in the book to try to set up an atmosphere.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know how successful it was.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: Some people who understood it found it, found it helpful.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: You know, Levinas himself went through a period where after the Second World War, he just fell silent.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: He lost a lot of family in the war.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: He kind of had two sides.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: He had the side that did exegesis of the Talmud, and he had the side that wrote philosophy.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: And for a while he just fell completely silent.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: Then he came back again with some Talmudic Jewish studies, Judaica studies, and then eventually got back into philosophy.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: But I think that concept of his of our ethical responsibility for the other is an important, pregnant, if you will, kind of term.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: And from a Christian standpoint, I think he's kind of hitting a spot that we should respond to.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: He's basically saying, again, you should have compassion.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's your responsibility to care for the other, to use that sense as you would have them care for you.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Treat the foreigner as one of your own native lord.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: He's kind of hitting on that nerve.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's uh helpful.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe I've misused the notion a little much, a little bit, maybe I've taken it out of context, but I think that particular concept of his is helpful.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's so easy for all of us to get involved in our own worlds and um not see the other.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: Might you have an idea or two how we might be able to uh appreciate the other a little bit more?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: I will confess, I'm like anybody else, right?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm involved in my own problems.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: If you have a leaky water pipe in the house, that's where your attention goes.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, if you'll leak in the roof, if you have to pay your bills, you have to go to work, your car has a flat, you tend to get absorbed in yourself.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: But I think the the beginning is just to be aware of people around you.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: I've been thinking about this a lot, and I don't mean to throw any stones at anybody, but if you live out in the country and you don't have really any neighbors, it's kind of hard to know who your neighbor is.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: You can be isolated in a sense.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: You can stay out of the city.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe because of where we live, I feel this more concretely right now.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we live in the city.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: We chose to live in the city.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's going to cost me$4,000 a year in taxes to live in the city, but we chose to live in the city because we believe in helping people in the city and we wanted to be involved insofar as we could in efforts that our mission has in reaching out to immigrants in this city.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: Whatever anybody thinks about Lancaster's viewpoint toward refugees is a political question.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: I don't want to get into that per se, but we have people here from all over, just in our neighborhood, just in our little part of the street here.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: We've got Hispanic people, African American people, and white people.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: So we're we have a fairly mixed area, just our own neighborhood.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: And the city itself is quite diverse.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: I think probably something like 29% are uh other nationalities, not white.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's a very diverse city.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's always been a city of immigration, even back to the revolutionary days.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: This area is known for the immigration of Amish and Mennonites and others, and that that's in the city here as well.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: We decided to choose a church that's here in the city that's very diverse ethnically, not as diverse as it might be, but it's still pretty diverse.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: It has a very strong uh mission-mindedness, and they have been involved in helping to furnish and fix up a house for a refugee family.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we have we have a lot of people around us, and I think part of that is just to become accustomed to people who are different.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, maybe for us it's not as hard because we lived all over the place and had so many different nationalities, but there's always a certain threat.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: I don't speak Spanish.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what they're saying about me.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not black, I'm white.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: I know so far none of my neighbors have been unpleasant toward me.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_03: Some have even been kind and reached out to me.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: In this day of COVID, I don't know if I dare say it, but shake my hand and say hello, welcome to the neighborhood.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: I think partly what we need to do to be able to work with immigrants is just to be more aware of differences around us, more open to differences around us.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: And that's not to say you should be foolish.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: Some people are dangerous.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_03: If I saw somebody that looked like they were on drugs, I would walk away.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: I wouldn't be bothered.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I would not that I wouldn't be bothered, I would I would try to be safe.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: But when you see people around you that are human beings, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, two legs, two arms, you say hello.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not a big deal.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_03: On a very small scale, try ethnic food.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: Go to the Peruvian chicken place for dinner sometime.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_03: Try a Mexican restaurant that's serving good Mexican food.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if your Cambodian folks have a restaurant that they've opened, but there are a lot of people from Myanmar here.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, so there are lots of different ways to come in contact with people of other backgrounds.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in several places, you've come across uh some people from very different backgrounds, uh, particularly in your direct work with refugees.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned your work in Serbia, but also in Greece.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I wonder if you might just say uh something about the refugees uh that you met.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: The Greek island of Lesbos is about three miles by boat to Turkey.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a very close point of contact between Western Europe and Turkey.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: And so smugglers bring people up from Syria and other places and put them in a dinghy, and if it's clear night, they can paddle in the clear night across to the shores.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_03: Some people have died in that passage, but not as many as um across the Mediterranean.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: But the the sad thing, I think the saddest thing about the situation is that nobody wants to take responsibility.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: The Turks were paid, I think, three and a half billion euros to keep the refugees in their own borders and send them back.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: And they have a couple model camps, but they're not stopping the people.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's a very tempting situation for people, whether they're refugees, literally like war refugees from Syria, or whether they're migrants, some of the African guys would be migrants or people Middle Eastern young men, migrants, they want a better life.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_03: It's tempting to put together the money, get a smuggler to help you get into that boat, get across.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: And then once you're across, you have a certain status that protects you until your case is decided.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: You must be dealt with according to the Geneva Convention.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_03: You can't be just putting the boat and sent back.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: So there they have a certain length of time they know they'll be there.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: And then as their processes work through, sometimes the process doesn't finish for two years.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know whether people are dragging their feet in the in the administration that deals with it.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes there's been violence.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: When I arrive on Leslos, some of the people in the camp had started a riot and lit fires.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: And that was not the first time.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: And then there was another one during that week.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_03: But it's such a harsh situation.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I I don't know the I don't know the current place where they're kept.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_03: They were in a place called the Moria Detention Center at that time, which was basically a minimum security prison, big hurricane fence and razor wire.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: Most people were not really kept in and they were allowed to to come and go, at least during the day.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: A very few were kept in the inner prison that was more security, secure area, except for like when the rioters were captured.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: They put them in that place until their case was was heard.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: They were given a court case in Athens, and then um most of them were put back on a boat and sent to Turkey.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: But in just uh i don't know if you've been to Greece but uh Greek island in the summer is miserably hot you can't imagine it's just I think it was 44 degrees so that Celsius so it's up there around 1045 I guess and it's dusty.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: The Moria camp was just a big slab of concrete on a hillside and the facilities they had to live on were live in were very primitive.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: The those that were fortunate had like a an ISO box so like a shipping box that then had been fitted up to be a home for for people.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_03: Most people were in group settings.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people lived in tents on the side of the hill of what was had been an olive garden.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: Some people had been living in a mass tent that held about 150 for more than two years.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't like the food it was chickpeas and feta cheese and pita bread and stuff they didn't like.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's okay I I ate it it was you could live on it but it wasn't very pleasant sometimes.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: Chicken was good when they got chicken they were excited about that.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: They were given a small amount of money to spend at their discretion for personal items and they often bought a chicken or something and made a meal.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: There was a level of whether brutality is the word but just the animosity between the different groups they kept Iranians separate from the Afghanis kept the Africans separate from the others.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: This is always some sort of low level kind of animosity was a prison, a detention center it wasn't meant to be nice.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: And sometimes you wondered if it was meant to be nasty.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: As people kept coming across they couldn't send them back nowhere to put them so they put them in there in a place that should have held maybe 2,000 swelled to 12000 at one point.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: And every time it would swell like that there'd be a riot and some problems and people were trying to push the process that way.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: Moria was burned down completely and now they've opened up another camp and as I say I haven't been there so I can't really say it was not allowed to take pictures inside the the camp secure facility of prison you're not really allowed to take pictures required to be silent about our faith.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: We couldn't share our faith we could help people we all did various jobs to help the people there.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: Hopefully our behavior said something about who we were they knew we were Christians.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: Although I met others who were working there one girl was a Mormon young lady was helpful to me in speaking French with some of the unaccompanied women the single women but yeah it was a very kind of an eye-opening experience from the standpoint of just difficulty misery and you know no no exit just kind of being stuck hit the lottery if you finally got out.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so many refugees living in going through difficult processes, living in difficult places and have a large issue in our world right now, don't we?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah I mean the the difficulty with Lesbos is a difficulty with other places that people are crossing the Mediterranean at closer points to get to Italy or Spain.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_03: And each time one country shuts down its border then they move to another place.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: But problems are greater than just immigrants.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_03: There's a very big problem for economic migration.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_03: People want a better life they want to move to a better place.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think sometimes Americans are not very kind when they think about these things.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_03: My great-great grandfather left England to mine coal in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: He wanted to get head financially and he did he was very successful actually we seem to take this idea that it's illegitimate to want to move for a better life.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_03: We're not consistent because if you're a graduate student at Stanford you'll be allowed to stay especially if you're an MD, you know you're a doctor or you're an engineer if you've got something we want, we'll let you stay and all countries do that.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: So the question becomes more and I don't mean to preach socialism or world one world government but the EU recognizes that one of the things it has to do is invest in infrastructure in northern Africa so that people don't feel the need to emigrate so somehow or another you know we have to think about this.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's not an easy question.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not pushing any political solution but this is a real problem.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: If most of the world lives in poverty then there's going to be a drive to move in my book my main concern has not been economic migration it's been legal immigration for those who are war refugees people that have really lost everything.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: Oh thank you so much for taking some time uh today to talk with us about uh refugees we will be speaking uh with Dr.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: Phil and uh his wife Dr.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Linda on uh February the 11th at seven o'clock in the fellowship hall at Central Schwankfelder Church we'll be having a dessert as well as a presentation from Dr.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: Phil and then also some time to ask him questions about refugees in the world today.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: So we invite any listener to join us for that evening either in presence or via zoom.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: If you wish the Zoom link just call us at the church office 610 584 4480.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: Phil, thank you very much.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you Lord's blessings be with you.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: You too