Education and Integration: Jesuit Refugee Service’s recipe in Singapore
World Refugee Day will be celebrated on 20 June. Migrants from Southeast Asia and the Middle East live in a limbo in the city-state. The Jesuit Refugee Service is active in the country and sends volunteers to refugees’ countries of origin.
Singapore (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Singapore has been working on projects that educate and serve migrant workers and refugees who make their way to the city-state where they usually find themselves in a legal limbo and unable to work.
Together with the local Church, JRS Singapore is preparing to mark World Refugee Day, on 20 June, with two days of initiatives on 18-19 June, starting with a Mass at the Church of St Ignatius, and including an exhibition on refugees in Southeast Asia and on Mercy in Motion.
Present around the world, JRS works on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees. It plans to expand its educational services globally to serve an additional 100,000 refugees by 2020.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are nearly 55 million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide, people who have been forced to flee their homes due to war, conflict and persecution.
JRS Singapore works mainly with people from Myanmar and Indonesia, but thousands have also come from the Middle East and the Philippines.
In addition to providing free education in refugee camps, JRS has sent volunteers to the migrants' home countries.
In several JRS projects in late 2014 and early 2015, volunteer made separate short trips to Myitkyina, the capital city of Kachin State in Myanmar, where they trained teachers, aged 17 to 25 years, in the use of group work in the classroom, as well as project-based learning.
The aim of this training module was to empower these trainees to help educate preschool and primary school-aged children return to their communities.
In another education project last year, four volunteers from Singapore were involved in a joint initiative between JRS Indonesia and JRS Singapore.
They conducted basic English classes for the immigration officers at the Immigration Detention Centre in Manado, Indonesia, in North Sulawesi province. The objective was to teach the immigration officers English in order to help them communicate with the detainees at the centre.
“It was almost like feeding baby birds, they were so hungry, they so wanted to learn,” said JRS Singapore member Thomas Flinchum who prepared the course curriculum and lesson plans.
In Singapore the refugee situation is very difficult. People who end up in the city-state without a permit are detained and sent back. Seeking asylum is long and complex process. Without a steady job, refugees cannot send their children to school.
Fortunately, JRS is not alone. Other organisations are also involved with asylum seekers. In recent years for example, the parish of St Francis has become the home of thousands of migrants from South-East Asia who receive support, and in turn help hand out meals to the neighborhood’s poor.
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