What follows is the transcript of an Awakin Call interview with Sr. Marilyn Lacey in August of 2019. You can listen to the recording of the entire call here. 

Mercy Beyond Borders Micro-Ent moms in Uganda grateful for their business loans

Pavi Mehta: Now it's my pleasure to introduce Sister Marilyn, who just flew in from Haiti six hours ago and graciously joined us this morning.

Sister Marilyn Lacey is the Founder and Executive Director of Mercy Beyond Borders, a nonprofit organization that partners with displaced women and children overseas to alleviate their poverty. She's been a Sister of Mercy since 1966 and holds a Master's degree in Social Work from the University of California Berkeley. For decades, Sister Marilyn has aligned her energies and aspirations with refugee communities both here in the United States as well as in some of the most ravaged pockets of our world.  For many years she directed programs for refugees and immigrants, including the resettlement of the Lost Boys of Sudan at Catholic Charities in San Jose. She describes her leap into the refugee universe in her breathtaking book, This Flowing Towards Me:  A Story of God Arriving in Strangers.

The heart of the Scripture come glowingly to life in the words, works, and the world of Sister Marilyn. She and her team have grappled with the question of what it means to welcome the stranger, to see the Divine in the displaced, and to walk beside and witness those on the burning margins. In 2001, Sister Marilyn was honored by the Dalai Lama as an “Unsung Hero of Compassion.”  A few of us here in the Bay Area had the privilege of meeting with her recently and it felt like meeting an old, wise,and delightful friend. Sister Marilyn, we are so happy to have you with us today. 

Sister Marilyn Lacey:  Pavi, you're wonderful. You got part of that introduction right--the "old" part. 

Pavi:  I meant "old" as in "familiar!" (laughs)

Sister Marilyn:  We'll let the listeners decide about the "wise" and "delightful part."   

Pavi: With you arriving 6 hours ago off of a flight from Haiti, I would like to begin there--what is life for you in this moment? 

Sister Marilyn: I have the privilege of walking with people on the margins--people who essentially don't matter in polite society, and people who are usually left without names and without influence. This happens while our lives go on busily and not even noticing the strangers in our midst.  The best part of my job are the times when I'm able to go overseas to see our programs and people in action. I spent the past week in the mountains of Northern Haiti, where we have a scholarship program for girls. WIth all of our programs in various countries we try to make home visits to the families of the refugees; the displaced persons or young girls that we're working with.  It is important because is where we see the roots; the love, or lack of love, that has formed the young women we're working with.

I went to five different homes in the far mountains. I say "far" mountains because the roads are quite poor and we can only go part way in our four-wheel drive and then we have to get out and walk the remainder of the way. We go up and down these steep ravines and finally get to these little huts made of stone and thatch.  We are always welcomed with great warmth, and they try to share whatever they may have. They could have a coconut tree or an avocado tree in their small garden and so they'll always share what they have. 

We sit with them and we listen. They usually speak about what it means to them for their daughter to have the opportunity or an education; what it means to them that somebody comes to visit them so far away and pay respect to them, to learn their names, and hear a little bit about their story.

Of the five home visits I made during my visit to Haiti, the one that that I kept pondering on my flights homewas to the little hut of our high school scholar I will withhold her name but tell you that she is 16 years old. When this young girl was 13, her mother died and her father then had a mental breakdown-- he basically took to his bed and gave up on living.  When we went to visit him, he was laying in bed on his stomach with his face turned away from the door. I came in and greeted him and he was motionless, not saying anything. Finally, he turned his head so that he could see who had entered his hut at the invitation of his daughter. I greeted him by name and asked if he was in pain. He mumbled a sentence. Although I had an interpreter with me, there was one English word in the sentence. The word was "photocopy" and he kept repeating it. I'd put my hand on the man's shoulder and turned to the interpreter and asked, "Is he waiting for some sort of document?"  The interpreter had tears in her eyes, and she said to me, "No Sister. He's saying that, 'you are looking at me, but you are not seeing me. You're seeing a copy of my old self. I am not myself anymore. You are seeing a photocopy of me.'" 

It is difficult to express what hearing those words did to me.On my flights home I was thinking "there's a lot of people walking around this world who feel empty; photocopies of the life that should be there. Yet instead they are flat, ,unknown,unrecognized, and unnamed."  As a Sister of Mercy and as a person who tries to live with compassion, I thought "what can we do to share the compassion we've received with other people who don't yet feel it, who don't yet know their own value and their own goodness, who have given up under the crushing weight of suffering of loss and grief?" So, although I am sitting here with you in this interview, I am thinking so much of that man. 

Pavi: There certainly is something haunting in that man’s story. 

Sister Marilyn: Yes!

Pavi: Would you please give us a little window into the world you where you grew up-- in your formative years and any influences that were pivotal in shaping your journey?

Sister Marilyn: I think one of the most blessed people in the world in terms of my early upbringing was my two very loving parents and four siblings -- four brothers with whom I fought lovingly and constantly!  We grew up in a happy household. And it's only in retrospect, of course, that you recognize how extraordinary that is and what a solid foundation it provides for moving outward. 

I  remember as a five-year-oldI had a little two-wheel bicycle that I shared with my brother. I would bicycle off to complete chores handed down by my mom. For example, my mom would send me to the butcher to buy a certain kind of meat. She'd give me the money and she would say, "I want you to buy five French lamb chops and always say ‘please’ to the butcher". And I said, “well what if they don't have them? What if he doesn't have them, what should I get?” And she said to me, “then just use your own good judgment.” I'm 5 years old, and I don't remember what I ever bought that was an alternative, but I do remember there were times when I brought something different home, and my mom would say, “Thank you. Maybe next time when they don't have them you could buy blah blah.” he never said “you got the wrong thing.” So,  I grew up with this extraordinary sense that I was powerful in the world; that I could make decisions and that I could make them on my ownI wish everyone had such a foundation because it essentially makes you fearless, well almost, I'm terrified of spiders but that's another story (laughs). To move, I believe, in the world beyond your comfort zone is something most people fear to do and because of that solid, appreciative, caring environment, I don't have that fear and have been able to move out into the world. I had a sheltered existence so it didn’t happen until I was in my twenties. In 1980 I was living in a convent near the San Francisco airport. It was the entry point where the boat people, shall I say, the Leftovers that cleaned up after the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War started to come in when Congress passed the refugee act in 1980. 

They were all transiting from Asian and Southeast Asian refugee camps through the San Francisco  airport to get to their connecting flights to the groups or the churches or the temples that were sponsoring them in the US.

It was a point of great congestion and confusion in the services, and I just stumbled into becoming a volunteer there. Honestly, it was like falling into Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole and you discover that there is a whole different world out there. It was chaotic, upside down and powerless. The people  were caught up in it and their lives were torn from their roots. It was nothing like the suburbs of San Francisco where I grew up. But because of the foundation of my environment growing up I was attracted to it rather than scared of it! I thought this is what the Scriptures are talking about when they say that "You can meet God on the margins" or "The God hangs out with the poor" or "There is a blessing in what is other". So technically one could say that I just kind of stumbled into it.

Pavi: That gravitation towards the margins and the fearlessness that you described is extraordinary.  What was your first encounter with the spirit of the Divine?

Sister Marilyn: As long as I can remember, I have felt a friendship with the Divine. I realize baseball and God may not go together, but hear me out...My earliest memories are of playing baseball. I picked up my first baseball mitt when I was four years old and I would play with my brothers all day long and then with my dad when he came home at night. I just lived and breathed baseball.  When I was very young, I played on a team. They start the little kids in the outfield where they can't do any damage. So one could stand in the outer field and maybe once every hour or more the ball would come in your direction. I recall standing in the outfield and talking to God while waiting for the baseball! I have never felt alone in my life. I don't know how much of that is due to the solidity of the family I grew up in and how much of it is due to this sense of the closeness of the divine in my life.

I think most people probably have a much longer and more difficult journey toward that sense of who God is and how close God is. When you make vows as a Catholic sister you get to choose a motto which is inscribed in the simple silver ring that we wear. And the motto I chose is “God is with me.” As a young nun, that was my sense always, that God is with me, which is so revealing of the individualistic American spirit and Christian spirituality, really, you know. “Me and God” or on your good days, “God and me.” But it's not this communal sense that many other cultures understand, and I came to that slowly over time and I came to that really through my working with refugees -- that we do not stand alone in the world and that we do not go to God or experience God in mystical alone moments. Yes, maybe now and then, but mostly in our interactions with others and in those interactions mostly with those who are other than we are. Not our close friends who are just like us that we've chosen, but I mean the ultimate “other” is God. And when we go beyond our comfort zone to risk interaction with those who are “other,” that's the meeting space I believe. A place where we come to understand a broader sense of God and this narrow tunnel vision drops away that we have of a Catholic understanding or a Buddhist understanding or a Sufi understanding, whatever. We need all of those views; we need all those angles to just stand in awe.

Pavi: Did your path feel very straight or did you have to meander to find your way?

Sister Marilyn: No, as a young child, I always had this sense of companionship with God--… like a friendship, but my intent was to become a major league baseball player [laughter].

Pavi: After becoming a Catholic nun, you became a teacher in the inner city schools, can you tell us why? 

Sister Marilyn: Well, in the convent we, of course, studied the Scriptures. There was this very evident call from the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures and from the life of Jesus -- toward the edges; "don't settle down in the land.  Pay attention to the poor among you. This is what you need to do in your life." I was teaching in a suburban private high school and I went to the Sisters in charge. I asked, "could you transfer me to our poorest school?"  And so they did. I was teaching in inner-city Los Angeles for a number of years, and I really loved that. It was a lot of fun. But then I was transferred back to the suburbs here in the San Francisco Bay Area to do some administrative work for our congregation and as I previously mentioned began volunteering with the Southeast Asican refugees. I was curious.  I'd never met a refugee. I wondered what that would be like, I was sort of attracted to step out of the little safe corner of the world that I had grown up in. And, as I say, it blew my mind and it became like a magnetic thing -- like this is what I'm meant to do. And I haven't looked back. That was 1980.  

Pavi: One of the things that comes up for me as I listen to you talk is that in your order, there’s a commitment to work in the world and to really channel acts of mercy.  What is that dance in in your life among the relationship between action in the world and surrender? 

Sister Marilyn: The history of our congregation, the Sisters of Mercy, is one hundred and seventy five years old. We began with works of mercy among the poor; visiting the sick in their homes, taking in abandoned children, starting hospitals, and working in schools.  We came to San Francisco in the 1850s, right after the Gold Rush. Within a couple of months the Sisters of Mercy established a hospital, St. Mary's, which is still in operation today and several schools. In fact, St. Peter's School is still active there also. It's the quality of mercy, as we understand it in our congregation, is to provide a practical response to immediate needs.  What we understand now is that what is critical requires our attention yet we also need to look at the systemic reasons why people are poor. It's not enough just to give food to a hungry person, but ask what caused this poverty in the first place? 

Our work in South Sudan is a good example. When I first went there during the long war, I saw just ghastly scenes of starving people. I can't put it into words.  My immediate response was to feed them and, of course, heal them, try to do something with them to improve their lives. Ultimately, one has to step back and ask "what is happening here? Why is this war happening? What we discovered was that there was war because of oil and because of greed for that oil. It's happening because of power -- between powerful men fighting each other.  That also needed to be addressed. So our understanding of mercy now is: mercy and justice. The root word in Hebrew for "justice" is the same root as the root for Holiness because it isn't just something external that you do. It comes out of this deep understanding of our connectedness that the mercy--the works of mercy--spring from an essential movement of God toward uniting and reconciling and healing and giving life!

A big part of our lives as Catholic sisters is contemplation, silence, prayer, annual retreats, time to sink back deeply into that center of who God is and how that spirit of God moves through us to demonstrate love and compassion to everyone and everything... they're all connected. We are all kin.  Therefore, I'm horrified at the way we are treating migrants especially at the southern border in our own country but also around the world. It's as if these people were enemies--a threat some how. Certainly they are "other", but God is "other" and God chooses that it's when we welcome the "other" that we have our best chance to welcome and experience God ourselves.

I am not certain I am being clear or how many ways to iterate it--but it is that initial surrender to the otherness of God that causes and allows the openness to interact with others in merciful ways. I believe they are intimately bound. Even if you don't believe in religion or God it shouldn’t matter.  Physics, quantum physics, is now teaching us the exact same thing. I find this astounding. If you interact with subatomic particles here in California and make them wiggle, or whatever they do, it can affect one over in China, and it will also wiggle at the same moment because -- the word the physicists use is -- that those particles are entangled. That's a great word, "entangled."  The Christian phrase has always been for centuries the "mystical Body of Christ," which sounds kind of esoteric but at its root what it means is somehow, in a way we don't understand, everything and everyone is one body and we are all connected. So if there is a woman dying in South Sudan because her village has been burned, because she's been trekking through the forests and deserts for two weeks with her children to get to a refugee camp, if she's suffering, I cannot be at peace. I cannot rest.  And that once you believe that, you're energized to do something, do something practical. Whether it's raise money to help alleviate that situation or advocate in Congress for stopping the greed of the companies that are extracting oil and armies that are building those pipelines and dropping bombs on the people to protect the pipelines. We're all interconnected. The fact that we want to build walls on our borders to keep people out is so blatantly wrong. It's backwards. The world is going to be safer when we make friends with strangers, not when we try to keep them out or kill them. I understand that it's fear that causes people to lock the doors, but we are really on the wrong path.

Pavi:  I remember you once quoting the poet Mary Oliver, when you read this line; "Except we love, all news comes as from a distant land." Those words resonated and have remained with me. 

Sister Marilyn:  Yeah. It's absolutely true.

Pavi:  Would you tell us the story of your first visit to Sudan and how it eventually led to the work that you are now doing there?

Sister Marilyn:  Well, after volunteering with the refugees at the San Francisco airport, I became so fascinated by refugee work I just kind of got pulled into it. I then ended up working overseas in Northern Thailand with Laotians in a refugee camp for a year and eventually switched from being a high school teacher to performing refugee resettlement work back in the US. I helped arriving refugees whom the State Department allowed in each year and are usually resettled by various faith groups or civic organizations in different towns all over the US.

I was working in that field for quite some time. Every couple of years we would have a professional conference of the Catholic Network, which was the largest resettlement network in the US. At the time I was directing a large program in San Jose for migrants and refugees from all over the world. In 1991, I went to this conference at a hotel in Los Angeles. There were over 600 attendees that worked with refugees in one form or another. For the opening plenary session there were three people on the panel; one was from the State Department who talked about refugee pipelines and who would be coming in the next year or two from which part of the world. The other one, I believe, was a speaker from what at that time was called the INS--now it's called the Border Patrol. He spoke about the laws that were changing as well as the funding streams. The third speaker was a Catholic bishop from South Sudan. He got to the microphone. He started talking about a war going on in Southern Sudan.  He's talking about this huge war that's going on in his country. He says it's the longest running war in the world and has been going on for decades. And he said, “I have a million refugees in my diocese; in my region. I have refugee children living in my house. I have a bomb crater in my front yard because the other side, the Khartoum government, is bombing us every day.” I was on the edge of my seat because here I am, I'm a professional refugee resettlement director and I have never heard that there was a war going on in Sudan. I’m not stupid, I read the international papers and The New York Times every day. It wasn't reported by the news in the US so it wasn’t even on our radar screens that there was a war over there. I was so interested in what this Bishop was saying…. Shortly after he began to speak the moderator of the panel walked over to him and took the microphone away and said, “Excuse me. We're out of time. Would everyone please go to your first breakout session?” And the other five hundred and ninety nine people got up and walked away to their interest sessions. I could not believe what had happened, they only gave this gentleman 5 minutes to speak. I was embarrassed and horrified that they did this. I threaded my way against the upstream to find him in the quarter. When I found him  I said, “Excuse me Bishop. I would like to know more about the suffering of your people.” He looked me in the eye and he said, “Come and see.” 

Now, if you are familiar with the Christian scriptures, you know that those are the first words in the Gospel that Jesus speaks when people say things like “Hey, where do you live? What are you about?” or are curious about Jesus.  Jesus replies, “Come and see.” So of course that reference popped into my mind when he said “Come and see,” I blurted out, “okay, I will.” I'm sitting in the corner looking at this guy and then my next thought was not so holy, it was like, “oh bleep. How am I going to do that?  I don't have any money. I have never been to Africa. What did I just say?” As I'm thinking these thoughts, I get a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and there's an American guy standing behind me who says, “Sister, do you really want to go to South Sudan? It's a war zone.” I said, “Yes I do.”  He said, “okay.” He handed me his business card and he said, “call me on Monday, I'll make all the arrangements.” 

It turned out that this gentleman was the Vice President of the Catholic Relief Services, which had apparently sponsored the trip of this Bishop whose name I later learned was Bishop Paride Taban. He's like the Mother Teresa of East Africa, and they had brought him precisely to this conference to be part of the panel so that he could raise awareness about the problems in Sudan. Up until then it was the worst war in the world at that time and nobody had ever heard of it. However, people learned about it three months later when the Lost Boys of Sudan emerged. The Lost Boys of Sudan was the name given to a group of over 20,000 boys of the Nuer and Dinka ethnic groups. These boys were displaced or orphaned during the second Sudanese Civil War (1987-2005) in which about 2 million were killed and others were severely affected.

I've lived in refugee camps so I thought I knew what I would see when I arrived in Sudan, but I was so wrong. I was naive. I got myself to the northern part of Kenya and then I was picked up by the driver and we drove for fifteen hours to get to the town where the Bishop was living. We saw nothing on that 15-hour drive; not a gas station, not a market, not a store, nothing.  Every 10 miles or so, there would be branches across the, well it wasn’t really a road per se, it was more like a track in the dirt that young boys, ages 10 or 11 years old, were guarding while holding AK-47s in their hands. They asked, “Who are you? Where are you going?” My driver answered, “We are going to see Bishop Taliban” and they would say, “Okay” and let us go. It was like a magic mantra. 

I don't know what I expected to see when we got there; like a settlement or the UN organizing displaced people or something -- but there was nothing. It was this little town of huts that were all bombed out; starving people just walking around, like sleepwalking, with maybe a half of a blanket draped over one shoulder, eerily silent.  Lots of children sitting on the ground, nobody was crying, nobody was talking. They were so weak. They were skeletal, and the Bishop wasn't even there. He had been airlifted out to go to a peace conference. There were peace talks between the rebels.  Seeing all this shook me to my core. That level of suffering and that level of ignorance by the rest of the world.

After a week I returned home and I thought, “someday,  somehow, I must do something to find some way to be with the people of South Sudan.”   Eventually, I had the opportunity to start the current project that I head, which is Mercy Beyond Borders, a nonprofit. Our mission is to work with women and girls. We aim to forge ways to help them learn, connect, and lead so that they can pull themselves up from extreme poverty.   

Pavi: Sister, I think it would be wonderful to have you explain, in particular, what is like in that part of the world and what the program you administer offers in that context. 

Sister Marilyn: Well, I can assure you that you do not ever want to be born female in a place like South Sudan. Historically and even to the present day, there are cultures which do not believe that females are human. I know that sounds harsh, and it is harsh. Almost unbelievable, but it's real. Girls born in South Sudan are told by their parents who love them that they are worth less than cows.  Their hierarchy of understanding is for those who are Christian and animist and Muslim. Whatever their hierarchy in those cultures is that God is on top and right below God, there's man. And right below the men, there is cattle. Then, the lowest of all, is females. So, in the culture, females are used essentially as domestic servants or slaves, and then bartered to other families in exchange for cattle. It's a cruel circular system that traps the girls. Because of that, they don't send the girls to school. 

The bishop who introduced me and invited me to South Sudan said to me, “you know, Sister, for 50 years here in South Sudan, we have been educating boys. What did we get? War. I'm going to try and educate the girls.”  This was in the late 90s. He began to run a school under a tree in his town. He took a bush plane and went around during the war and invited families to trust him with one of their daughters. Nobody would give up all their daughters but some families did. He had several dozen girls learning under a tree. Of course, he couldn't pay the teachers and the surroundings were very chaotic as the refugees and displaced people kept moving through and trying to get out into Kenya into Uganda to where there were refugee camps. So, the school was pretty haphazard, but it was a school nonetheless. It was a place where girls were learning and it was a place where different tribes of girls were learning together. It was probably the only place in South Sudan where you had tribes that historically hated each other and were killing each other, actually living and learning together. So, I recognized that as a seed of great hope for the country.  

The war eventually ended in 2005. Then, in 2011, a referendum overwhelmingly voted in favor of seceding from Sudan. So, the new country was created, South Sudan. That was a period of wonderful hope and when I started Mercy Beyond Borders. We are an international nonprofit. We are now set-up in South Sudan (and Haiti). Our focus is on changing the trajectory of the lives of young females in these countries. Providing young girls access to school, and keeping them in school. The bishop was doing a wonderful thing with his school under the tree school, but nobody ever graduated from eighth grade. It's not that they were done. It's just that by the time they were in fifth or sixth grade, the parents would come to school and pick up the girl and marry her off in exchange for cows. So, at least that was a positive step. At least, those girls knew what education was and they would try and fight to get their daughters to go to school.

As an organization, we decided that if we gave high school scholarships, perhaps some families would allow the girls to spend a couple more years in school. We started offering scholarships to anyone who could pass the national exam in eighth grade and, lo and behold,  families did allow some of their daughters to continue in school. We did begin to get a pipeline through high school. Then this other amazing, unintended, consequence was that all the girls in the primary school, where there were hundreds, started to see that there was hope for them. They started studying really, really hard because everybody wanted one of those scholarships. Nobody wants to get married when they're 12, especially not to an old man. Because the old men have more cows to give away they can pay a higher bride price. It is very discouraging and heart aching to have a girl of 12-13-14 years old being married to a man of 60 or 65. Believe it or not,  these young girls are not even a man’s first wife. She's his fourth or fifth or sixth wife. She becomes a slave not only to him, but to all the prior wives. It is not a happy life. So the chance that education was providing them was a golden opportunity. The girls began to realize the importance of an education and could see how it changed their lives. They would say, “I'm going to hit the books and study really hard.” So, we now have a conduit of hundreds of girls going through high school and already we have 55 young women who have graduated from university! 

Pavi: That’s tremendous.

Sister Marilyn: It's so amazing because all the odds are against these young girls. Everything. They would rather study than eat. Literally! They work so hard and now they're going right back. All 55 of them work back in what is still a war zone. Why? Because even though the main war ended after 37 years, those tribes in the South no longer had a common enemy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. All these different ethnic groups in South Sudan started fighting each other for the oil,  the gold, the land, the resources, the power, or for the money. So, there is tremendous devastation. This has caused more than a million and a quarter people to leave South Sudan again.

This is a country of only 12 million people and one-third to one-half, of all the people in South Sudan are currently displaced. Can you imagine if that were the US? Millions upon millions of people no longer in their own home or their own territory with farms or anything. So, Mercy Beyond Borders, as an organization, has moved with these displaced people. We are now working in the refugee camps in northern Uganda and northern Kenya, as well as still continuing our work inside South Sudan as well as Haiti. We try to go where the need is greatest.

Sometimes our Board of Directors will shake their heads and say, “Marilyn, couldn't you have come upon easier places to work?” Well, of course...but, Mercy needs to be where the need is greatest. So we're never going to scale. What I want to do is see the light in the eyes of a girl or in the eyes of a woman who suddenly understands “I am worth more than cows. I do have talents. I am going to make and forge a future for myself and my family.”  

That change is one by one. I am no longer thinking I'm going to save the world. It is a blessing just to be with these people whose lives have been transformed.

Pavi: That blessing is something I want to touch upon. This idea of deep hospitality, and the idea of welcoming the stranger, and the possibility of unknowingly entertaining angels, and this idea that the stranger in need is the person who brings the blessing is so deep, so deeply embedded in the Scriptures. You've led this life of such paradox. You bridge one of the wealthiest pockets in the world.

Sister Marilyn: Yeah, I live in Silicon Valley! 

Pavi: Soon you will be flying back to Sudan and you live a hair's breadth away from these cultures of extreme violence and the totem pole that you just described; those women who reside at the bottom. And yet you also live so close to acts of extraordinary generosity, humanity, to communities that have such a deep understanding of community that it almost puts our Western world to shame a little bit. Would you speak a little bit about the deep nobility that you've encountered in these communities? 

Sister Marilyn: After nearly 40 years of working with so many different cultures, I have continuously brought up how narrow our ideas are in our culture and what poverty we have in our lack of hospitality. We measure our progress by how rich we can become, how our communities are gated communities where we think we can have everything by keeping other people out. My experience is just the opposite.

I think about one of the Lost Boys of Sudan who was resettled by Catholic Charities where I was working in San Jose, California. The Lost Boys are all very tall. Many of them were from the Dinka tribe, which is not unusual to be between 6' 6" and 7' tall. When you're emaciated and you're tall, you really, really look very skeletal. Besides teaching these new arrivals about our culture and our norms, I also provided them with instructions how to prepare for a job so that they could become independent here. You see, independence, individuality, making it on your own is how we think of success in America. But, this is different for them. They've taught me about togetherness and community and sharing. 

I was driving a young man, Anyuan,to a job interview about four o'clock in the afternoon. I was coaching him. “This is how you shake hands firmly, and you look people in the eye who are interviewing you.” All these “normal” cultural things in the US which are not “normal” for them in their culture.I noticed that he was kind of slumping in the seat and he looked tired. I said, "Anyuan, have you eaten today?" And he said, "no, I didn't eat anything yet." It's four o'clock in the afternoon. Of course in the refugee camps, they were accustomed to eating only one meal of ground-up maize porridge and always in the evening because they would say to me, “you can distract yourself in the daytime from hunger, but you can't distract yourself at night. The pain is too great in your stomach.” So they always would save their rations and eat at night.

He has spent 12 of his 19 years in a refugee camp but he is now in the US and he's going to a job interview. He hasn't eaten all day. So I really got impatient. I felt annoyed with him. I said, "Anyuan, look, I am knocking myself out here trying to get you job interviews. You at least have to eat breakfast and you need to bulk out a little bit. Nobody's gonna hire you if you look like you can be knocked over by a breath of wind." He said, "oh sister, I wanted to eat breakfast, but my roommates were not fast enough." I said, "What? What are you talking about? I'm asking you if you had breakfast." He said, "well I wanted to but it was time to go to class at Catholic Charities and so my roommates were not fast enough," he repeated. I repeated again, "why didn't you eat?" At that, he turned to me and he said, "well sister, I could never eat alone."

Wow! Welcome to fast food America where even families don't sit down, but he, living with four roommates in a little apartment that we had, because his roommates were not up yet and he had to leave to catch the bus to come to class, even though he's hungry, he wouldn't even dare think about eating alone. It's just not something you do. Food is precious. Food is a gift. Food is to be shared.

Pavi: That was one of the most powerful things to me, the poverty of presence, how we often tend to rush from one thing to the next. There's such a moving chapter in your book where you talk about people who haven't forgotten the deep humanity of blessing each other with their presence, just showing up to say hello and to witness each other... 

Sister Marilyn: I know, these folks take 3 buses to come across town just to knock on my office door and say “good morning.” And as the director I'm focused on "what are you here for? And their response it “I just want to say, '' Hello.” The title of my book is a little strange. People are like, "what does this mean?" The title is This Flowing Toward Me. The subtitle is "a story of God arriving in strangers". The title comes from a Sufi poem. Sufism of course being the mystical tradition within Islam. The poetry of the Sufis was introduced to by a coworker whose father was a Sufi master who worked alongside me resettling refugees and who is just an extraordinary human being. His name is Reza Odabaee, and he introduced me to their poetry. Honestly, it has become very central to my Christian prayer. In one of his poems -- I can just quote you the first section because I know it by heart, I just love it -- it's called “The Music”. It starts, 

For sixty years I have been forgetful,

every minute, but not for a second

has this flowing toward me stopped or slowed.

This flowing toward me, it's like this goodness, this welcome from God, this graciousness, this spirit of openness. Even though I'm not thinking about it, it never stops. I think when we become, perhaps through a crisis in your life, perhaps through daily meditation, perhaps through falling into an encounter that you weren't expecting such as my introduction to refugees, that is when we become conscious that this goodness carries us, transforms us, frees us, melts away our fears so that we can encounter the other. It doesn't stop inside us, it flows through us to kind of openness and connectedness. The surprising thing is the joy that comes then. 

Refugee work is not grim work. But it is a grim reality. I think that it happens when we leave our comfort zone, that we see that the refugees are bringing blessings not threats.  That welcome is what we all deeply need and for sure, the refugees and migrants need it the most because they are not welcomed and they are perceived as dangerous and “other”. That is just wrong and people of deep spirituality from any tradition, I think, know that it's wrong. We need to be speaking out about it. We need to be acting. We need to be changing our policies. The people who say that religion and politics need to be kept separate, my goodness, what world are they living in? That is that danger of the individualistic thing, that religion is private -- something between me and God and doesn't have to do with the way I live. That is ridiculous. [laughing] I forget who it is now, but somebody said, "Religion is always personal, but it is never private."

There is a big difference. It is personal. It is interpersonal. It is communal. It is not private. And when we privatize it, we bastardize it. It is not true anymore. We make God very small.

LuAnn: Thank you Pavi and Sister Marilyn; I would like to open this discussion up to questions.  From Jane Jackson: "Sister Marilyn, do you encounter much opposition to the work of Mercy Beyond Borders in the countries you work in, since the education of girls in the areas you work is not culturally the norm? And do the girls themselves face danger for becoming educated? Thank you so much for the hope and light you bring." 

Sister Marilyn: Yes, there is opposition, and yes, there is danger for the girls and the women we work with, but they recognize it and are not going to turn back from the opportunity education provides.

Most of the Sudanese people were in refugee camps during the long war if they were lucky enough to reach and get over into a United Nations. camp. In those camps, South Sudanese females for the first time in their lives saw that females in other parts of the world apparently had real jobs and higher education, because in the refugee camps they saw U.N. administrators who were female. They saw doctors and nurses who were female. They saw teachers in the camps, social workers, business people, pilots. This was a revelation to the females in South Sudan.

So the women's eyes were opened, and they began pushing for education. They are not always successful, because the men make the decisions. When I was in the refugee camps last year in Northern Uganda, there are 1.2 million refugees in 21 camps along the border just south of South Sudan in Uganda. Every refugee camp has a government official from Uganda that oversees it. They elect a refugee to be chief of the camp who of course are all men, elect one of their number to be the uber-leader, the chief of all the chiefs, who of course is also a man. I was at a meeting of all the NGOs and at each monthly meeting a different NGO presents. And that month it was our turn, so we were talking about the work of Mercy Beyond Borders in 4 of the camps. And in those camps, we were doing micro-enterprise loans and training for women to start businesses.

So we give our presentation, and the first hand to go up is this 6'8" tall Mandika man who stands up and proceeds to harangue my staff who just presented. "Don't you realize that you should not be giving loans to women? If you give loans to women, they may become self-sufficient, then they will leave us. You should be giving loans to the men, because we are the decision makers. And you are causing problems by giving loans to women. And we have to beat them, so they understand the money they are earning belongs to us. And you are causing division in the camps." And he went on and on for about 15 minutes.

I was grinding my teeth because I was about to strangle the man, which shows you how uncompassionate I am after all these years of trying to be a Sister of Mercy. But that is the prevailing attitude of the males. And the fact that he stood up and said that in front of the U.N. officials and all the other NGOs who were on our side. So yes, there is opposition and I am frequently stopped when I am walking through the camps or the schools where we work by young men who say, "Hey, I want a scholarship too. Give me a scholarship. Why are you giving it to them and not to me?" And I always stop and engage them in conversation. I say, "Oh, I would love to give scholarships to you and your younger brothers, as soon as the day comes when females have all the same opportunities that males do." And they laugh because they know that the world is completely tilted in favor of the boys, not the girls. So they get it. They say, "Oh yeah, Ok." And they walk away.

LuAnn: Because my background is in education I would like to move on with that thread of thought. I frequently hear from other teachers is the difference between American students and students from other countries, especially what you are talking about from the Sudan where they are so eager and want education so much, yet here it seems that we have to force some students, not all, some students to understand the value of just being able to read.  If you could talk about your experience there, because I know you taught in impoverished schools, and I did that for one year, and the difference that you see between the two, if any, or if that is just a myth that we tell ourselves.

Sister Marilyn: Well, what can I say? If you were dying and there was a magic pill that could save your life, you would do anything to get that magic pill. Right? 

LuAnn: Right.

Sister Marilyn: But if you're leading a comfortable life and somebody says, "here's a pill but it's going to cost you 12 years to get it and if you get it, it might open some doors for you to get a good job" -- you don't have that same burning desire to spend 12 years to get that pill that might open a better door for you. But if you're dying, you're going to do anything to get that pill. That pill is education for girls and they know it. So, they -- not just girls, both genders in really poor countries -- everybody knows and research has proven it in country after country after country, that the single most effective intervention you can do against poverty, extreme poverty, is the education of females; and in most countries the boys already have a much better opportunity for education. So, the focus of international aid really ought to always be on educating girls. It's also, I learned from a doctor who's on our board of directors, that education is the strongest predictor of global health. I had not known that -- you know, rigorous scientifically proven. So, if you want a healthy world, you want a world that's less divided by extremes of poverty and wealth, education of girls is the solution.

We don't feel that in the US because we are not under such deprivation and such severe pain. And so, I don't think you can expect US students to have that same drive or grasp the value of an education. 

For example, once there was a 12-year-old girl inside our convent. I asked, "what's she doing in the convent?" And they replied, "we're hiding her, we're hiding her from the family that wants to sell her." So, girls, themselves, recognize that “it's worth my life to get back to that school.” And even the ones who don't have to escape, their journeys are arduous. The vehicles, if you can get on the back of a pickup truck, travel for two days, with the blazing sun, bouncing over these dreaded roads and through the flash floods and then to be ambushed by bandits. Girls have not been educated. So the fact that in the past 10 years, we've managed to get 55 girls through University is huge. It's not to scale. It's not 10,000 women but 55 educated women are now working. They are the first educated women in the country--working.

Our next project is to try to start an advocacy network of alumnae because, obviously, they go to work in a hospital, they're the only female in the hospital. All the nurses and doctors are men. They go to work in a school; they're the only female in school. All the other teachers are former rebels; some of whom I might add, cannot read or write themselves but got the jobs because they were in the army and the army won so they gave them the jobs. So, there's a lot to be done. The thirst for education is palpable among the females, so it's going to spread.

LuAnn: Elizabeth from Richmond, VA asks, are there volunteer opportunities in Haiti or Sudan?

Sister Marilyn: Thank you Elizabeth, for even thinking that thought and wanting to do that. We, in the beginning, did accept some volunteers coming to South Sudan to help out in St. Paquita Primary School. But it has since become so dangerous with the resurgence of the civil war, that we're no longer taking volunteers in Africa at this point in time. We are, however, accepting volunteers in Haiti. Each summer, we have leadership and an English camp for high school girls. High school, in Haiti, follows the old French system since it was a colony of the French. So high school starts very young, seventh grade, and it goes up through the 13th grade, junior college. We have scholars for a period of seven years. We like to get them together. Haiti is dirt poor but it is not oppressive of females intentionally. Poverty oppresses females because it causes early marriage and it causes early death and it causes, you know, all kinds of problems -- lack of education when they send their boys to school but not their girls; but it's not an intentional denigration the way it is in South Sudanese cultures.

LuAnn:  The next question is from Mish in Brooklyn, NY. She is asking what the level of medical care is available in the areas you've served--Doctors Without Borders--are they able to get into these areas to help people?

Sister Marilyn:  Yes, they are.  Doctors Without Borders is a fantastic organization. I encourage everybody to support them. The medical care, as you can imagine, is very incomplete and sporadic.  You cannot give vaccinations when a country is at war and half of the population is on the move. You cannot properly treat for significant illnesses when the clinics are not staffed, when foreign doctors or well-trained medical professionals leave the country because of the danger, and the NGOs call out. So a very high percentage of the girls that we educate or that we provide scholarships for choose nursing and they do it because they have seen their mothers die. And they've seen people die of very preventable diseases.

One out of every five children dies before the age of five.  In today's world, that's utterly ridiculous. These are preventable things. The government builds clinics, but then there's no trained people to work in those clinics. A  lot of the work is done by NGOs, however, the government is so corrupt and so dysfunctional that they have threatened to tax all the NGOs 10,000 US dollars per head, per year for the privilege of working in their warzone. So of course everybody from the UN on down to us is saying "no, we're not going to pay that tax." And so the government has backed off a bit.

LuAnn: Thank you so much for being our guest today SIster Marilyn.  You have done my heart so good. I work on the periphery of an immigrant organization and it never quite feels like I do nearly as much, and I don't do anything like you do. You have given me so much to think about.   

Sister Marilyn:  We all do our part.  Just spread the joy and drop the walls. That's my advice.

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Learn more about the work of Sr. Marilyn's organization Mercy Beyond Borders here.

For more inspiration, join this Saturday's Awakin Call with renowned immigration lawyer Sheela Murthy: Serving the Stranger. More details and RSVP info here.