Hospitality, Refugees, and Radical Sanctuary
a repost
What does it look like to welcome refugees or to shelter people at risk? It isn’t as easy as an Instagram post or a catchphrase. A few years ago, I had the privilege of speaking with three people who put their lives on the line to offer sanctuary and hospitality in times of international and national crises.
Issues of security, internally displaced peoples, violence, and the need for shelter and hospitality are, unfortunately, global issues. How are people around the world facing multi-dimensional crises in their communities? What can Americans learn from their examples? What do you know about the internal displacement or the ethnic and religious violence in parts of the world that don’t make the main headlines in the West? Places like Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo, Bangladesh, Myanmar, India…? What is your own experience of offering or receiving radical hospitality, sanctuary?
Here is an excerpt from the story I wrote in 2022 for Plough Magazine featuring people in Congo, Nigeria, and Lebanon. You can read the whole article there.
“The war in Ukraine has brought eastern Europeans into the refugee and internally displaced crisis, with millions of Ukrainians now displaced. They join a growing throng around the world fleeing war, persecution, and natural and manmade disasters. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the number of displaced people doubled between 2010 and 2020, reaching over eighty million globally. More than half of these are internally displaced, meaning they remain within their national borders but have had to flee their homes. In each of these places there are people seeking to love their neighbor and welcome and shelter the stranger no matter the risk.
Democratic Republic of Congo
Conflict in the eastern Great Lakes region of the Democratic Republic of Congo was recently dubbed a neglected crisis by the Integral Alliance, a conglomeration of Christian humanitarian organizations. This means the violence is “protracted, complex or overlooked by the media.” Dr. Lazare Sebitereko, rector of Eben-Ezer University, said the area around his city of Minembwe has been devastated. In South Kivu, the region in which Minembwe lies, over three hundred villages have been burned to the ground between 2017 and 2021. According to the UNHCR, fifty thousand people were displaced just between January and April of 2019, adding to those already displaced by the violence.
Dr. Sebitereko founded the university in 2011 so that students in this rural region could access higher education. The area is so remote that supplies are brought in by chartered airplane or on the heads of people able to navigate the hilly terrain with no roads, which makes humanitarian assistance nearly impossible. This leaves the local population to care for internally displaced people with what little they themselves own.
“At one point,” Dr. Sebitereko said, “we had over six hundred people sheltered at the school campus. They slept in classrooms, the conference hall, the churches. We provided clean drinking water and medicine. We shared the roof, and we shared our food. If someone had one piece of maize and someone else had nothing, they cut it in half. And thousands more came. So, we opened our houses. Every house hosted two or three families.”
He described the challenge of caring for people who were used to being totally independent. “They had their own schools, churches, health centers, cattle. They had no problem with living and then the violence came and they faced the trauma of seeing everything destroyed or stolen, gone in one day. They are malnourished and grieving and when we share our homes and food, we are also sharing joys and sorrows.”
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) suggests three possible options for displaced people: voluntary return, local resettlement, or resettlement elsewhere. Traditionally, voluntary return has been seen as the preferred solution. However, return is complicated by ongoing violence, trauma, and the destruction of the home left behind. There is often not much to return to.
In Minembwe some families move on, hoping to cross the border and enter a refugee camp. Some stay in town. Many attempt to return home. One group of villagers whose entire village was burned revived themselves in Minembwe and then went back, hoping to rebuild. They were attacked and forced to flee again. They returned. Forty-one times since 2017, they tried to rebuild their lives and were attacked.
“One woman came with nothing,” Dr. Sebitereko said. “Nothing. Only the clothes on her back, and she was pregnant. She gave birth in one of our homes. She named her son Eben-Ezer, rock of help. She said, ‘I am saved because there are people here to take care of me.’ God is my own rock of help, every day, every hour. We are only alive because of God and prayer.”
Dr. Sebitereko rebuffed the idea of turning anyone away, even when there were no more beds. “We never turn people away. You never tell someone who is stranded, coming for help, to go away. Never. God is still doing miracles, helping us through the desert, giving us enough water, food, clothes.”
God is at work, even while fighting rages around Minembwe and there is no guarantee of security or a full belly. One day a young man approached Dr. Sebitereko. He had been waiting more than five hours for an opportunity to speak with the rector, and begged him to listen to his request. “I just arrived here,” he said. “My house was burned with everything I owned. Please, I no longer have a Bible. I need to read the word of God and I don’t know where to find a Bible.” Dr. Sebitereko nearly cried. Here was a man who had lost every worldly possession, and he was hungry and thirsty for a Bible.
“We know God is with us,” he said. “Providing shelter, sustaining us, answering our prayers. Please pray for us.”
Sanctuary as Radical Hospitality
Dr. Sebitereko and his colleagues in Minembwe are providing sanctuary, radical hospitality. For many, hospitality has become tamed and outsourced, distancing guests and hosts, or focused exclusively on family and friends rather than including people in need. Henri Nouwen describes this domestication of hospitality as conjuring “images of tea parties, bland conversations, and a general atmosphere of coziness.”
But hospitality as sanctuary confronts the cultural idols of comfortability, safety, autonomy, independence, and privacy. According to Dr. Christine Pohl, author of Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, it exposes the failure of these idols to satisfy.
“Hospitality,” Dr. Pohl said, “is a response of grace to grace. God has opened up the life of the Trinity and welcomed us. We are asked to respond to that grace in the form of showing welcome to others.” Hospitality is fundamental to our identity as Christians. “There is an element of mystery in hospitality, that God is present in the practice for both hosts and guests. Even in the challenges, God’s presence is life-giving and life-affirming.”
The gospel as God’s hospitable welcome motivates Christian hospitality, but scripture also commands it. In the Old Testament God commanded care for the alien, sojourner, neighbor, and stranger. Hospitality is even a requirement for church leadership (1 Tim. 3:2).
Sanctuary moves from hospitality as welcome to hospitality as risk-taking protection. Sanctuary is not the hospitality of a comfortable dinner gathering around twinkling lights and sparkling water, it is hospitality as resistance: resistance to dehumanization, violence, division, economic oppression, religious boundaries, fear of contagion.”
You can read the whole article there.
What is your experience of offering or receiving sanctuary? Hospitality? Radical welcome?