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Pray

Please pray for the people who have been affected by wildfires in California. May God’s healing presence give them peace and hope in their time of need. Pray that God will deliver comfort to those who mourn the loss of loved ones and strength to those who are working diligently to contain the fires and care for affected communities.

Give

Gifts to “U.S. Wildfires” will be used to assist those affected by the wildfires until the response is complete.

Connect

To learn more about the situation and the ELCA’s response:

• Share this bulletin insert with your congregation and encourage support.
• Sign up to receive Lutheran Disaster Response alerts.
• Check the Lutheran Disaster Response blog.
• Like Lutheran Disaster Response on Facebook and follow @ELCALDR on Twitter.

ELCA Youth Gathering:  Reflections from a volunteer

Before my arrival in Houston, my plans for attending the Youth Gathering were minimal.  I came to Houston to take some long overdue vacation time and I only really planned to go to the convention center on the day before the hall opened to help my wife Marie Anne Sliwinski (ELCA Program Director, Disaster Response and Sustainable Development) with her Lutheran Disaster Response/AMMPARO booth and build a replica of a Rohingya refugee camp due to the my experience handling many proms and setups as a school facility director.  During the build that day, I worked mainly with Chandran Paul Martin (ELCA Regional Representative for Southeast Asia) and Joseph “Joe” Chu (Program Associate for Lutheran Disaster Response-US) and really started to learn more about the Rohingya  camp and the perils that go with it. I could not believe that the situation was that dire with over 700,000 refugees crammed into about 5 square miles of space with minimal water and resources to survive.  It is unfathomable to think that the UN is referring to it as ethnic cleansing and investigating that it could also be considered genocide; terms used during World War II.

As everyone gathered at the end of the night, it was determined that there may not be enough volunteers to help with the booth the next day.  Always being one that wants to help out and knowing “the show must go on,”  I threw my hat into the ring and became one of the 2-3 revolving presenters in the refugee camp section of the LDR exhibit each day of the event.  Chandran’s wealth of experience from visiting the camp allowed him to give me a sample of how the tour should look.  My first few tours through our model camp were a little rocky as I had very minimal background in this topic, but my past experiences as an educator as well as nightly research in my hotel room allowed me to improve and give each passing group a more informed and unique perspective than the previous ones.  I ended up giving almost 50 tours through the camp and the Rohingya refugee crisis has become a topic that I follow on a weekly basis.

For a gathering of youth, I was very surprised that just about every group I walked through was very attentive and engaged in a time where a lot of children their age will tune out and be glued to their phone.  This speaks volumes about the foundation of Lutheran values instilled in these young people.  While not a Lutheran by faith,  I now have an enhanced perspective of the religion, its mission, and the thousands of youth that will carry the church for years to come.   Most vacations are about rest and relaxation.  This one became over 40 intense hours of learning and teaching, but one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in a long time.  I look forward to possibly helping out in Minnesota in 3 years!

Dan Sliwinski, ELCA Youth Gathering Volunteer with People on the Move: A Refugee and Migrant Experience.

Be a part of the response:

Be a part of the response:

Pray

Please pray for the people who have been affected by wildfires in California. May God’s healing presence give them peace and hope in their time of need. Pray that God will deliver comfort to those who mourn the loss of loved ones and strength to those who are working diligently to contain the fires and care for affected communities.

Give

Gifts to “U.S. Wildfires” will be used to assist those affected by the wildfires until the response is complete.

Connect

To learn more about the situation and the ELCA’s response:

• Share this bulletin insert with your congregation and encourage support.
• Sign up to receive Lutheran Disaster Response alerts.
• Check the Lutheran Disaster Response blog.
• Like Lutheran Disaster Response on Facebook and follow @ELCALDR on Twitter.

“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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