The reason that they felt that they had to leave their home country, their families, their traditions… Knowing that that was because of the good they were doing in the world, that's devastating. For someone to understand that by helping other people they were being persecuted. So, that's number one; to see these people having to leave everything they know, everything they love, everything they've built and worked for in order to help the world be a better place, they were forced to make these amazingly cruel decisions... I mean, the cruelty was forced on them. And visiting them; it was emotionally heart-wrenching, devastating to hear the stories of pain, of some losing their children along the way, of smugglers taking everything that they had, of the government throwing them out of their any sense of reality.
There's so much pain in this world. We are overwhelmed. As an individual, I am overwhelmed so many times by hearing the stories. And we hear similar stories from so many groups of people that we are just our senses cannot handle every story. And we tend to discount what we don't see with our own eyes or experience with our own beings being proximate to people. There's nothing that compares with seeing the face of a ten-year old child or a 4-year old child--as I did--telling you the story. They're the stories their fathers and mothers are telling us, but they are more raw, they're more real, they're more honest for somehow, they didn't make those stories up. They lived those stories. And so, being there firsthand; there's nothing that can compare to that to help us to understand how cruel people can be to each other.
When people hear these stories they are moved to immediately say, "What can we do?" Whatever I can do to help; to set up a social service agency there so we can send resources to them and disseminate it so that that can be a gathering point that they can connect with each other and help one another. That's essential too. I've been talking with other people in the relief agencies world-round to help to do that. They need to know that we care about them. So, not only us giving to them but for them to know that they're not forgotten.
* Trinity Memorial Church, Philadelphia
Published on 30Plus TV, 15 February 2018, Thursday
