Marjean Perhot
Marjean Perhot welcomes the stranger.
“I always remember I could be that Haitian woman trying to cross the southern border to find safety, or the people fleeing a war to find safety. I could be a woman in Ukraine in a business role or I could be doing social services in Ukraine and, all of a sudden my city is taken over. I could be any one of those people. But by the sheer blessings that I have, I was born in a place where I can survive. I remember that I could very well be that person we’re helping."
Photo: Stephanie C. Olsen
MARJEAN PERHOT, the Vice President of Refugee and Immigrant Services at Catholic Charities Boston (CCAB), told us of her life-long love of learning other cultures and meeting people. That powerful attraction to turned into a calling. Her mission became wrapping her arms around and providing wrap-around services to families, torn from their war-torn homes and placed amongst the foreign. She and her team guide them into a new normal. Hoping to give them a glimpse of joy again. “People don’t want to become refugees, right? They’d rather be in their homeland. Wouldn’t you rather be where you come from, where you speak the language? Where you understand the food and its familiar smells?”
Our conversation begins here:
What called you to this work?
Marjean: Bridget, this an interesting question that at this point in my career I should have a concise answer for, yet, this question is the one I struggle with the most since I cannot pinpoint the exact origin. The honor of sharing my story with Pink Chair Storytellers has encouraged me to really think about this question in depth, so thank you! My short answer is that my calling to this life-changing work is a combination of family ancestry, faith, and hardship.
Family ancestry: On my paternal side, I am the granddaughter of a first generation immigrant, my Papa, who insisted that we were American, not Croatian-American. He was so adamant that we were American first and Croatian second that he did not share a lot of our heritage with us grandkids. However he and my grandma did not hesitate to speak in Croatian when they wanted to say something us grandkids should not hear! His sister, my great aunt Helen, was the family historian and dedicated much of her life to support Croatia, our ancestral home. She provided very generous funds to renovate the church steeple in the small village in Croatia where my great grandparents were married. I was always asking questions about Croatia and our family and learned anecdotes from my Papa but most of actual history from her dedicated work to preserve the culture and history. From my Papa, I also learned about the discrimination he faced working in the coal mines because he was of Croatian origin, a lesser preferred nationality among the European immigrants at the time. My Papa, through his storytelling, which at times was “colorful” at best and horrifying at worst, I learned about intense racial tensions and growing up very poor, (which later I realized meant living through the Great Depression) and loss of life due to illness, sparked by poverty; having held his little brother in his arms as he died on the steps of the local hospital. Because he was the only surviving male, he was not permitted to join the military and could not afford college, so, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, as a way to support his sisters and crippled father (my great grandfather that immigrated from Croatia). He helped to build up our nation’s infrastructure and then settled his family in a city that billed itself as “The International City” where immigrants from more than 55 nationalities called the city home. My Papa did not necessarily settle in my hometown due to its diversity, but rather the booming steel and shipping industry at the time–but, all the same, growing up in a city that celebrated immigrants and their heritage definitely helped to shape my interest in immigrants and migration.
Faith: on my maternal side, my mother was one of ten children growing up in a rural town and her family were faithful Roman Catholics as were many of the families in that area. She had a strong faith in God and the Catholic Church. When I was in elementary school, my parents were able to give me a Catholic school education and were very active in our local parish at the time, my father serving on the PTA committee and other men’s groups along with supporting fundraising efforts. My mother was particularly invested in my faith and even made me the costume of my favorite saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton! For some reason I took an interest in Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first AMerican born saint, possibly because her middle name was “Ann” as was mine, but the more I reflect on it, I was intrigued by her journey to Europe and converting to Catholicism after meeting with an Italian family. Again, the draw of culture, with what is likely providence sprinkled in, likely contributed to my calling.
Hardship: while I do not like to dwell on certain experiences from birth to age 18, as I write my story, I have come to realize that hardships I aggressively suppress had an impact on my calling to serve. Growing up I experienced the acute pain of divorce, housing loss and constant economic and food insecurity–all while our family was fierce about pretending that we were fine, strong, and stable. Most days I felt like I was living a double life and was very ashamed to admit our situation. But, even as a child experiencing this, I was acutely aware that we were still very lucky and had opportunities that others in my local community did not. As I matured, I realized that those opportunities were available to me because I was born a White woman in the US. What an amazing gift from God.
So, while faith, family ancestry and hardship are foundations, a few pivotal experiences are what started my professional journey.
After graduating from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN, an all women’s college, with bachelor degree in anthropology and foreign policy, having finished a pivotal semester at American University in DC doing an internship at a Croatian American (sorry Papa!) lobbyist during the Balkan Wars, I was ambivalent about next steps in my life and decided to do a year of service. I chose to do that service through the Marist Volunteer Program (MVP). I selected the option to work in a social service agency when most of the placements were with schools operated by the Marists. So, that meant the only placement was in Boston, with the (Marist) Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary (SMSM) who were religious sisters assigned to work overseas as nurses, doctors, and teachers. They had a site in Lexington and agreed to accept two MVPs, myself and a really awesome woman who I would share my early professional years and life changing experiences with. While that experience of living in community with religious sisters was at times a challenge for two young women just out of college, the benefits were immense, especially for me. Our placement as MVPs was at Catholic Charities Boston. I was assigned to the Basic Needs program and the front desk as a receptionist. BTW–the best way to learn about an agency is to work as a receptionist! To this day, I use my skills and knowledge of the agency learned way back in 1995 as a receptionist for what was at that time our Greater Boston office in Somerville. My MVP service at CCAB started as the first refugees were fleeing the genocide and war in Bosnia starting with the falling of Sarejevo. While during the day I worked to help the poor and working poor access Basic Needs such as food, rental and utility assistance, I also pestered the Refugee Resettlement team, located in our building, to let me volunteer for them too. As luck (or maybe Providence) would have it, Saint Brigid Parish in Lexington had generously allowed Catholic Charities to use a home on its property as temporary housing for refugees from Bosnia. And I, the young and eager MVP lived in Lexington, volunteered to do whatever in support of the refugees living in there (Lexington was quite a distance from our office in Somerville). That led to me being the one to deliver items from the case manager to the families at the temporary home. One evening, my younger (blonder, thinner :)) self sprinted up the front steps of this temporary home and knocked on the door, without speaking Bosnian and no interpreter, to drop off a check to a family. The adult male in the family opened the wide door and said to me “welcome, come in, come in” gesturing with his hands to enter and then I sat down to talk with them, even though I was supposed to drop off the check and leave, per the case manager’s instruction. The family, recent escapees from the daily gunfire assaults on their luxury apartment building in beautiful Sarajevo, having fled in the dark of night and climbed mountain (Mount Igman) to get out, kindly insisted I sit down in one of the few decent mismatched wooden chairs, gave me very strong coffee (I never drink coffee) they called “turkish coffee (but really was Nescafe finely grounded by the mother’s hand with a spoon) and fed me, from the small amount of food they had. That evening I stayed sitting in the wooden chair for over an hour, listening to their story of as members of the professional, successful upper-middle class, watching the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, and having family and friends that were Christian and Muslim and how one day, poof, it was gone; beautiful Sarajevo was invaded and they fled. I kept coming back to see this family.....and the rest is history.
I wonder how many of us hear that voice, hear that calling, but decide not to pursue it.
My resolve for working at a non-profit agency in Boston–which required a second job while also relying on my devoted father, the owner and operator of Perhot’s Auto Service (one of the only honest mechanics in our entire city, no bias!) to pay for my car and insurance plus sending me “extra support” on a too-regular basis, was finally tested in the spring of 1999.
Prior to that spring of 1999, I had managed to convince CCAB that I wanted to remain with the agency and work with refugees. It was not easy. I was not what the program needed and contract dollars were very limited. I did not speak Bosnian or the language of other refugee groups and had no cultural fluency (fourth generation American-Croatian is not overly convincing). I agreed to work in two positions for almost two years, Basic Needs and RIS. Finally RIS found enough contract dollars to piece together a full-time position in Refugee Resettlement.
Now, back to 1999, my Bosnian friend—she was from the same family who opened that wide door in Lexington and welcomed me—kept saying to me something along the lines of: “Why do you work at the Charities? You are crazy, you don’t make any money and work too much. You are American and can make more money and do easier work. You should work at my company.” By that time, I was no longer living rent free with the SMSMs, my friends were moving up the economic ladder faster than me, and the idea of earning $28,000 per year was so amazing! She got me a job as an administrative assistant, working under her guidance at a socially responsible investment firm downtown Boston. I was so happy at first, we had an hour lunch and were in such a cool location (no offense Union Square Somerville, but you were very different in the late 1990s). I was not the point person to immediately find an in-patient bed on a psych ward for a person suffering from severe PTSD, no landlord refusing to rent to my clients because they did not have a credit score, no donors dropping off donations of antique, dirty, smelly and completely useless items that “refugees should appreciate” in my office or worse yet, that I had to pick up in our extended passenger, extremely hard to drive van (BTW–maybe in my next life, will be a CDL driver). So, that job as an administrative assistant was working out great, I had a lot more free time and money to do things. But, then the war in Kosovo started to be nightly news on my television (not iPhone!) screen. Kosovo, a small (now) nation in the Balkans, the region of my ancestors, was invaded and decimated by ethnic conflict against innocent people because of their Muslim faith. It was horrific and I could not get it out of my mind. Back at the office in Boston, I was surrounded by people constantly focused on the stock market, making money and was being evaluated on my ability to process mail informing already wealthy people that they were earning more money was sent out on time or grilled on why financial reports were not immediately available. There were days when I wanted to shout out loud “Seriously, these are only pieces of paper, there are people who look like you and standing in a bread line in Europe, trying to get a little bit of food to eat, in Europe! Don’t you know there is an ethnic conflict and people are dying just because of their religion?
As God would have it, one May summer evening I was in the most unusual places for me, the Fairmont Copley Hotel, and bumped into many of my former CCAB RIS colleagues. They were all there to support one of our amazing paralegals (who is still on our team at 40 years of service!) was being honored (in the same stage as Senator Ted Kennedy!) for her tireless work. I only got to speak with them briefly, but, I recall saying half-jokingly to the resettlement program manager, I’d be willing to come back if they would match my current salary. A few days later she called me while I was at the investment firm to offer me a position and I did not even hesitate to accept. I happily gave my two week notice, barely lasting there for three months and went back to our Somerville office. I started back at CCAB the next week. When I re-entered the battered office, crammed with staff and clients, I did not even think about the fancy office space, tony downtown location, copious, free food and drink, hour long lunches and high income of the private sector.
Even though I still cannot afford to purchase a home and only got a brand new car in 2020, I remain thankful that God put my former colleagues in my path that May evening of 1999.
Is there one family or event that stays with you all these years?
Oh Bridget, another hard question for which I do not have a short, concise answer! Over the past 29 years, I have been so honored and blessed to hear the stories of and participate in so many people’s lives. There are people such as the family from Bosnia that opened that door of the temporary house and welcomed me. There are my colleagues, who have been doing this work alongside me at CCAB, some longer than me and we have shared so much in service to our clients.
There is one family though that has had a significant impact on me during my “later” years in this work. As I have been writing my story for Pink Chair Storytellers, I am now seeing patterns which I choose to believe are providential, God-driven, as I respond to your questions. So, the way I came into contact with this family is part of that pattern. In 2014 we were asked by the national office to participate in a pilot program that was slightly beyond the scope of our usual refugee resettlement and legal services and would require us to partner with a federal agency that we typically did not work with. However, because I am always Boston proud and believe we in Boston can do anything, we signed the contract. The federal agency with which we were required to partner was one that many in my line of work think of as the “enemy,” including me. But one thing I learned early in my career from a very wise religious sister was that if you do not meet the perceived enemy half-way, you have zero chance of finding compromise or defeating the enemy.
As this was a pilot program, there were definitely some challenges that required creative responses. It was proving very difficult for the federal partner to refer people from Boston for our services. More than halfway into the pilot project year, our national office found some potential clients for us, although they were not exactly in our region. This led to me to rent a car (as my beloved used Buick would not survive the trip), leave at 3:00 a.m. to drive six hours, which ended being eight due to traffic, to a rural location where our potential clients were located. I had to make it to the location by 10:00 a.m. to meet the federal agency and national partners. Got my first speeding ticket ($263.00!) since 1992 during that frantic drive to the facility and I was still late! When I finally arrived and was allowed into the facility, having to leave all of my belongings in a supposedly secure space, I was given a tour of the residence where families who were seeking asylum in the US were being held. I saw families from many different countries, all desperately wanting to find a way to stay legally in the US. There was a facilitated meeting with one of those families identified for our program where I pitched the program: move to Boston, we will provide an apartment, food, living assistance, English language classes, enroll your kids in school, find an attorney for your case, etc. But even as I made my pitch, I could see that they were very guarded (they were from a country with constant surveillance) and the interpreter may not have been entirely neutral in the interpretation. Of course they were scared, they had been detained while seeking asylum and they did not know me from Eve. They chose to not enroll. I was really disappointed, not for our program performance outcomes, but because I knew that if they did not accept the program, they would not be able to stay in the U.S. And, that’s what happened, they were removed to a different country. To this day, the family sends me an annual email to say hello and ask if there is any way their (now adult) child can return to the U.S. for another chance.
The next day, I drove to a physical rehabilitation center where another potential client was located. All I knew about was that he was suffering severe neurological damage due to being struck by bombs in home country. He was not able to get treatment in home country and had a visa to come to the US. But, when he arrived in the US, the family that was supposed to sponsor him refused to come to the airport to get him. He was not able to communicate effectively due to the neurological damage and since he had no family, he was put in detention. While in detention, he began to decompensate medically and was transferred to a local rehabilitation facility. I was not prepared for what I saw when entering his room: a middle-aged, thin, male adult, stripped of his dignity being shackled to a hospital chair and watched by an armed guard 24/7. Even though he was shackled he tried to stand up and bow, as a gesture of respect to me. I was indignant and said: “Why is this person in shackles? He cannot even move which is why he is in this facility. He’s not going to run away!” “Well, that’s policy, ma’am,” is what the guard told me. I was only permitted to be with him for a short time and could not even give him a pen to sign his consent for our services! Aside from the completely inhumane treatment for a person who was severely injured and not a criminal, I remember thinking to myself, how expensive is this for the taxpayer? I am so angry that my tax dollars support this treatment.
I left that rehab facility, 110% committed to doing all that I could to get our new client out of that facility and up to Boston.
I also am reminded of a surgeon from a war-torn country who just survived a double-tap barrel bomb explosion at the hospital he was working in. He ran out to serve the wounded and was severely injured. He had a valid visa to come to the US for medical treatment but he came to the U.S. to get medical attention, expecting to be met by a family member at the airport, but the family member did not show up. So, he was put in detention.
This person was an incredibly brilliant, top cardiothoracic surgeon in his country. I got a call from our national office in D.C. asking us to take him into our program. By this time, he had been admitted to a rehab facility in Pennsylvania because he was so severely injured. So, I drove to Pennsylvania to meet with the people from ICE and our national office. When I arrived to meet him, he was shackled to a chair in the rehab facility. This man was so thin, you could tell he had lost so much weight and was unable to do anything. So he’s certainly not going to run out of a hospital room. There was a 24-hour guard in the room. I tried to show him a picture of his family because I had reached out to his wife and children who were in another country living as refugees. I was the one who broke the news to them about where he was; they had no idea because when people get sucked into this detention system, there’s no obligation to tell family members anything. And he couldn’t communicate. I remember calling her with an interpreter to explain who I am, saying, “I’m your sister. I want to help you. I want to help your family.” It was such a powerful experience and very humbling to be here in a conference room, telling this woman this. God has again, put me in this position to be here and be helpful. So I went into this hospital, this rehab room, and met with my client. I was furious. I said, Well, unfortunately, that expired. That hospital couldn’t hold him anymore, and the government didn’t want to keep paying. So they put him into detention, and I think he was very close to the end. Couldn’t emotionally, physically, or mentally take it. But we were able to get him out. They transported him up to Boston, and he’s become part of our family. We were working with our lawyers to get his family over here, and one of the happiest days was when we were with him at the airport for the reunion with his family. Just seeing them alive, just holding each other, you know? We backed away, and we didn’t want to invade people’s space. I got to go to the naturalization ceremony for him and then, recently, for his daughter. So, they’re a very amazing family. And his wife and I are the same age. I think we actually might even share the same birth month. I can’t remember, but when I looked at her and then myself and I was like, “Oh, my God, my privilege.” They both were very successful medical professionals—top of their fields. Careers decimated. Their war-torn country ripped apart. Experiencing that kind of trauma, a bomb.
And you are there when they get off the plane, right?
Here’s me, this White woman, loud, waving my arms because gone are the days when we could physically go to the gate and pick people up [laughing]. I’m trying to say a common greeting in their language or tradition. I will be waving my arms their language. “As-salaam 'alykum! As-salaam 'alykum! ” But you realize the enormity of the responsibility placed on you, your program, and your agency when you welcome these new families. It’s probably one of the most rewarding things to do: be at the airport to welcome families. And then the hard work really begins for all of us, right? That’s probably what keeps me going.
There’ll be lots of calm around here, and then all of a sudden, something happens, like we lose all of our funding because the government administration changes or there is an evacuation of refugees from a conflict situation. And then it’s all hands on deck, never mind what your job title says. For some reason, it seems these crises happen we are not fully staffed, so, the work falls to me and my trusted partner, who’s been working with me for over 20 years. So then I have to get to the airport and my supervisor will question why I have to go as I should be focusing on being a , and I usually like, well, we don’t have anyone else to go, like, “this is not? You’re supposed to be acting like a director or acting like a vice president.” I’m like, “Well, there’s nobody else to do it. So guess what? I’m going.”
From my perspective, that is acting like a director, like a VP. That’s the mission, right?
I think the nature of our work is that you have to jump in and help out. I don’t do that much anymore. The last time I did an arrival was probably in 2021 with the Afghans. But, ideally we should have staff doing that and staff who are themselves bilingual and bicultural. You know, maybe it’s a little scary for somebody to come and meet an American. She doesn’t know my language and she doesn’t look like me. I’m wearing a cross, and she’s wondering, “Am I going to be evangelized?!” I think we’ve got a great team that understands the enormity of that situation, the pressure that we’re under, and the expectations.
What does a day in your chair look like?
I think as you get more advanced in your career, the routine becomes more manageable in some respects. I do come to work with a plan in mind, but then something inevitable happens—you don’t get to this budget amendment, or you don’t get to this report because you’re helping out your team who are encountering all of this mess. There’s a lot of messiness when trying to help people who a lot of people feel should not be here in the first place. So it gets challenging for them. And they need support.
What is some of the mess that they have to help them deal with?
Barriers to accessing services and supports. There are so many barriers, that get put in front of somebody whose name is not Jane Smith. We spend hours on the phone with a public benefit office or with a health insurer to say, “This person is eligible!” It’s not easy to be poor. It’s not a good time to be a refugee. It’s not easy to access support. You hear, “Everybody’s on food stamps or SNAP.” Well, guess what? It’s really hard to get those services. And if you add a language barrier, a cultural barrier, it can be even more difficult. That’s what the team spends time trying to do: Get people the benefits that they are eligible for, so they can get a little hand out, so they can start to move along the pathway. I think there’s so much negativity right now, toward immigrants and refugees. I thought it was bad back in 2016, 2017, but I think it’s worse now. People are more emboldened to speak up and just demonize whole populations of individuals. You know, I wasn’t born into wealth, but I wasn’t born into extreme poverty. I had access to education. I’m white, I have so many privileges just because of where I was born.
I always remember I could be that Haitian woman trying to cross the southern border to find safety, or the people fleeing a war to find safety. I could be a woman in Ukraine in a business role or I could be doing social services in Ukraine and, all of a sudden, my city is taken over. I could be any one of those people. But by the sheer blessings that I have, I was born in a place where I can survive. I remember that I could very well be that person we’re helping
You said earlier, it’s a tough time to be an immigrant. You spoke a bit about that but I wonder if you’ve seen any changes since you started this work in the ’90s.
Well, I think the refugee and immigrant distinction itself is so broad. But let me just think on that for a second. That’s a really good question.
People don’t want to become refugees, right? They’d rather be in their homeland. Wouldn’t you rather be where you come from, where you speak the language? Where you understand the food and its familiar smells. Nor do you choose to be an asylum seeker. You know, somebody that has to trek and cross our borders. So there’s a difference there, too. Refugees are at their ends —they can’t go anywhere else. So in the global context, the goal is that a refugee who is designated as a refugee by international standards and by the United States law wants to be able to go back to their home country or maybe integrate closer to their home country, but not necessarily cross oceans to get here to the United States. Once they’re here, they’re sad, they’re torn, and they generally feel like, “I have nowhere else to go.” But they come here, and I think the expectations a lot of times are very high. And I hear people get very frustrated because it’s hard to live in the United States. It’s very hard. And at a time like now when resources are dwindling because of policy changes—not because we can’t meet the need, we can meet the need in America. We can do this work, but we’re choosing not to. We’re choosing not to use resources properly and not to create policies that would make things easier for everybody. These families struggle a lot when they first come here, suffer a lot of indignities. So, I think what I’ve seen change is the sentiment toward refugees and immigrants; it has definitely shifted. This country doesn’t have scarcity like other countries have scarcity. I mean, there are, of course, many challenges for people who are in poverty. But even there we could choose to make lives better. We just choose not to, right? We choose not to advocate. We choose not to talk to our legislators. We choose not to be informed. You know, if we were an informed populace, we could probably solve a lot of these challenges. But people don’t want to move outside of their comfort zone. In Massachusetts, people are so generous. I can’t even count the ways volunteers and donors have stepped up and said, “Hey, we are one human family.” And that’s gratifying. But when you look at what is happening toward immigrants in other parts of the country, that “bubble” we live in here is evident. But the bubble in MA seems to be even here, that bubble is starting to burst. With the challenges that we’re seeing with housing and the conflating of what’s the real issue. The real issue is not necessarily people coming here to seek asylum; it’s that we don’t have affordable housing in the Commonwealth. I mean, that’s the problem. We don’t have affordable housing. We don’t build enough affordable housing. We can build these beautiful buildings a mile away from me here in Boston’s Seaport—so who in the world is going to live in these places? They’re not building housing for people who are working poor—people like those that we serve.
You’re working with people who have no choice. Then they end up here with some people who are choosing not to help. So that’s a really interesting collision of No choice/Choose not to.
That’s so interesting when you extrapolate like that out to the population that we are losing in Massachusetts—because people will go live in New Hampshire or Rhode Island or somewhere cheaper, or work at home from Texas where it’s cheaper—and here are the refugees that are willing to try to make it work in this very difficult, financially challenging state because they have no other place to go. But they want to contribute. I mean, refugees don’t want to be refugees.
The family that I was speaking about earlier? Their now-grown daughter spoke at an event recently. And one of the first things she said was, “I didn’t ask to be a refugee. I didn’t ask to lose everything.” She was 15 years old, giving that talk. An amazing young woman and her words always, always stick with me. I don’t think you ask to be born into poverty. You don’t ask to be homeless. We just keep blaming people for social issues—for lack of affordable housing, access to decent quality of life.
One thing I don’t do enough is go out and educate people and try to create—borrowed from Pope Francis—cultures of encounter. Until people encounter folks and get to know them and see that we are the same human family, it makes it hard for them to conceptualize. What does it mean to have a family or to have housing in your community that’s affordable? It’s good to bring together people who are not the same color or don’t speak the same language, but want the same things you want: access to opportunities. Something I would like to do more is create ways for people to encounter. I was just reading something yesterday where one community has just totally embraced a hotel filled with unhoused people—over 100 people—and the community is working to give them an education, to get them cars, to get them driver’s licenses. It’s a beautiful testament to how people see humanity. But I don’t think we have enough of those.
How do you handle the stress and the frustration of seeing policies change, seeing people changing the discourse, the conversation around refugees.
There are so many people doing this work and we do it in a team. I’m so lucky to have a really good team in a very supportive agency that chooses to do this work. Catholic Charities of Boston was founded in 1903 to serve immigrants: the Irish, Italian, German, Southeastern European immigrants that were coming here at the turn of the 20th century to build up Massachusetts. We started because people had nowhere to leave their kids. They weren’t able to eat. The cardinal that started this agency wanted to make sure these new immigrants had a place to go, a safe place to leave their kids so they could go to work.
So perspective is really important to me, and I’m constantly trying to remind myself of all the different perspectives. To you and me, it is frustrating. I get sad, angry, but when I see people coming to our offices for services and support, I find the courage to keep going. Because I know they need us here and we need them too. I need to work with immigrants as much as they need us. I’m better because of the people that I encounter every day, whether it’s just smiling at somebody in the hallway who I know is here to see one of my staff or to get a legal consultation. That’s what gratifies me. I think that’s why I had such a hard time during Covid because we were so shut down and I couldn’t see people we were connecting with. I’m very much an office person, I want to be in the office. I want to see the populations that we’re serving across Catholic Charities.
During Covid, one of the only in-person services we were doing was food pantry work. So I went and volunteered at our food pantries because I need you. I need interaction, I need to see people. They give me so much resilience. I am lucky to witness the strength of folks. Just contemplating having to leave your country—what do you take with you? I can’t imagine putting my life in a backpack and just starting on a journey that I’m not sure how long it’s going to take, or if I’m going to run out of money, or if I’m going to be raped along the way. If I’m going to be extorted along the way; I might die along the way. That’s a whole level of courage that you don’t know if you have. But when I see the faces of the people who have made that journey, I’m just so impressed and so humbled.
That’s incredible.
Oh yeah. I’m lucky to have encountered people from all over the globe who are just, in my mind, trailblazers.
How can we help?
I thank you for asking that. A really important thing is to be politically active and educated. Call your legislators. Educate yourselves about the issues that immigrants and refugees face so that you can be better informed when you encounter somebody at the supermarket checkout speaking a language you don’t understand. Maybe they’re working there because they don’t have the opportunity to go to an English class. Catholic Charities, has a wait list of over 500 people who want to take English classes but cannot access them because we don’t have enough slots. The state doesn’t fund us for enough slots. And no amount of private philanthropy is going to fund this need. Think about that scenario before having a knee-jerk reaction. Just, please, voice your support for the work the Commonwealth is trying to do to serve the new families.
Or if you hear about families being disparaged or blaming migrants, give pause and consider their story. My father always told us to remember that there are two sides to every story, and we have to think about that other side. And that’s what I’m offering: the alternative narrative. I’ll give an example: The other day I was walking in the building. We have a major drama with our parking lot. There are not enough spaces. We have a lot of clients coming in, which is good, because it means people want to seek our services, but most of them don’t drive, so they’re using the little bit of government assistance they get to pay for Ubers. So really, what’s flooding our parking lot are Uber drivers, not the migrants. But somebody came in and said, “Oh, the migrants are flooding up the parking lot.” I said, well, actually it’s probably not the migrants because they don’t have licenses yet and they can’t afford cars because they’re in the shelters.”
Perspective is very important. I think as the rhetoric heats up, I would encourage people to read other sides of the story. That doesn’t mean you have to go to the opposite end of what you believe. But just listen. I hope people can take away from this that we are all human beings. We are not labels. We’re not aliens. We’re not illegal. We are all people, all children of a God. Whatever God you believe in or don’t believe, we all are human beings—you cannot argue that. We must try to see the humanity in one another, no matter the issue.
I was not born in a country that outlaws education for girls or in country that has seen the ravages of nothing compared to a young child traveling unaccompanied through the physical and emotional dangers of a desert or having to collect all you own and leave your only home for the rest of your life, those hardships made me empathetic. And, at the same time, because of my fortune to be born in the US, white and having access to education, opportunities and social supports, I know that I obligated to help those that do not have
Another important thing people could do is band together as a group of maybe five or more folks who want to engage in this work. We can help you form community sponsor groups to join us in this work. As we help families move out of a shelter, we would love to have a group in the community into which they will move to help show them around; help them practice their English. It’s not to help provide basic needs for people such as things that they can’t buy with their snap benefits, like paper products, feminine hygiene products, diapers.
In Duxbury, a group came together to help the Afghans. Two people were at the airport with us when we greeted that family, they took them back to Duxbury, had an apartment ready for them, and had food. God bless that Duxbury group. They then walk with the family through their journey—and that journey is now going on three years! They’re bringing the family to Boston for appointments to get their green cards and to get their citizenship, so that they become part of the fabric of your community. And that’s what we really want to help grow—those cultures of encounter.
BE A CATALYST
Inspired by Marjean? Here are ways you can support her:
TUTOR the families in English. We have a wait list of 500+ people who want to take English classes but cannot access them because we don’t have enough slots. Choose a location or contact us with questions about how you can help.
WELCOME Be part of our Welcome Circles for Ukranian families resettling in Massachusetts.
DONATE Your donation helps families and children to live more stable and self-sufficient lives. We could not do this work without you.
TALK Voice your support for the work the Commonwealth is trying to do to serve the new families.
