In Washington state, Hispanic immigrants come to work in the agricultural fields. In northern Virginia, immigrants from Ghana form fellowships to worship in their own language. In California, an historically Japanese Presbyterian church tries to reach out to more recent arrivals from Latin America.
In some ways, all of these are stories of journeys, of people displaced from their own countries, sometimes voluntarily, but often pushed to move by war or violence or the basic need to provide food and shelter for their families.
Twenty years ago, Sharon Stanley, then a brand-new graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, started the work that for her has become a transforming ministry. Stanley had grown up in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia; been encouraged by Korean friends to go west to seminary; and upon graduation felt called to work with Asian immigrants and the poor.
She moved to Fresno, Calif., a city in which she had never before stepped foot, for what was supposed to be a three-month, temporary assignment working with Hmong refugees from Laos. As she discovered, “it was an astounding environment.”
Fresno is located in the great central San Joaquin Valley — flat, an agricultural powerhouse. About a third of the country’s food is grown there. A 2005 Brookings Institution report issued after Hurricane Katrina lashed New Orleans, Katrina’s Window, focusing on domestic poverty, found that Fresno had the highest per-capita concentrated poverty of any city in the United States, making it “a sort of Appalachia of the West Coast,” Stanley said.
The neighborhood into which she moved, filled with Hmong families, was named after a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand.
Living there, Stanley experienced firsthand the clashes of cultures, the old ways mixed with the new. It was not uncommon, she said, to see an entire cow carcass stuffed into a grocery cart, feet up, being wheeled to someone’s home for a Hmong shamanistic ritual.
She became, in time, the founding executive director of Fresno Interdenominational Refugee Ministries, which works with the more than 60,000 refugees in the Fresno area who come from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Slavic countries, and elsewhere. FIRM has staff members from seven cultural backgrounds and 11 denominations. Her job, in part, is a struggle to find answers to questions like “How do we as people of faith, as Presbyterians, seek to welcome in people who are coming here as new arrivals” – some of whom “have literally been pushed out, who have nowhere else to stay?”
Stanley contends that “it’s very important in hearing and in witnessing to Jesus Christ that we seek to connect in profound and culturally appropriate ways.” She describes it as finding ways to weave “our cultural background with the power of what the Holy Spirit is doing throughout the world.”
Stanley has learned, through long experience, to look for natural points of connection, what she calls the bamboo of the relationship. In Laos, the Hmong use bamboo for everything – to carry water, to trap animals, to build homes. “It’s strong, it’s flexible enough … for many uses,” Stanley said. “It’s sustainable. God grows it, sometimes a lot more than you want to have … growing in your backyard.” For the Lao and Hmong people, it reminds her “so much about the rootedness of their traditional home culture.”
Finding those points of connection can mean, in part, taking the time and making the effort to understand the history, the culture, and the experience of the immigrants. Many have learned the hard way – by discovering what does not work – about the importance of listening and paying attention.
Stanley has learned much, for example, about how Hmong people tend to view the connections between the physical and the spiritual worlds. She has studied both the Hmong and the Laotian languages. She now knows, for example, how deeply the Hmong people care for and value children, and not to touch the head of a child, which is thought to be a point of connection to the spirit.
Those lessons take time and experience. Not long ago, Stanley went with a group to Laos – where, she said, the culture is “not efficient, but is in a way very deeply relational, and so strongly values not demonstrating conflict.” One American man in her group grew frustrated, late one evening, at how slowly the gathering was moving. It was taking forever to get to the official part of the meeting. But the Laotian hosts wanted to make certain they showed hospitality, that their guests were well-fed and cared for.
For them, “it’s an eating, not a meeting,” Stanley said.
And even though it was late at night, the Laotian leader knew exactly what he was trying to accomplish, Stanley said. Because they were working with government officials, things had to proceed in the proper way. In that culture, “showing your own conflict is evidence of not having a very good sense of spiritual control and not having a value of peacefulness,” she said. And if conflict is openly expressed, “you will lose much ground rather than gain it.”
Stanley also has educated herself about the history of conflict in Laos and Vietnam and the role the U.S. government and military played in that, a history that contributed directly to the outpouring of Hmong refugees leaving Laos, and to the distrust some refugees feel toward American authorities.
A picture quilt that a Hmong woman involved with Stanley’s ministry made shows scene after scene of journey and exodus – from the Hmong working peacefully as farmers to violence and destruction; crossing rivers and jungles, with many dying along the way; to new border crossings in the United States, as the Hmong immigrants struggle to find their way in schools and citizenship classes and in big, strange supermarkets.
Stanley’s advice to others working with immigrants, shared at the recent Churchwide Gathering of Presbyterian Women: “Don’t be concerned with efficiency, but demonstrate over and over and over that you truly care about relationships. Listen for what the needs really are. Look at the skills that community members have.”
Fearful of being evicted, deported, or misunderstood, “new communities are fearful to speak and say the truth,” Stanley pointed out.
So ask questions. She constantly asks the immigrants, “‘What would you recommend?’ ‘What would you suggest?’ Don’t ever assume when you walk out of that session meeting that you’ve got it all figured out.”
Provide opportunities for sharing. Cooking classes, in which the immigrants learn to make chocolate-chip cookies and lasagna, and the Americans tackle spring rolls, is one example.
She has used folk tales from the Hmong culture to illustrate community-organizing principles, stressing, for example, the traditional Hmong inventiveness and persistence in dealing with problems such as substandard housing with high rates of lead, roaches, and mold in the walls.
And be prepared, she said, for expressions of faith and ways of telling faith stories that may be different from those the people of the congregation are accustomed to hearing. That takes some adjustment, Stanley said.
But with that broadening of the borders, she said, “think of the breadth of new faith stories we begin to have new opportunities to tell.”
