Three young women from the parish baking a cake at the center for unaccompanied minors who are seeking asylum in Sweden. Transit center

Mariasun Escauriaza rscj is Spanish, and was born in 1940. She has been living in Sweden since August 1993. She now belongs to the newborn Central European province (Germany/Austria-Hungary/Sweden). In Goteborg she works especially with asylum-seekers and refugees, in collaboration with others.

It?s to Rose Philippine Duchesne and Helen McLaughlin that I owe my call to the refugees. I?m still drawing light and affirmation from Helen?s words at the opening of the ?88 chapter:

?Philippine?s dream was to be one with the Indians, to live with them. After years of waiting, she went to the Potawatomis whom she loved dearly. Who are our ?Potawatomis?? Her love for the poor, for the most abandoned was clear and strong. What place do the poor have in our life??

I was searching at the time, and in faith I asked the Lord to let me meet my Potawatomis.

And so in 1989 came the perfect answer: I was invited to work with Justice and Peace Bilbao in ?Bilbo Etxezabal?, a welcoming centre for illegal immigrants which was just opening. It meant sudden and complete immersion in the slums of Bilbao, without much preparation. It was my baptism of fire.

And it was also by chance that on Holy Thursday ?92 I received a copy of a letter from Sweden to my provincial, asking for an RSCJ ?not afraid of languages and with a feeling for immigrants?. That description fitted me. On the feast of the Baptism of Jesus in 1993, I received Helen?s letter sending me.

To sum up my experiences:

The first three years in Sweden: ?sent by the Spirit?, ?a foreigner with them?

• I was the only one in my district and parish to approach the refugees, but with encouragement from my community of Uddevalla and my two provinces;
• Arriving in Sweden at the same time as the Bosnians, I came into contact with other churches and organisations connected with them, and I found courage to fight with them for their right to receive asylum in Sweden;
• I studied Swedish in the adult education college in my city, where the refugees were also obliged to go;
• The Catholic children and teen-agers from Bosnia that I met in the ?refugee cities? were being integrated with the children and teen-agers from the parish where I also worked.

Stage 2: ?Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb??they saw that the stone had already been rolled back?.

The policy on granting asylum in Sweden had hardened, and some 4,000 asylum-seekers from Bosnia had to fight against the current. But the RSCJ network of Justice and Peace was already functioning, and a Bosnian family refused admission into Sweden was able to obtain resettlement in Canada, thanks to the generosity of that province through Mary Power. By then I was also already in contact with Caritas Sweden and in collaboration with influential bodies. There was an attempt to start the JRS (Jesuit Refugee Service) in Sweden, but the Catholic Church here is so small; we could already count on the competence and commitment of Caritas. And asylum-seekers of other nationalities, also in danger of being expelled, had come into my life: Iranians, Armenians, many coming from Sub-Saharan countries, single women, families and minors.

The battle was fierce, the Lord was trying us, but he seemed to be on our side. My community opened its doors wide to an Iranian woman with her grown-up son, who was mentally disabled; they lived with us for two months. The ?miracle? nearly always happens: the residency permit finally arrived, hours before they were to be deported.
I was experiencing once more the strength of our international RSCJ network and the resources of our universal Catholic Church. Together with other people, I had done the impossible for a young Iraqi woman and her brother, who had fled from Iraq to Sweden by a different route from their parents; they had been taken in by false promises and abandoned without papers in Thailand, to the horror of their parents, who had already arrived in Sweden.

Once she was reunited with her parents, the girl asked me to help a young Iranian couple who had also been cheated in Thailand. She did not want to forget people in the terrible situation she had escaped. I wrote to Mary Power in Canada, and her Province set in motion the process to sponsor these Iranians stranded in Thailand. They have now been in Canada for a year.

Stage 3: ?Standing near the cross of Jesus was his mother?. In the year 2000 our community left the mission of Uddevalla and moved to Goteborg, a city of 600,000 inhabitants, with a much bigger social problem:

• Some 500 asylum-seekers live in hiding, without rights, because they refuse to return to their country. While Sweden formerly welcomed 80% of asylum-seekers, now only 20% are allowed to stay.
• Most of the refugees who are given legal entry live segregated in two or three slum areas of the city.
• The Immigration Services, with their various units for asylum-seekers, are situated 20 kilometres from the city: a centre for minors who have come to Sweden without their parents; a detention centre for adult men and women, deprived of freedom while waiting to be forcibly deported to their countries, or newcomers who are fairly certain not to be accepted (Afghans, Iraqis, Chinese, Nigerians, Somalis, Kurds, Russians, Mongols, Moldavians, Chechens, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Albanians); and a transit camp where at first we didn?t see much point in going.

Although I would sometimes like to work in other fields, those who come knocking at my door continue to be asylum-seekers. It shows we still have a mission to ?bind up the broken-hearted?. I work with Caritas; I try, with others, to be ?God?s heart on earth?, as our icon expresses it. There are opportunities opening up before me to work in collaboration with Amnesty International, the Red Cross, Save the Children and the Swedish Evangelical Church. In the parishes of Goteborg there are other opportunities to inspire an apostolic spirit and so create ?multipliers?: ?I was an asylum-seeker and you welcomed me, I was deprived of freedom and you visited me, I was going through a very bad time, and you stood beside me.? Young people, students and other adults are beginning to give their time to asylum-seekers. We are organising voluntary work together with Caritas and the other NGOs:

• A youth group visits the minors and organises activities with them;
• A group visits the detention centre;
• Groups visit the centre for transit camp, which was how we found out the bad living conditions there. The wives and children of those in the detention centre are separated from their menfolk because the children cannot stay in the detention camp for more than 70 hours; they live in the camp until they are deported to their countries.

My role with the refugees since that time has been to ?be there? with them in their loss of freedom, and for many, in their final anguish faced with their return to real situations of dire poverty and political and ethnic insecurity in their countries (Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kazakstan). Such is the harshness of foreign policy at present that we can seldom do anything for them. Where there is sadness, loneliness and anguish, we try with the volunteers to create times and spaces of welcome, relationship and celebration; we entertain the children, listen to the women and men, and try to ?do whatever He tells us?. We believe that He is putting some measure of ?new wine? into the lives of these people, through our interest and the contacts which we may be able to arrange for them with Caritas, UNHCR, JRS, etc., in the countries to which they are returning.