A Catholic deanery in the San Francisco Bay Area has established a refugee support committee to help recent arrivals integrate into their new communities with greater ease. The Alameda Deanery’s Welcome the Stranger (WTS) program, inspired by Pope Francis’ ongoing call to welcome the stranger, has already assisted several families, community member David Harberger writes in the Alameda Post.
“The committee is composed of people from all walks of life and of all ages. Middle and high school students, young adults, couples, and retired folks all contribute,” helping guide new community members with language, education, and transportation services, and more. “To date, more than 10 families have been assisted by WTS, and several family members have already become US citizens.”’
“In 2015, Pope Francis directed Catholic parishes worldwide to accept a larger role in assisting refugees, immigrants, and the impoverished,” Harberger said. In a meeting with hundreds of refugees and migrants last year, Pope Francis said welcoming was “the first step toward peace,” and during his famous 2015 visit to the Americas said that migrants should not be viewed as numbers but as people. Communities should “respond in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal.”
It’s a message Alameda community members are carrying out. Shelter In Peace, a sister organization to WTS, helps refugees, as well as immigrant and low-income families, with temporary housing until they can get on their feet. “Welcome the Stranger team members discovered early on that securing housing is difficult for refugees,” Harberger continued in this piece, noting that new arrivals don’t have the kind of credit history or references needed to rent their own place.
Shelter In Peace has helped address their gap by working with landlords on a case-by-case basis, helping more than 150 clients to date.
“It’s usually quite doable to help clients find a job,” Shelter in Peace Committee Chair Anna Rossi said last year. “It might not be a job you or I would want, but if they’re willing to clean hotel rooms or wash dishes or something similar, there’s usually something available. Housing is the hard part, and that’s why I founded Shelter in Peace—so there would be a place to start.”
Writing about Shelter In Peace last year, Alameda Post contributor Karin K. Jensen wrote that it wasn’t hard to imagine the challenges that recent arrivals face, because her own family members have lived it. Like some of Alameda’s newest community members, they were also helped by local faith groups.
“Long ago, my mother had to assist my aunts when they emigrated from China, escaping the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War,” she wrote. “They had been living in a small, rural village in third-world conditions. When they arrived, my mother sought the assistance of a Presbyterian charity, the Ming Quong Home, where my aunts received subsidized transitional housing and donated clothes, took lessons in English and cultural etiquette, learned the skills of modern life, and found assistance enrolling in school and finding jobs. Thanks to Ming Quong’s help, they became contributing members of society with thriving children who are my cousins.”
The vast majority of Americans support the welcoming of refugees who are escaping violence and war – and we see that in action, in Alameda and communities all over the nation.
In Connecticut, a group of sponsors taking part in the Biden administration’s private sponsorship program recently welcomed a family of six that initially fled the Syrian civil war in 2012. At that time, Zyad Al Mahameed and Souzan Al Jarad had just one child, who, because of age, “was unaware of the surrounding war,” Welcome Corps said. “That’s when I thought that I should start a plan to get out of there, just to save our lives,” the family’s father said. In Pennsylvania this past January, sponsors welcomed John Morales, Valentina Godoy, and 7-year-old Alan Godoy, a Venezuelan family that has been targeted by criminal groups. The sponsors “hosted a seventh birthday party for Alan, and were with him when he saw snow for the first time,” The Philadelphia Citizen reported.
