The Rev. Gary Smith worked with several young students at Kakuma Refugee camp, including Luul, a Muslim from Somalia. Photo courtesy Jesuit Refugee Service.

Jesuit Father Gary Smith has dedicated more than 50 years of his life to serving the poor, including the last dozen in African refugee camps in Uganda, South Africa and Kenya. He says that working with the poor in U.S. cities, such as Portland, Tacoma and Oakland, prepared him for his work with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in Africa.

“It gave me a viewpoint of how the church had moved toward the poor. All the personalities you find on the streets prepare you for all the personalities you find in the camps. Human beings are human beings,” Fr. Smith says.

Now back in the states, Fr. Smith recently spoke with The Oregonian about why he’s drawn to Africa: “There are the poor and there are the poor. My experience in the refugee camp is that people there have no address, no money, no documents. The degree of poverty is very different.”

Fr. Smith also discussed working with refugees from other faiths.  He said working with Muslims was not difficult. “They believe in the absolute, the creator. They want help discerning how God is moving in their lives,” he says. “They saw me as a father, someone who wanted to listen to them very attentively. These students knew the Quran, and they rejected extremists out of hand.”

Fr. Smith also spent time helping refugee students work on an online diploma program through Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins, which is run by Jesuit universities and JRS.  “When you work with really bright refugees who want nothing more than to be a man and a woman for others, there is a great sense of accomplishment in that,” Fr. Smith says.

To read the complete interview with Fr. Smith, visit The Oregonian website.

Photo: JesuitCommons.com

A hundred Jesuit experts and educators from around the world met last week at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, to discuss the future of the “Jesuit Commons – Higher Education at the Margins” program. Higher Education in the Margins is a greater distance education initiative aimed at refugees that was launched two years ago by the Jesuit Refugee Service in collaboration with 13 Jesuit universities.

“The goals are really around the learning, the development of a new knowledge base, development of leaders who can think differently, solve problems on behalf of their community, wherever that community is,” said Dr. Mary McFarland, the International Director of the program.

The conference, she said, is an opportunity to plot the future for the initiative: “We’re learning together how the model needs to evolve, to insure that there is access to those at the margins for Jesuit higher education.” While she acknowledged that, as a new program, “Higher Education at the Margins” faces some challenges, she is optimistic about the outcome: “We’re in a pilot, so it’s not a utopia. We have a lot of challenges that we’re trying to understand collectively from a world-wide point of view… but the outcome is well worth it, it highlights there’s this phenomenal, growing group of people around the world committed.”

To listen to the full podcast about the event from Vatican Radio,

[Vatican Radio]

Catholic nuns based across the Artibonite river in San Francisco of Banica Parish in the Dominican Republic organized the project in consultation with community leaders. Jesuit Refugee Service/USA provided $113,000 to fund the project, and members of the community supplied the labor to build roads, construct cisterns and lay miles of plastic pipe and tubing.

“We had 11 brigades of 25 to 32 people each working on the project. They carried sand and cement to places where trucks could not reach. They carried these things over the hills to the source of the water,” said Wilens Thomas, of Los Cacaos.

Water project highlights recovery in Haiti from Jesuit Refugee Service | USA on Vimeo.

Previously, obtaining clean water meant a hike of several miles — one way — over rugged hills and through valleys to collect the water in buckets and jerrycans. The arduous trip took four hours or more, and often had to be done twice a day.

“Before the project I would send the kids to get water, it would sometimes take them half a day or more. Sometimes the water would spill on the return trip and they’d have to go back,” said community resident Olise, a father of five. Olise’s comment highlighted an additional benefit of the cisterns: children who were before engaged in trekking for hours to water sources now can concentrate on attending school within the safety of their communities.

“This project proclaims a bright future because all different age groups are involved. And I don’t want to leave out the work the women have done, they have done a great deal of work for this project,” said Sr. Refugio Chavez.

This community-based participative model for humanitarian aid delivery and development has had the dual role of providing necessary resources for the health of the community while strengthening the role of women in the decision-making processes and empowering them to take an active role in the development projects. In light of the prevalence of gender-based violence in Haiti, the full integration of local women in the planning and implementation of this life-saving water and reforestation project will have an enduring effect on the status of women in the region.

To read the full article and learn more about this ongoing project, please visit Jesuit Refugee Service/USA.

The Kino Border Initiative (KBI) was founded in January 2009 as a binational effort to help support and provide assistance to deported migrants. Since its founding, KBI has served thousands of migrants by providing food, shelter, first aid and pastoral support.

Fr. Carroll recently spoke with National Jesuit News by phone from Nogales to discuss the work of KBI and about his own background as a Jesuit. You can listen to our podcast with Carroll via the player below.

“The rebels are about 10,000, but attract the attention of the international community,” he told the Fides news agency. “Our mission is to give voice and hope to 99.9% of the Afghan population, who struggle every day with all their heart to go forward and to build a better tomorrow.”

JRS has been working in Afghanistan since 2005, when a team of Indian Jesuits started programs in the field of education: today in the “Technical High School” in Herat, there are 600 students taking courses in electricity, electronics, construction, trade. Since 2006, the religious also teach English, computer science, biology and physics to more than 3,000 university students in Herat, Bamiyan and Kabul.

“Children and young people are tired of war and very few of them have the opportunity to go to school,” he added. Jesuits are now teaching 600 students at a technical high school in Heart, 3,000 university students in Herat, Bamiyan, and Kabul, and 200 elementary school students who are refugees in Sohadat.

[Jesuit Refugee Service/USA]

Currently beyond capacity, the Safe Haven serves a vulnerable population – unaccompanied women and children, many of whom are victims of sexual and gender-based violence. Jesuit Refugee Service/USA director Jesuit Father Michael Evans, visited this work in March 2010, reflecting on his visit and experiences for Jesuit Refugee Service’s Voices.

“The camp is now bursting with 85,000 refugees living there, and a Kakuma II is being planned — and the JRS extended team has grown to sixteen. Along with continued pastoral care, dozens of trauma counselors have been trained over the years. However, the new work now includes a safe house for vulnerable women and children; the care of refugees with physical, mental, and emotional challenges; and outreach to those who cannot make it to the JRS Centers.”

Safe Haven in Kakuma from Jesuit Refugee Service | USA on Vimeo.

To read Father Evans’ full reflection, click here. Or to learn more about Jesuit Refugee Service, please visit their website.

“Each day of this online retreat will offer the opportunity to reflect prayerfully on the situation of refugees via the lens of The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. By linking the Spiritual Exercises to the plight of refugees and vulnerable migrants, we believe that the retreat will provide an easy way for people to fuse spirituality and social justice into their daily life. During the next four weeks we invite you — day by day — into an experience of “prayerful storytelling” as we share with you the grace-filled stories of God’s powerful love for all of us.

As you progress through this retreat, God will direct you and touch your soul with love and challenge in a truly personal way. We trust that the graces of this retreat will renew us and transform us into the heart of Jesus, deepening our commitment to accompany, serve and defend the rights of refugees and forcibly displaced people.”

For more information about the retreat, or for a direct link so you may participate in the online retreat, please visit: http://www.jrsusa.org/Retreat

Six months after the earthquake devastated Haiti on January 12, more than one million survivors continue to live in appalling conditions, with inadequate sanitation, limited access to services and food shortages, say the Jesuits who are working to provide humanitarian assistance.

Conditions in many of the nearly 1,400 camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) around the capital, Port-au-Prince, are extremely critical. The conditions at the largest Jesuit Refugee Services’ (JRS) camp, Automeca, with a population of 12,000, are typical. Here, residents continue to live in shacks held up by rags and poles. There are no schools or electricity, sanitation is poor and the water barely drinkable. When heavy rain falls, garbage rushes through the camp.

For many years, JRS has had a grassroots presence in Haiti and has provided humanitarian assistance to displaced Haitians in both the Dominican Republic and along the Haitian border. JRS – Haiti is focusing its current relief efforts in the Port-au-Prince area, working in seven camps that serve the needs of more than 21,000 displaced people in and around the capital by providing emergency assistance, psychosocial support, and training to community leaders to manage camps and civil society organizations.

“Camp management and aid delivery structures should always include consultation and cooperation with the displaced people who are swiftly forming their own organizations to advocate for their own particular needs,” said JRS/USA Director Jesuit Father Kenneth J. Gavin. “More attention must be placed on supporting the food and relief needs for IDP recipient communities and people not living in camps so that moving to a camp is not the only way for people to receive minimal food, water, and livelihood assistance.”

At a meeting with JRS – Haiti on June 20, seven IDP camp leaders highlighted numerous concerns, including the lack of security, particularly in camps that don’t have electricity and lighting at night, which pose a particular threat to women and children.

The situation in unofficial camps is even worse. Throughout the city, unofficial camp residents receive little or no care from large aid organizations or international coordinating bodies; many have even been told leave the camps but have not been provided with alternative housing.

“JRS welcomes the moratorium on forced evictions issued by the Haitian government. Unfortunately, pressure from landowners on IDPs to evacuate the sites continues. Actions go so far as intermittent disconnection of the water supply, and refusals to allow the construction of more permanent shelters and street lighting. ,” said JRS – Haiti Director Jesuit Father Wismith Lazard. “The government needs to use its authority to protect camp residents from this kind of harassment, and put more effort into identifying suitable shelter.”

In the video below, Frs. Lazard and Kawas Francois, president of the Jesuit Interprovincial Committee for the Reconstruction of Haiti, discuss the conditions in the camps in Haiti and the plans to open 17 Jesuit Fe y Alegria (Hope & Joy) schools in the next year in Haiti.

Jesuit Father Bill Johnson was in the Dominican Republic when the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12. Fr. Johnson is the director for pastoral care at the Institute of Latin American Concern (ILAC) of Creighton University located just outside of Santiago. ILAC is a Catholic, Ignatian-inspired, collaborative health care and educational organization offering service-learning and immersion experience opportunities in dental, medical, nursing, pharmacy, law, physical therapy and occupational therapy for undergraduate and high school students, and also to faculty-led groups, medical/surgical teams and other colleges in the rural Dominican Republic.

When the call went out for help in the days after the earthquake, Johnson answered it by offering his services as a translator and as a helper to the Creighton medical team assembled to come to Haiti to provide emergency medical care to the wounded and critically injured.

Jesuit Fr. Bill Johnson (center) poses with Jim Jalovec (right) and John Ward (left) in front of Jalovec's helicopter as they deliver supplies during relief efforts in Haiti.

Johnson experienced another tragedy in the days that followed the earthquake when his good friend, Jim Jalovec, was killed while providing help during the Haiti relief efforts. Jalovec had phoned Johnson immediately after the earthquake in Haiti to offer the services of his helicopter in the relief efforts. Good Samaritan Hospital in Jimaní, Dominican Republic, where Johnson and Creighton University’s medical teams were working, invited Jalovec and his pilot, John Ward, to come and fly doctors and medicine into Haiti. Three days into their rescue efforts, they died when their helicopter hit a mountain on the foggy night of Feb. 4. Johnson presided at Jalovec’s funeral in Chicago and Ward’s in Ft. Myers, Fla.

In memory of Jalovec, ILAC is selling “Show Your Goodness” t-shirts to help the ongoing relief efforts in Haiti. All profits will be sent to the Jesuit Refugee Service in Haiti to help children suffering from the earthquake. The shirts can be purchased by visiting the showyourgoodness.com website.

Johnson shared his reflections with nationaljesuitnews.com on his time helping at Good Samaritan hospital in the days following the earthquake. You can read his reflections and see his photos by clicking below.

Padre, did you feel it?” asked the neighbor lady as I made my way around the running path at our grounds in the Dominican Republic that evening.

“Feel what?” I asked.

“The wave in the ground. And were you shaking the barbed wire fence?”she inquired.

I stopped my run and headed back into the Institute for Latin American Concern (ILAC) center where I was told the lights hanging from the ceiling in the entrance had been swaying considerably.

Then the news hit: a major earthquake had battered our neighbors in Haiti. It was Tuesday, Jan. 12, and preliminary reports said there were possibly thousands dead or dying and many more homeless. I was in disbelief. How could this happen less than 200 miles away in Port-au-Prince and we had no damage or people hurt in the Dominican Republic? It didn’t seem right or fair. But what could any of us do about it?

I had arrived in the Dominican Republic at the end of August to be director of pastoral care at Creighton University’s ILAC center in Santiago de los Caballeros, the country’s second largest city, situated in the middle of the Cibao Valley between two mountain ranges that traverse the island.

Because ILAC has been providing basic health care to the poor of the Dominican Republic since 1977, Creighton University Medical Center was in a unique position to respond to the tremendous needs of the earthquake victims. The next morning I received a phone call from Creighton’s Dr. Brian Loggie, professor of surgery, and, with the amazing cooperation and generosity of many individuals and institutions in Omaha, we had a well-supplied, nine-member health care team on the ground here at the ILAC center in Santiago.By Saturday evening we were preparing for the seven-hour bus ride to Good Samaritan Hospital on the Haitian frontier in the town of Jimaní, in the southwest corner of the Dominican Republic.

We arrived at Good Samaritan by mid-afternoon on Sunday and our team of surgeons, anesthetists, nurses and a pediatrician went right to work at the triage center where over 400 patients were lying everywhere waiting for care, most for broken bones and crushed limbs. Most operations those first days were amputations. Anesthesia, antibiotics and other medicines and supplies had been almost non-existent before we arrived. Indeed, amputations had been done without anesthesia before our arrival.

Our Creighton team tried to bring some order to what looked like the chaos of a war zone, even as
more patients arrived in the back of pick-ups, flatbed trucks, ambulances and cars. Most had come from in and around Port-au-Prince, some 40 miles to the west.

Monday morning began a week of 12-hour shifts and non-stop work. By mid-day Dr. Loggie had become in charge of the surgical area where our operating teams worked while the rest of our team selected the most critical patients for surgery and cared for wounds in the triage center on the other end of the grounds. Because of my fluency in Spanish and French, I was put in charge of the front doors of the surgical center to allow only those with clearance to enter. At times I was called in to the operating rooms to help communicate between the surgical teams and the patients. The Haitians were amazingly patient and appreciative. Often their cooperative spirit and even smiles showed their tremendous resilience and amazing dignity.

Each day brought new duties and special moments for me. I can still feel my guts wrench when on Monday afternoon a nurse approached me at the front door carrying a large black plastic bag and asked me where the morgue was. I’d seen some caskets on the side of the building and asked what was in the bag. He told me it was the arm of the man I’d just translated for. Later, a huge man who I’d helped communicate with by telling his lovely young wife that the doctors would have to amputate his leg, died during the operation. I was away from my post at the entrance to the operatory when he died but was asked to comfort the distraught wife when I returned.

I tried to pray with her in French but it didn’t come easily. The Creole the Haitians speak is quite different from Parisian French. However, a Haitian woman joined us and began singing religious songs in Creole as we held the wife. It was amazing how her breathing eased and body relaxed at the songs and caresses. The next morning I prayed with her again before she left to return to Haiti.

By mid-afternoon on Tuesday I stopped and realized that in the midst of the terrible suffering all around me I felt consolation. I had the thought that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I was where I was meant to be: serving God’s suffering people. I was not happy but I was full of joy to be there. Service of God’s people is joy. I shared that with other members of the team after dinner that night and most felt the same joyful sense of meaning and purpose in their service. Indeed, we all lamented that it took such a tremendous human tragedy to get so many good people together to do such good work. People laughed when someone remarked that they’d normally be bickering among themselves at their jobs back in Omaha.

The remainder of the week was full of blessings and challenges. We were all deeply touched by the suffering
of the kids; so beautiful, eyes full of light, smiles that melt your heart, some orphaned. By Wednesday, we were able to arrange for our first helicopter evacuations of patients in need of special care. Over the following days and weeks many more patients were evacuated, many in helicopters from the U.S.S. Comfort, a thousand-bed hospital ship off the coast of Port au Prince, through the intervention of Creighton administrators and Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

By Thursday, Good Samaritan was running efficiently and more than 80 operations were performed. Health teams from many other nations came and went, but our Creighton team, and several more that followed us, were stalwarts of the staffing. I was very proud of Creighton and of our country for such generous responses.

By Sunday, Jan. 24, we decided it was time for us to leave. We’d put in a tremendous week of service and helped the hospital get up and running. A new team had arrived from Creighton and other health professionals and supplies were showing up daily. We would leave after Mass at noon. The Scripture readings fit perfectly: “Today is holy to the Lord your God. Do not be sad, and do not weep” (Nehemiah 8:9). “As the body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ” (1 Cor. 12). “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk. 1:21). I preached having lived the readings that week with God’s people, Haitian and American and many others. We had lived the words. We experienced joy.

Praise God!

Jesuit Father General Adolfo Nicolas, right, visits the JRS Haiti tent offices in Port au Prince with Jesuit Fr. Wismith Lazard of JRS Haiti, left. Between the two men are Jesuit Fr. Kawas Francois, in white shirt, and Jesuit Fr. Daniel Leblond. Fr. Francois is president of the Jesuit Interprovincial Committee for the Reconstruction of Haiti and founding member of the National Committee for Reflection and Action, and Fr. LeBlond is the Provincial of French Canada. (Photo courtesy JRS/USA)

Jesuit Father General Adolfo Nicolas visited the Haitian capital Thursday to see the work Jesuits have been doing to as they accompany and serve the people of Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating January 12 earthquake.

Fr. Nicolas, the leader of the Society of Jesus, visited the Jesuit novitiate in the Tabarre neighborhood of Port au Prince, where he met with staff of Jesuit Refugee Service Haiti and Fe y Alegria. Both organizations have set up offices in tents on the novitiate grounds, and staff and volunteers are also living in tents on the grounds.

For many years Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) has had a grassroots presence in Haiti and has provided humanitarian assistance to displaced Haitians in both the Dominican Republic and along the Haitian border. In addition, JRS has responded to the needs of Haitians following successive natural disasters, a food crisis, and repeated hurricanes.

While continuing to maintain its presence along the Northeastern border, JRS Haiti is focusing its current relief efforts in the Port-au-Prince area, working in seven camps that serve the needs of more than 21,000 displaced people in and around the capital. After visiting with staff and holding Mass, Fr. Nicolas met with and thanked JRS staff at the Automeca camp for people displaced by the earthquake in Port au Prince.