Loving our neighbors as ourselves
Our Advent Gift for 2021 is now closed. Thank you for helping us welcome new neighbors with World Relief!
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Every Advent season, Resurrection chooses to give our time and resources to one of our local ministry partners. This year we are again blessing World Relief and the refugee families they serve in DuPage/Aurora. Your gift will help newly arrived families rebuild their hearth and home with gift cards for groceries and kitchen supplies like dishes and pots.
How You Can Help
Help families prepare food and fill refrigerators by purchasing gift cards to Aldi’s, Jewel-Osco, and Walmart.
Please leave gift cards in the secure box on the Advent Gift table in the narthex.
Assist in rebuilding a family’s home by providing kitchen supplies like dishes, pots, and pans through an online registry.
Loving the sojourner
After several years of historically low refugee admittance rates, the U.S. refugee cap has been raised to 125,000 for this next year (beginning October 1). Over the next year, we expect 300 new refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia to resettle in DuPage County.
The U.S. is also committed to resettling Afghans who worked with or on behalf of the U.S. government during the war in Afghanistan. World Relief has been resettling these Afghan allies for several months.
Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in Egypt.
— Deut. 10:19
Show Christ’s love to resilient refugees
World Relief is working to provide services for refugees, but they need our support to accommodate for increased numbers of families.
We have the opportunity to share Christ’s compassion for sojourners and to help welcome refugees into our community in several ways:
Whether you have a few minutes or an hour each week, you can apply to volunteer with World Relief as an individual or with a team from Rez.
This Advent, you can help families rebuild their lives and gather around the table by providing kitchen supplies like dishes and pots, as well as gift cards to grocery stores like Aldi’s, Jewel-Osco, and Walmart.
Contribute to our Advent Gift until January 3, 2022
Questions? Contact Missions Manager Julia Damion at juliadamion@churchrez.org
Stories of Change
I helped U.S. troops in Afghanistan. I’m safe now, but I worry for friends I left behind.
Program participant Seeta Habib and her family were resettled through World Relief Memphis in October 2020 through the special immigrant visa program. She and her husband had served as interpreters and journalists for U.S. forces in their home country, and they were consequently targeted by the Taliban. This is her story.
When the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996, millions of Afghan girls were shut out of school. I was one of them.
It wasn’t until the eventual defeat of the Taliban government in 2001, when I was 13 years old, that I entered a school for the first time in five years.
It was one of the happiest days of my life, but it was still a dangerous time to be a girl in Afghanistan, seeking an education. I learned English secretly, in a private class outside of school, and when I graduated, I knew I wanted to be a part of Afghanistan’s reconstruction. I became a print journalist for a magazine operated by NATO’s security mission in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Farah, in the western part of Afghanistan. There, I covered ISAF activities having a positive impact in the community.
The Volunteer and Refugee Friendship Helping Both Reach their Goals
Who are the people who have changed your life? Are they friends who share your passions? Family members who have known you for years? Coworkers who helped you do challenging projects?
We can all attest to how relationships and friends can change everything.
That’s why, when World Relief Chicagoland matches our volunteers with opportunities to serve, we focus on relationships.
The Volunteer and Refugee Friendship Helping Both Reach their Goals
October 20, 2021
Who are the friends who have changed your life?
Who are the people who have changed your life? Are they friends who share your passions? Family members who have known you for years? Coworkers who helped you do challenging projects?
We can all attest to how relationships and friends can change everything.
That’s why, when World Relief Chicagoland matches our volunteers with opportunities to serve, we focus on relationships.
When you apply to volunteer, our staff want to hear about you – your unique skills, passions, and goals. That’s because your gifts and interests might uniquely align with the goals of an immigrant or refugee. You might be uniquely equipped to help them reach their goals!
When we match a volunteer with an immigrant, refugee, or asylee to help provide transportation, tutoring, or career mentorship, it’s so that you can walk with them. And together, you will both learn and grow!
And you might end up building a meaningful relationship as a result. Max, a World Relief Chicagoland volunteer, and Daniel, a refugee, are a fantastic example of just how meaningful these friendships can be.
“I cannot express how meaningful our relationship and connection has been.”
– Max, Volunteer with World Relief Chicagoland, referring to his friendship with a World Relief client named Daniel
Meet Daniel
From the age of 7, Daniel knew a life of change and uncertainty. He remembers a before time, when his home country was a beautiful place full of loving family. The violence that broke out in the 1990s ruined that. When conflict and violence killed his family and pushed Daniel from his home in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1999, he fled to safety in Uganda. There, he lived in refugee camps for nearly 20 years.
Their home was a plastic shelter. Food was scarce and water was hard to access. Even as a young boy, Daniel woke up as early as 3 a.m. to collect water. “There was not enough food,” Daniel told us. As he showed a video of the refugee camp, he reflected on life there. “It was very hard.”
Eventually, Daniel moved to another settlement camp. That camp’s conditions were a little bit better. As he grew up, Daniel fought to study and achieve an education despite their poverty and his many responsibilities. This allowed him to achieve an academic scholarship to study at a university in Uganda and achieve a degree in human services in 2016.
The Future Became Brighter
Then, in 2018, Daniel was accepted for resettlement in the United States. “I’ve never been excited like I was [at] that time. I was extremely happy,” he told us. Among the many changes he experienced with life in the United States, one blessing was the most basic: he slept inside a building – something he had only done while studying at university in Uganda. In the United States, he became connected to World Relief’s services and started working toward stability – and dreaming about his future.
And that’s when he met Max.
Meet Max
Like many of our volunteers, World Relief Chicagoland’s mission and work serving immigrants and refugees in vulnerable situations inspired Max. He wanted to be part of the work. That prompted him to apply to volunteer as a virtual youth tutor in the Chicago office. However, in talking with World Relief staff, discovered another way to use his skills and passion. As a pre-med student at Loyola University, Max has long been working toward a future career in medicine and was a great candidate to join World Relief as a volunteer health advocate.
Friends with Shared Passions
As a volunteer health advocate, Max walks with Daniel to help him navigate the intricacies of the health care system and manage various health tasks. He also helps Daniel work toward other goals – such as Daniel’s dream of becoming a nurse. “He has helped me so much,” Daniel said. As a pre-med student himself, Max helps Daniel study for his anatomy and physiology classes and the two discuss their shared interest in the healthcare field.
But the relationship is far from one-sided. In return, Daniel has shown Max a new perspective. “Through getting to know Daniel, I have been able to learn more about the gaps in our healthcare system, as well as the good things that can happen,” Max shared. “My hope is that in the future, I can help change the parts that are broken.”
Daniel has an insider perspective on what it’s like to receive healthcare as a refugee in the United States. Throuh him, Max has gained a greater awareness of the many tasks required to effectively navigate the healthcare system.
Dreams for the Future
“Once I am an established provider, I want to work to change the policies around the gaps in the healthcare system,” Max says. He wants to serve individuals who can’t easily get healthcare. To do this, he will take what he has learned from Daniel and engage other people in vulnerable situations. If they share their experiences, perhaps they can be part of improving systems. In the meantime, Daniel will focus on achieving his goal to become a nurse. He wants to be part of the mission and deliver vital healthcare to everyone. Daniel described how he will value the individual and their unique perspectives – especially those who are often excluded or forgotten. He shared, “I want to give the best services to marginalized communities.”
“I want to give the best services to marginalized communities.”
– Daniel, referring to his future career aspirations as a healthcare provider
Together, both Max and Daniel want to be part of making healthcare more accessible for people who are overlooked or underserved. And they are equipping each other to do just that.
You Can Build Transformative Relationships Too!
For more than 40 years, World Relief Chicagoland has connected volunteers like you with opportunities to serve. And as a result, thousands of volunteers have made a life-changing difference for our immigrant and refugee neighbors. If you bring your whole self – gifts, abilities, and passions – to the table, you will gain the chance to experience transformation too. We will provide opportunities for you to walk with individuals like Daniel, who are rebuilding their lives in Chicagoland.
Will you begin a transformative relationship?
More than ever, these resilient men, women and children need to know that they are welcomed and loved. World Relief’s continued support is made possible by churches and local communities who help them thrive. Our partnership helps enable World Relief to provide holistic care in Jesus’ name with the purpose of welcoming “strangers” into our midst.
