The names are grouped into two sets. The first set, the places people have fled to—Buriej, Calang, El-hol, Tindouf, Kacha Gari, Iridimi, Nueva Loja, and countless other settlements, slums, border cities, and wildernesses—is less familiar, if known at all. By contrast, the second set is like a stream of headlines: Gaza, the 2004 tsunami, Iraq, the Western Sahara, Afghanistan, Darfur, Colombia, famines, military coups, tribal conflict, persecution. And while the first set represents places people have fled to, this second set illustrates their reasons for fleeing.
How, outside your homeland, do you start from scratch? Where do you go, and how do you get there? How, in a settlement of tents and tarps, do you build a life? Or how, within a foreign nation, do you speak and expect your voice to be heard? And then no matter what you choose, there is also always this: How, in the midst of it all, can any life seem right after the horrors you've seen?
These are the daily questions of refugees worldwide, who, when counted along with asylum seekers and others who are internally displaced or stateless, number 32.9 million—just slightly less than the global population of people living with HIV. Supporting refugees begins with helping meet their immediate needs: namely, re-housing for those living locally as well as permanent living conditions on an international scale. We’ll begin in the summer of 2008 to wrestle with these issues in an effort to discover our place of response—come fall, be expecting specific opportunities to engage this initiative as a way of serving in the world.