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Working with Refugees

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 8:58 am
by Bootstrap
My wife and I have recently become involved with this group together with other members of our church:

http://worldreliefdurham.org/

Please pray that we will continue to be able to serve refugees under the new administration.

Re: Refugees

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 10:20 am
by mike
Very interesting. So is this organization specific to your area?

Re: Refugees

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 10:52 am
by Bootstrap
mike wrote:Very interesting. So is this organization specific to your area?
They have organizations like this all over the country, and they are quietly helping resettle refugees. Most of them are faith based. We did an orientation about six weeks ago and are forming a group now.

Re: Refugees

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 10:59 am
by mike
I would enjoy seeing this happen in our area. Keep us posted on how it goes.

Re: Refugees

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 11:06 am
by MaxPC
mike wrote:I would enjoy seeing this happen in our area. Keep us posted on how it goes.
I looked at that organizational website for the umbrella corporation and they seem to have a very large board of administration. I wonder how much money these people receive in salary?

Re: Refugees

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 12:05 pm
by Bootstrap
MaxPC wrote:
mike wrote:I would enjoy seeing this happen in our area. Keep us posted on how it goes.
I looked at that organizational website for the umbrella corporation and they seem to have a very large board of administration. I wonder how much money these people receive in salary?
It's pretty easy to look up expense rations for a charity. Here's World Relief and a few other charities for comparison:
So it looks like their expense ratios are reasonable. It's not really what's on the top of my mind, I'm doing my best to be helpful to refugees.

Re: Refugees

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 7:20 pm
by Josh
Who funds World Relief Durham?

Re: Refugees

Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 7:58 pm
by Bootstrap
Josh wrote:Who funds World Relief Durham?
They get funds from local churches, donations, and they also get money from the government for the first 90 days of each refugee's resettlement. I don't know what proportions, I really haven't studied their budget, I'm just trying to help refugees settle in.

This page explains the mission and vision.

Image

Re: Refugees

Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2017 5:50 pm
by Bootstrap
Update: we now have ~20 people trained to work with refugees, and will probably be receiving two families from Aleppo some time this month. We are lucky to have at least four people who speak Arabic in our church, two native speakers and two former missionaries, so that will help.

We're very excited.

Re: Refugees

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2017 10:42 am
by Bootstrap
The two families arrived at the airport on Friday, we gathered them and brought them to their new apartments, nicely set up and stocked with an awful lot of food. One family has 5 children, 3-13. The other has one daughter, 2. (I'm guessing at the ages, I have them in a document somewhere.)

We checked in on them Saturday, and were able to let them use Skype to call their families in Turkey. The two families live far enough away that it takes 30 minutes to walk, so we decided to provide cheap cell phones so they could communicate and make plans - and also so that we can coordinate our own visits with them. We delivered the phones on Sunday. So this took up much of our weekends, a very rewarding time for everyone involved.

At least four people in our church speak Arabic fluently, two of them speak it as their first language. This makes communication a lot easier. We're trying to introduce as much English as possible as early as possible.