Sharon E. Watkins Shares the Stories of Iraqi Refugees

General Minister and President Sharon E. Watkins recently visited Israel, Palestine and Lebanon as part of a Global Ministries trip to the Middle East. Her trip included opportunities to meet with Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders, as well as to visit schools, religious sites, and interfaith centers. She also spent three days in Damascus, Syria at a World Council of Churches (WCC) meeting that allowed Protestant and Orthodox members of WCC to further explore their relationship.

The following is her personal glimpse on the church’s response to the Iraqi refugee crisis in the region.

Three moms are sitting across the table from us in a Beirut clinic. Three Iraqi moms far from home. Pretty sure they'll never be able to go back. At least not like it is now.

Lelia never once stops crying. Every time she about gets herself together, the tears well up again and drop down her cheeks. She's been in Lebanon three years already - since the beginning of the war. Sahira, more composed (or is it resigned?) has been here for ten years - since the beginning of the first Gulf War.

Ranna, only three months a refugee, has three year old Ricardo on her lap. We smile - the same name as my husband, Rick. Rick is in his "dad" mode, making faces at Ricardo, trying to get him to laugh.

We hear the women's stories: "We used to live in peace with our Muslim neighbors - we knew the birthdays of each other's children. But now it's all disorder. People come to kidnap our sons, to threaten our daughters."

"We owned our own shop. Now we have nothing."

Tears are welling in all our eyes now.

Two and a half million refugees from Iraq (the US has accepted to resettle 14,000). Most are in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon - bursting those small countries at the seams, exhausting local relief efforts, introducing inflationary pressure, raising concerns that moderate, secularized countries where Christian and Muslim have lived side by side in peace, will be irreversibly destabilized.

In Lebanon, a newly-arrived refugee family receives fifty dollars from our partners to help with food, a change of clothes, medicine, school supplies, rent. A drop in the bucket of their need.

In Syria, forty dollars feeds a family of four for two weeks. Our partners struggle to feed 500 families in Aleppo - $20,000 for one food delivery. In Damascus that two week food delivery costs $600,000 for the one hundred fifty thousand destitute families our partners are feeding there. Local churches are overwhelmed.

"These people were teachers, engineers," we are told. "They came with some money in their pockets. They have nice clothes on. They don't look destitute. But they are destitute. They are used to being the ones who give. Now they have to receive."

The moms have left the room - off to their appointments.

"How do you keep going in the face of all this?" I ask the social worker.

"I have a roof over my head," she says. "What right do I have to be overwhelmed?"

I ask the same of our Greek Orthodox partner in Damascus. "The people are so grateful," he says. "You see the relief in their faces. Besides. This is what Jesus would do. We have to respond. We must keep going."