Helping Iraq's Catholic Refugees

Ramzy and Rajaa Hermez recall the visit of St. Thérèse's relics to Baghdad in November.

“She gave us peace in our hearts,” Rajaa Hermez said.

The Iraqi family is living in Beirut now. They are some of the 4,000 Christian Iraqi refugees in Lebanon and one of the families Archbishop Michel Kassarji of the Chaldean Church of Beirut is trying to help. Most of these refugees came two months before the war started.

“These people have nothing to go back to,” Archbishop Kassarji said. And, he added, they have escaped to a country in the midst of a severe economic depression, where few jobs are available.

Without official residence papers, the refugees are not eligible for medical care and are not able to work. As the archbishop explained their plight, a delivery of donated food items was leaving his church on its way to refugee families.

The Hermez family — which includes children Simon, 15; Sandra, 11; and Renaldo, 3 — fled Baghdad just one month before the war started. They said they had little choice, as their home was located near principal Iraqi government ministry offices.

“We knew there would be bombs,” Rajaa Hermez told the Register.

They now have no home to return to and it is not likely Ramzy Hermez could find a job like the one he had before the war. The biggest obstacle preventing their return, they said, is security.

“Even if my husband found a job, he wouldn't be able to go to work every day because there are no policemen and it is very dangerous,” Rajaa Hermez said. “If there was security in Iraq, I'd go home right now.”

Their children are home every day in their sparse two-room apartment in one of Beirut's poorest neighborhoods. Simon and Sandra would prefer to attend school, but they arrived too late in the school year to enroll.

Their father is working in a car rental agency earning just $200 a month. After the $150 needed for rent, there's little left for food. They depend on donations of basic foodstuffs from Archbishop Kassarji's church.

But despite their uncertain future, there is a sense of peace in the Hermez home, where prayer is a vital part of family life.

In late July, Archbishop Kassarji is scheduled to embark on a one-month fund-raising visit to the United States. His first goal is to raise $100,000 for a medical clinic for the refugees while they are still in Lebanon and to raise funds for them to eventually go home.

He plans to visit Chaldean churches in Detroit and San Diego, he said, “and anywhere else I'm invited to visit.”

— Doreen AbiRaad