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LISA HELFERT


A new future


By Jocelyn Breeland T


Breeland is a public rela- tions professional and freelance writer living in Virginia. She is a frequent contributor to the ELCA’s Faith Lens online Bible study.


38 The Lutheran • www.thelutheran.org


Lutherans resettle young refugees who are on their own


esfaye Gebre was 14, living with his family in a small town in the east African nation of Eritrea, when authorities announced they would begin removing children from school and forcing them to join the army. Gebre


wasn’t in school that day and didn’t go back. Instead, he and a cousin set out on foot, crossing the border into Ethiopia. The date was Feb. 1, 2008. The cousins weren’t the only ones to leave. Today more than 50,000 Eritre- ans live in refugee camps in northern Ethiopia. From January to May 2013 alone, nearly 4,000 people fled Eritrea, according to the U.N. News Service. They fled what the U.N. Special Rapporteur calls “blatant disrespect for human rights.” Among the concerns are military conscription of children, indefinite national military service, arbitrary arrest, incommunicado detention and religious persecution. Gebre’s 2008 exodus wasn’t his first trip across the border. When he was 10, he and four friends ran away after arguing with their parents, intent on reaching his older sister in Ethiopia. They were quickly apprehended by U.N. troops monitoring a cease-fire along the border, turned over to the Eritrean police and jailed for two weeks.


At one point, Gebre said, the soldiers lined them up and tied their hands around the trunk of a large tree overnight. “It was very hard,” he recalled. A year or so later, police came to interview Gebre and his friends, demanding to know which boy had the origi-


Tesfaye Gebre loves attending St. Mary Eritrean Orthodox Tewahdo Church, Washington, D.C. Rather than be forced to become a child soldier, he fled Eritrea in 2008 as an unac- companied refugee minor. He was re- settled in the U.S. in 2011 by Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area.


nal idea to cross the border. When the boys couldn’t remember, “they tried to scare us and make us fear,” Gebre said. Eventually, just to end their ordeal, one boy said it had been his idea. The police let the matter drop. Fast forward to 2008, when Eritrean authorities announced that anyone who had crossed into Ethiopia would have to join the mili- tary. “[I] was very scared because I couldn’t do anything and I was very young,” Gebre said. He saw an 18-year-old cousin and a much younger classmate taken away. So Gebre and his cousin—a


16-year-old girl—fled. They were picked up by Ethiopian soldiers who moved them from place to place for three weeks before they ended up at the Shemelba refugee camp.


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