Jesuit Refugee Service- JRS Day 2024
14 November 2024|Kunanyaporn Jirasamatakij
Conversation with Fr. Joseph Gerald Hampson, JRS Asia Pacific Interim Regional Director
Why do you think makes JRS unique in its own way of accompany, serve, and advocate the forcibly displaced persons?
It’s not just a unique way of accompanying, serving and advocating for refugees, but that triad of values and statement of identity is itself unique for humanitarian agencies, as far as I know. It’s not just a statement of JRS mission and identity, but was crafted after reflection by JRS workers on their work and experience here in Asia Pacific, under the leadership of Fr Mark Raper.
In urban slums across all continents, in remote refugee camps at the edges of society, in centres for care of displaced, in detention centres for imprisonment of undocumented, along borders preventing displaced or asylum seekers finding refuge, alongside those individuals and groups who have been traumatized by war, by ethnic cleansing, by torture, by abuse, and even by the effects of natural disasters, there you will find people committed to JRS values, working with the displaced in seeking solutions that combine compassion, empathy, and professionalism to bring hope and strengthening of self-identity and self-realisation.
As for the anniversary of JRS, what would you like to say to JRS staff in the regions and beyond?
JRS has been around for a long time, something to rejoice in, but also bemoan as the refugee issue has not only been around but grown in intensity and complexity — consider now climate displacement, consider growing hostility to offering welcome to asylum seekers, consider growing IDP and stateless numbers. In spite of these great challenges, you who work for JRS have proved yourselves up to the challenge. You have not given up, you have not tried to push the problems under the carpet, but as friends on a journey you continue to offer walking with displaced, listening to their stories and amplifying them for a wider audience.
What should be one thing that all JRS staff should remember while working to serve the refugees?
Fr Arrupe, founder of JRS, tells us that love is the one thing that can change the world, but can also change us. It makes us get up in the morning, it decides who we want as our friends, it can decide our life and our calling. That love, surely expressed in the divine love for us, is also seen in the face of our displaced brothers and sisters.
