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EDMUND SWUM
My vision at that point was that we should be
able to host between 100 and 150 refugees...
I had no idea what I was talking about. We
[now] consider 25 or so, 20 to 30, to be a real
handful...
But, we laid that out and started building
it, and sure enough in September of 1980,
the first refugees arrived hours after we had
finished the cabins and were just barely ready
for them. And they turned out to be not boat-
people from Vietnam but boat-people from
Cuba, because in the meantime the whole
freedom flotilla and the Marielitos episode had
taken place. Jimmy Carter was in the White
House. We'd had some dealings with Carter
down at Koinonia; he was just eight miles
away in Plains. All that discovery of refugees
in that summer of 79 and then the prepara
tion through the succeeding 12 months for the
first refugees to get here... that just turned us
180 degrees and then changed our visions of
what we would be about at Jubilee.
It's been a marvelous, marvelous way of
relating to the whole world, not only for the
3,400 or 3,500 refugees who have come to
Jubilee since the fall of 1980, but also for the
dozens of trips that we've made or projects
that we've launched around the world—from
Iraq, to Nicaragua, to Bosnia, to southeast
Asia, Africa, all over. There were Central
Americans who were then accepted into
Canada; that was a major program we called
"Ario de Jubileo" that lasted for about eight
or 10 years.
FP: So, Jubilee Partners has as least as
much of a social investment in projects around
the world as it does in having a home base for
its work with refugees here in Comer?
DM: Yes. Both. And I want to say, too,
we feel as if we're making z mistake if we
only get excited about projects on the other
side of the world. We see the connections
very strongly between peace and justice and
climate change and things right here around
home. We're very much very self-consciously a
Christian community, very ecumenical. We've
got Catholics, Protestants. We're mainly just
trying to relate to this world with compassion
instead of bullets, missiles. That has led us to
NEWS & FEATURES I CALENDAR I
undertake many projects that very few people
would have.
FP: That's definitely not a "what's-in-it-
for-me" philosophy, except maybe spiritually.
DM: Yes, spiritually. And it's an exciting
way to live. We have a lot of volunteers who
come here on our staff who would have a hard
time putting into words what it is that gets
them excited about being here. [But] it really
is looking for meaning in life, something that
is truly fulfilling and exciting instead of just
addictions and gluttony in one form or another.
And I think our culture is in real danger of just
becoming a collection of addictions [laughs],
from food to material things to power. And
yet people are bored, unfulfilled. And I think
we [Jubilee Partners staff] are not at all—we
don't look like the kind of people that come
to mind when we think of saints, martyrs or
ascetics. We're having a great time! This is fun.
FP: What about the staff? How do they get
here?
DM: I'm biased, of course, but I think we
get the absolute cream of the crop from all
around the country and all around the world.
Catherine has been in Bolivia for two or three
years. Sue and Blake spent a decade in El
Salvador from 1970-1980 during the bloodiest
part of the war in El Salvador... she was there
about half that time. They were co-directors of
the Mennonite Volunteer Committee, an inter
national church volunteer agency. They lived
behind guerilla lines, in fact. They chose to be
out in the village, not supporting the violence
of the guerillas, but they said that's where
the suffering was and so they ran a national
program of volunteers in El Salvador. They felt
it was more appropriate to do that out among
the people who were being massacred. The El
Mazote Massacre, where a thousand or so peo
ple were killed, happened just down the road
from where they were living. They were out in
genuinely dangerous stuff. And so it has been
with almost all the year-round staff—they've
lived and worked all over the world.
FP: Do you see the issue of refugees for
you as one that begins with your religious
sense, or is it more a matter of the experi
ences that you've accumulated in your life, or
both?
DM: That's a very interesting question.
I don't think—on the one hand—we did
not choose to work with refuges because it
sounded Biblical somehow. I'm not conscious
that that was a part of our thinking. We were
living in tents for the first few months our
selves, and we could identify with people who
were uprooted and began to sympathize with
them in a new way that we had not before. I
think that's what was happening at a sublimi
nal level, a slightly subconscious level.
But I think you ask a question that is really
worth considering... there is a real Biblical
tradition of refugees... Not only the Exodus;
Abraham, before that, being a wanderer out
of the civilization that had been so advanced
already, over at Ur of Chaldea. I've visited
those areas in Iraq, and he sort of went out
into the wilderness of Palestine from there.
Jesus was a refugee. I'm writing a book right
now on the subject of hope, giving stories of
why I'm so hopeful despite the fact that I've
gone from one war zone to another now for
40 years. I've been in war zones all over the
world, war zones that, as you sit and talk you
hear "dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah," within
range of those guns very often. And I don't
know what it is that has drawn me to them,
but I have met some of the most courageous
and hopeful people, including these refugees
who come through Jubilee, coming out of
some of the most horrendous atrocities that
human brutality has been able to manage.
FP: Do you think the market for meaning is
going to boom any time soon?
DM: I hope so. I think the alternative is
depression and people just eating themselves
to death and sitting in front of televisions
endlessly, and doing mindless stuff. And
the world can't take that much longer. We're
destroying the world in the process.
Edmund J. Smith
To be continued with an account of meeting a group of
young refugees from Liberia and learning their stories.
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