Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) is one of just nine voluntary agencies the Federal government works with in the task of resettling refugees in our country. This year alone EMM will help almost 5,000 persons fleeing persecution to build new lives in 30 communities across the United States. Canon Frank & Victoria Logue and Spencer Cantrell, who grew up at St. Michael and All Angel's, Savannah, are currently with EMM on a two-week Pilgrimage to Kenya and Rwanda.

In the past week, the group of eight Pilgrims together with EMM staff traveled to Gihembe Refugee Camp in Rwanda. There they visited with sixth grade students in the camp's 3,000-student school, took part in an English as a Second Language Class for a group soon to be resettled in America, visited with a women's farming cooperative, visited with refugees in their homes, and spoke with more than a hundred refugees in a lively town hall style question and answer session, and more. The group also visited the Genocide Memorial in Kigali which tells the story of the 1994 mass killings in that country and is the burial site for a quarter of the estimated one million victims.

The Pilgrims have also spent a  lot of time with the workers at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, Church World Service's Resettlement Service Center, and others who know the joys and challenges of this work which aids vulnerable persons who have and continue to face persecution in their home countries.

You can read some of their reflections at the Diocese of Georgia's Facebook page including Spencer's reflection on meeting a clergy spouse whose own work on peace has been nationally recognized and Canon Logue's reflection on the genocide and how we can work in small ways to redeem great tragedies. More of their writings will follow. The Pilgrims return on Friday. 

Seven missioners from St. Anne's (Tifton) are now at work on the construction site for Iglesia Episcopal Espíritu Santo (The Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit) in the village of Las Carreras near the city of Azua in the Dominican Republic (shown on the map on the right). They arrived on March 7 and are scheduled to return home on March 14. The Episcopal congregation in Las Carreras has been meeting and worshiping for many years in the home or the back yard of the congregation's senior warden, and the church that St. Anne's has been building over the past few years in partnership with St. Patrick's (Albany) and Grace Church (Charleston SC) will be their first permanent building. After landing on March 7 and spending the night in a hotel in Santo Domingo, the team attended Sunday morning worship services at the Episcopal Cathedral in Santo Domingo before proceeding by chartered bus to Azua for another worship service Sunday evening at the Church of the Reconciliation in Azua. They began work on Monday morning, and their first job will be to remove rubble and to grade the dirt floor of the church building (pictured below). After that grading is done, then the second job for the St. Anne's team will be to mix and pour the concrete for the church floor.

This team from St. Anne's is the third mission team sponsored by the Diocese of Georgia to work in the Dominican Republic in 2015. For an overview of the our Companion Diocese relationship with the Diocese of the Dominican Republic, check here. Two other trips are scheduled for this year, with a third trip a possibility.