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tions and at least a dozen commit- ted volunteers like Helen Tobin, a 70-something Lutheran who said her life has been profoundly changed by relating to refugees.
It costs about $23,000 a year to
Volunteer Helen Tobin (standing at left) and Ben Krey, pastor, pose in the sanctuary with sev- eral refugee families that Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, has helped resettle via “Welcome Home.”
refugee families a safe haven and help overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers for a month or more until more perma-
nent housing can be found. The program is operated by Prince of Peace and Lutheran Chil- dren and Family Service, a divi- sion of ELCA-affiliated Liberty Lutheran. The congregation has taken the lead and receives financial and advisory support from LCFS, which resettled more than 170 fami- lies in 2012. The effort also involves a net- work of supportive area congrega-
run Welcome Home. The initiative has attracted funding from several sources, including the ELCA Dea- coness Community, the Wheat Ridge Foundation and other area churches, said Jennifer Phelps Ollikainen, an ELCA pastor and director of min- istries for Lutheran Congregational Services, Liberty Lutheran. Heiba and Hassabo’s family has been the third to find shelter in the home since August 2012. They found a more permanent residence in December, and a fourth family from Burma was set to move in. In each case, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security determines asylum eligibility and refers families to qualified U.S. agencies for con- sideration. For Hassabo and his fam- ily, a relative in the Philadelphia area made it the logical place. The family began its flight in 1989—the year Omar al-Bashir assumed power in their native Sudan and, Hassabo said, began an ethnic cleansing on the Zhaguwa tribe to “extinguish” citizens of African descent, especially men, who might organize to oppose him. “They would basically come to your mosque, take you out and kill you,” Hassabo said. He fled Sudan, to be joined by his family in Libya, where he worked as a mattress fabricator. Fast forward to Benghazi’s Arab Spring. After Hassabo left Libya, Heiba and other Sudanese neighbors fled to a refugee camp in Saluma, near the Egyptian border. Heiba and her children moved back and forth from Saluma to Khartoum in the Sudan twice, once by force, before they reunited with Hassabo
and arrived in the U.S. In Philadelphia they were embraced by Ben Krey, pastor of Prince of Peace; Tobin; and volun- teers like Bruce Leonard, an English as a Second Language instructor; Jessica Stewart, who teaches Ameri- can Sign Language; and Vickie Senbertrand, a member of St. Petri- Hope Lutheran Church in Philadel- phia, who battles her own disabili- ties to visit homebound members of another refugee family.
The heart of a volunteer Tobin, a member of Prince of Peace for 51 years, grew up in North Phila- delphia in a single-parent household. As a child she saw her mother col- lect warm clothing for German rela- tives overseas who were cold and hungry during World War II. Tobin can identify with the worry refugee families have when they are apart. When her late husband, Frank, a Philadelphia patrolman, went to work, she was fearful he might not come home, Tobin said.
When her husband died of cancer
in 2007, Tobin was devastated and depressed. Her pastor at the time, Tim Heinke, consoled her. “One night I had a dream about Frank that was so real I told Pastor Heinke about it,” she said. “He said, ‘What makes you think that was a dream? It might have been God coming to you to help you through, saying every- thing is going to be OK now ….’ “I began praying to the Holy Spirit for strength and energy, for new direction.” A year later the congregation’s
interim pastor, Paul Townsend, invited her to a meeting where she heard about a family of eight refu- gees with no place to go. He asked if the family could live in the church’s empty parsonage. Tobin’s response was: “I think
March 2013 29
MATT ROMANO
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