“I heart migrants and refugees”, this phrase was on the t-shirt I wore while working the Lutheran Disaster Response/AMMPARO booth in the interactive learning center at the National Youth Gathering in Houston.  It was the same t-shirt that we gave to participants at the end of their learning journey.  It was a tangible way to understand my work the week of the youth gathering.  If I left the NRG center for lunch or got dinner on my way back, people would notice the message of my work.  I worked the beginning of the refugee interactive learning experience and participants asked where they could find my shirt.  They wanted to share the message too.

I spent three days teaching youth and their leaders about refugees.  I learned about refugees in preparing for the youth gathering, and while I knew what we were discussing was very important, I did not expect the magnitude of the booth’s impact.  I attended two youth gatherings as a high school participant.  I’ve been in the crowd of 30,000 plus, but I could not imagine just how many people 30,000 people is when you yourself are not one of the participants.  The booth had a line for almost the entirety of the gathering.  I was amazed at the amount of people eager to learn.  On public transportation when youth groups asked what I did, they told me they had heard of the booth and that people we’re saying that others should check it out.  During a summer where the lives of refugees and migrants are frequently on the news it felt productive to be talking about it with youth, to watch thousands of kids learn about the lives of their neighbors and if they were so inclined at the end of their experience to advocate.

This wasn’t the only way I saw the impact of the youth at the gathering.  I spent my mornings in a booth that discussed the intersection of young adult ministry, advocacy, and the Strategy on HIV/AIDS.  The Strategy on HIV/AIDS had a welcome board, where we asked kids to think about ways to challenge stigma and to write messages of affirmation.  Every morning the board started blank.  I watched kids thoughtfully approach the board and add their message.  When I returned at the end of the day after spending my afternoon with the LDR/AMMPARO booth, the board would be full.  Every day kids filled this board with messages of affirmation and took a moment to be thoughtful about the ways they and their congregations could be a place of welcome.  There was, again, a visual reminder of the messages of the ELCA and the youth of the church.  30,000 voices can be loud, and together they spread and share powerful and important messages about the world we live in and what we want it to look like.

Maria Bruno is an Intern with Community Development Services at the ELCA Churchwide Office in Chicago. She attends the University of Virginia where she is persuing a MA in Religious Studies with a concentration in theology, ethics and culture.

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Working at the refugee and migrant section at the ELCA youth gathering was an incredible learning and teaching experience for me. First and foremost I learned about the experience of the Rohingya refugees but what was so impactful to me was learning from a colleague who had actually visited the refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This colleague could explain so vividly what life was like in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, and frankly it was gut wrenching. The life of a refugee is a difficult thing to fathom and can make those of us who are privileged feel uncomfortable. Everyday tasks like cooking food become challenges when you don’t have easy access to the materials needed to start a fire. I wanted to communicate the differences in everyday tasks to the youth who came through the experience, so they could begin to understand a life that seemed so foreign to many of them. The reason they come to the camp also feels foreign, when young people think ethnic cleansing seems like something that only happened a long time ago.  

After coming back from a semester abroad in the former Yugoslavia, I was exposed to the ethnic cleansing and civil war that took place in Bosnia in the 1990’s. When I visited the site of the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 where more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, what struck me most was how recent this was. There were even photos and color videos to look at. I have tended to think of genocide as something that only lives in the history books. I knew that the few people still on this earth who had survived a Nazi concentration camp were very old and entering their last stages of life. But at Srebrenica, the guide at the visitor center and museum revealed to us that he was a survivor of the ethnic cleansing. I remember feeling so shook up, because I realized that genocide is not a thing of the past. Hearing him talk about that week in July of 1995 was one of the most moving experiences in my life. In 2018, 23 years after the genocide he still has no definitive answer to what happened to his brother and explained to us that he is still “missing”.

I went into the experience at the youth gathering hoping to help the young people and adults have even a fraction of the breakthrough I had at Srebrenica. Helping them realize the harsh realities of the world we live in and that horrible things still happen. From personal experience, I knew how hard these harsh realities could be to digest. So I spoke with a colleague who helped me think of a way to make this into a positive learning experience for the youth – hope. She encouraged me to communicate the hope that the Rohingyas have despite their current circumstances and the hope we should have that the situation improves for them. A way I encouraged the young people to act on that hope, was to pray for the refugees. I urged them to turn their discomfort and frustration into action through prayer, and hopefully prayer can help us to find peace despite the difficult circumstances.

Kayla Cooper is an Intern with Community Development Services at the ELCA Churchwide Office in Chicago. She attends Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, PA where she is majoring in Globalization and French.

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On the evening Tuesday, May 21st, a storm dropped 6.5 inches of rain in just a few hours on areas of Frederick and Washington Counties in western Maryland. Local Lutheran Disaster Response affiliate, Diakon Lutheran Social Ministries reported that over 60 water rescues were

made and, more than 80 people were stranded for hours on a train when tracks were flooded and washed out. Hundreds of homes were flooded and many roads were flooded and/or destroyed. Initial estimates said around 100 homes were damaged, but that has since climbed to 350 homes.

This past Sunday, May 27th, a similar storm dumped 10.5 inches of rain in Howard and western Baltimore counties, resulting in tremendous flooding. News footage shows floodwaters raging down Main Street in Ellicott City — a similar event having occurred in 2016 — once again devastating the businesses along that stretch. There has also been some residential flooding. While Ellicott City has had news coverage, Catonsville and Oella in western Baltimore County were also particularly hard hit by this same storm when 10 inches of rain fell in 4 to 5 hours. There were multiple water rescues and many homes and businesses received significant water damage. Damage assessment is ongoing at this time.

Lutheran Disaster Response and our affiliate will continue to monitor the flooding. Please be in prayer with us for the impacted communities, their families and responders.

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Pray

Please pray for the people who have lost loved ones to disaster. May God’s healing presence give them peace and hope in their time of need.

Give

Your gifts to respond to U.S. spring storms through Lutheran Disaster Response will work to bring God’s hope, healing and renewal to those who are impacted by storms

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