“Our work with and for refugees began when we began to follow Jesus, to follow His way and His teachings. It is because we are followers of Jesus, because we follow the way of love, because we follow the way of compassion, because we follow the way of human decency and kindness that we must be passionately committed to helping the refugees and displaced persons of this day,”
The Most Rev. Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, from his 2018 message for World Refugee Day
Thank you to members of St. Mary’s that were able to attend or contributed funds towards the 2021 World Refugee Day event. St. Mary’s is a Community Partner of the Refugee Resettlement Coalition. The event took place in the parking lot of First United Methodist Church on the evening of June 17. It was a very active three hours with people first contributing $20 towards a relief kit; then picking up a green pail and filling it with such items as soap, 4 different colored bath towels, tooth brushes, shampoo and other hygiene items. The goal was to create 75 kits. By the end of the event, 115 kits were created!
Life in a refugee camp is incredibly difficult. Shelters are overcrowded, conditions are squalid, and the safety of the people sheltering there is often threatened. Refugees also reside in urban environments in abandoned or unfinished buildings with few resources and no support. The suffering of people in these conditions is almost impossible to imagine. World Refugee Day has been observed globally in June since 2001 to honor the courage, strength, and determination of people forced to flee their homelands because of natural disasters, conflict, and violence. Since 2017, it has been sponsored locally by the Refugee Resettlement Coalition of Lane County (RRC) Members of the RRC Relief Kit Committee with take all the kits up to Portland to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) ( a non-profit organization) collection site. The kits will be boxed up and transported to MCC headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania. Toothpaste will be added to the 5-gallon bucket kits and then transported by ship throughout the world to camps and cities where they are needed. In 2020 alone, MCC shipped over 21,000 relief kits throughout the world.
