Several weeks ago, Restoration was visited by Fr. James, a Karen priest, who recently moved to Minnesota from a refugee camp in Thailand. Elizabeth Wohlers, a member of his Welcome Corps team, shares more of his journey below.

An Arrival at Terminal 1

On January 16, my family stood in the arrivals area of Terminal 1 at MSP. We were joined by a jubilant crowd of members of St. John’s Karen Anglican Church and Church of the Redeemer, as we waited to witness a life-changing moment. The doors opened, and out stepped Father James, his wife, and their three children. We let out a collective cheer! The family worked their way down the line of us, shaking hands, receiving hugs, and being adorned with celebratory flower garlands. As refugees from Burma, they received a rare opportunity to resettle in the U.S.

What, exactly, is a refugee?

Most people think of a refugee as a person who flees their home because of some calamity. That is the general idea, but there is actually a specific international definition of a “refugee” that was written in the United Nation’s 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, as the world grappled with the tremendous displacement of people due to WWII. Refined in the 1967 Protocol, a refugee is someone who has left their home country and is unable to return due to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.

Conflict in Burma

There are estimated to be over a million people who are refugees or asylum seekers (people who have fled by haven’t yet received the status of refugee) from Burma, with many of them living in refugee camps across the border in Thailand and Bangladesh. Why? I still remember sitting in a classroom as a twenty-year-old college student, listening to a peer present about the crisis in Burma and thinking, “How can such atrocity be occurring in the world and I’ve never heard of it in the news, or even heard the name of that country?” Though the situation in Burma doesn’t gain a lot of headlines, refugees have been flowing out of Burma for decades due to the brutal practices of the oppressive military regime that has controlled the country since 1962 (with a brief period of quasi-civilian-led government from 2011 to 2021).

Father James and his wife lived in a refugee camp in Thailand for well over a decade. They got married there, and all three children were born there. There are nine refugee camps with more than 90,000 inhabitants along the Thai-Burma border, the oldest of which is now more than four decades old. Camps are meant to be temporary, but it is not uncommon for children to be born and grow to adulthood in a camp—passing life’s major milestones all in a place of limbo.

The Church’s Response: Welcoming the Foreigner

About five years after I first learned about the situation in Burma, my husband and I joined a group at our church in Rhode Island called First Friends and welcomed the first refugee arrivals from Burma to Rhode Island in 2009. The relationships with the more than 100 refugees whom we welcomed during our years in First Friends were transformative. They are the reason why a few years ago when we moved to Minnesota and joined Restoration, we visited St John’s Karen Anglican Church in St. Paul. Around that time, the U.S. government was launching a new refugee resettlement program called the Welcome Corps, which allowed groups of ordinary people to apply to sponsor specific refugees.

The Welcome Corps was designed to supplement the traditional pathway of resettlement in the U.S. through nonprofit organizations like Restoration’s partner, Arrive Ministries. One of Father James’s cousins asked us to help form a sponsor group. Our team, including members from St. John’s Karen Anglican and Church of the Redeemer, was able to sponsor Father James’s family because they had already been granted refugee status. As sponsors, our group is supporting them financially and materially during their first three months in the U.S., as well as providing them with cultural orientation, and assistance with things like finding housing and employment, applying for government services, and enrolling in school.

We are so thankful that Father James’s family arrived on January 16th, because on January 20th all resettlement of refugees in the U.S. was stopped. If you were present during Father James’s visit, you received his blessing in the beautiful lilting tones of the Karen language. Hearing his blessing was a reminder to me that we worship each day in one accord with countless other Christians throughout the world, known and unknown to us, yet all known to and beloved by God.