She stumbled in and immediately dropped down on a bench.
She wiped tears from her eyes as she waited to be registered. The baby girl in her arms was bundled tightly against the cold, against the cruel world. I watched as her four-year-old pulled off bright pink gloves, welcoming the warmth of the church onto chapped hands.
Name tags in hand, we padded down the steps to the children’s area, one slow step at a time. I held tightly to the tiny hand of her daughter, dark brown skin now dotted with the round yellow stickers she had discovered on the ESL registration table.
Stickers that looked like tiny suns.
The mother’s eyes were weary beyond understanding, tears falling silently as we trudged through the tunnel. I asked the friend she arrived with what country she had come from, the words climbing over the lump in my throat, not really wanting to hear a story I couldn’t swallow. She answered quietly.Congo. The Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC.
My own eyes filled with tears and I imagined her story. I reached out with my other hand to rub the shoulder of the mother carrying not only her baby but also the weight of horrors I could never know. “That’s very hard,” I whispered, knowing she didn’t understand me but praying that my hand on her back might offer warmth.
A little background on the DRC: it suffers from horrific violence and human rights abuses. Refugees from there are the result of over twenty years of armed conflict which started in 1996 when Rwanda invaded the Congo to track down the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. What followed is sometimes called Africa’s World War, as more than nine countries became involved in the fighting. Armed groups have continually committed serious crimes against the Congolese people, including rape, torture, and mass killings. Refugees arriving from the DRC—those that survived—are mostly under the age of 25, and most of them have experienced and witnessed extreme horror. The DRC is known as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman.
These thoughts swirled through my head as we reached the bright yellow counters of the children’s classrooms and the mother reluctantly handed over her two little girls to workers wearing smiles.
I led her mother silently back down the hall to take a placement examination for the ESL class organized by World Relief . This class she hoped to join is new, meeting the needs of too many adults patiently waiting for the opportunity to just learn our language. Jobs require English, and food on the table requires a job.
Without it, survival itself is threatened.
As I watched her walk away for the next part of the registration process, my heart tottered between despair and hope. Despair for what she’d seen and run from, what she carries behind her tears, and for all the obstacles ahead of her as she starts over in a new country.
Yet I thought of those tiny round stickers, those yellow suns, on the hand of her daughter. And I had hope, that the world of English might be opened to this mother and her children in the walls of an ESL classroom. Hope that their faith in a God who sees and cares despite the sufferings and pain of this fallen world would be renewed. Hope that I could see her again and know more than the names on their name tags. Hope that they would discover that there is a safe place for them here, that they can belong.
To belong is to hope.
Hope and Be.Longing.
Who do you see that needs hope, that longs to belong?
“Because the poor are plundered, because the needy groan,
I will now arise,” says the LORD;
“I will place him in the safety for which he longs.”
Psalm 12:5 ESV
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