Magyar Egyház, 1962 (41. évfolyam, 2-12. szám)

1962-03-01 / 3. szám

12

MAGYAR EGYHÁZ

Inter-Church Aid and Service To Refugees

A World Wide Mission to the Hungry, the Homeless, and the Sick

Three new portfolios have been opened in 1961 by the World Council of Churches’ Division of Inter-Church Aid and Service to Refugees. One is for Asia, the second for Latin America, and the third for Africa.

There are signs which show how the Division, which exists to help those in need, is adapting itself to meet the challange of the times. It is no longer content to look solely at Europe but is equipping itself to carry out a worldwide mission to the hungry, the homeless, the sick, and the destitute.

Immediately after the war and before even the World Council of Churches came into being, most of the Protestant and Orthodox Churches worked together to bring aid to the tens of thousands of refugees and displaced persons in a Europe shattered by war.

That work has gone on without pause since 1945 and gives no hint of slackening for many years to come. Today the Division enables an average of 1,000 refugees a month to emigrate to new countries overseas. It maintains orphanages and hostels in many countries where the aged and the handicapped may end their lives in peace. It trains young people for jobs and provides university scholarships. It pays for houses and flats to be built for refugees and it lends capital to many stateless persons to set up in bussiness for themselves.

Besides this work in Europe, costing millions of dollars a year, emergency operations are also conducted there and elsewhere - the Hungarian uprising, for instance, earthquakes in Greece, Morocco, and Chile, and the devestation caused by fire, flood, and famine around the world.

Relief and rehabilitation has been carried out in every instance without distinction of color, creed, or race by the churches. Need is the one criterion.

Although the first refugee programs were centered in Europe, they now encompass the globe for the refugee situation cannot be boxed off in one small area. It became a problem in the Middle East with the flight of Arabs, from Palestine; in India and Pakistan with the granting of independence; with the movement of more than one million Chinese into Hong Kong; with the effects of war in Korea and Viet-Nam; with the flight of the Dalai Lama and his followers into India; with the struggle for self-determination in Algeria, the Congo, and Angola.

The churches had to face these situations and they responded with DICASR as its agent.

Two principels have governed this worldwide extension of the work. The first is expressed by the term “Inter-Church Aid.” The plan is for the stronger church es to help their weaker members to relieve the suffering that crowds around their doors. Paternalism is shunned. All semblance of interference from “Big Brother” is scrupulously avoided. But when struggling churches in Asia, Africa, and Latin America cry out for the means to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and provide necessary technical knowledge, then the more prosperous churches in the West have it on their consciences to respond. But not at the price of diminishing local independence and responsibility, stifling initiative, and eroding self-determination.

The second governing principle is that the help given must not pauperize. After a typhoon or a volcanic eruption there is a period when the immediate task of the churches, in common with other welfare agencies, is to bring rice and milk to the starving, tents to the homeless, and medical aid to the injured. But this is no more than an emergency operation. To be acceptable to modem thinking such help must be no more than temporary; if it becomes permanent then it merely cintinues the squalor and the suffering it is intended to end.

DICASR works through the appropriate body of united Christians that is nearest to the disaster. This may be an organization such as the National Christian Council of India, the East Asia Christian Conference, or the Hong Kang Christian Welfare Committee. When the local body has decided what needs to be done and what would be the most effective contribution that the churches could make, the program is sent to the headquarters of the World Council of Churches in Geneva and is circulated by DICASR to more than 175 member churches and on continents throughout the world. The result is often an outpouring of money, the recruiting of experts with the particular skills asked for, and the shipment of vast quantities of food, clothing, seeds, pedigree farm animals, tractors, medicines, surgical apparatus, and building equipment.

The experts recruited through the World Council and sent to serve in the areas of need that have asked for them through their local Christian churches include doctors, nurses, teachers, agricultural scientists, welldiggers, irrigation engineers, textile designers, and many more.

An example of DICASR’s work has been to move more than 1,000 Old Believers from China and to set them up as self-contained, self-supporting colonies in Brazil. These Old Believers are a body of people of Russian origin. They or their parents fled to China in 1917 and now find life insupportable under Communism there. DICASR arranged and helped to pay for the transportation of upwards of 1,000 of them to Brazil. There they built their own cottages and made their own furniture. Each cottage has 2y2 acres of garden where the family grows its own vegetables, grazes a cow, and keeps poultry, as well as 44 acres of farmland on which rice and some buckwheat is grown. The Old Believers are supplied with timber, roofing, and glass for their cottages and tractors, seeds, trucks, agricultural implements, fertilizers, wire and fencing for the farms. Two distinct colonies have now been established and have been so successful that DICASR is making plans to set up a third.

Another example was the sending of a young Dutchman, Aad van den Brandeler, to Viet-Nam to be at the disposal of the churches there and to try to do whatever they asked him to do. His was a mission of Fellowship in the name, and on behalf of, the member churches of the World Council. Van den Brandeler stayed in Viet- Nam for three years. He learned the language, and lived, dressed and ate exactly like one of the people. The churches asked him to carry out two important social surveys which he accomplished.

It follows from all this that DICASR’s work which is undertaken by a field staff of 500 in more than 40 countries is many-sided. Its Service to Refugees is, nat-