Europe’s open arms

MARY REICHARD, CO-HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: welcoming refugees.

NICK EICHER, CO-HOST: The war in Ukraine is now in week six. An estimated 3.8 million people have fled Ukraine in search of safety. Most of them have gone west into Europe.

And churches across the continent are mobilizing to help.

WORLD’s European correspondent Jenny Lind Schmitt is a member of a church in France where the first bus of Ukrainian refugees arrived yesterday morning. And she joins us now to talk about it.

REICHARD: Good morning, Jenny!

JENNY LIND SCHMITT, CORRESPONDENT: Hi Mary!

REICHARD: Tell us about this particular group of refugees. Where did they come from? and is it mostly women and children as we hear a lot about?

SCHMITT: We've welcomed a group of 27 people. And it's really a mix. We do hear a lot about mothers and children leaving Ukraine. And in our group, we do have that. But there's also a woman traveling with her older parents, and several young women in their 20s, traveling as friends. And then there's a few boys - 12, 14, 16 - traveling with grandmothers. Part of our group is from eastern Ukraine. And then the other part is from a church and Kyiv, their pastor had a direct connection with our pastor.

REICHARD: Jenny, what is your church doing to help get them settled in France?

SCHMITT: We want to provide three things right now: shelter, food, and then help and just learning how to adapt to their new surroundings. How to use public transportation. How to get on the Wi Fi, and where to take walks. We also want to provide Ukrainian community and Christian community. Ukrainian culture is very community oriented. And even for the refugees that didn't know each other before their bus trip here, that time traveling has really knit them together. So it's really important to provide opportunities for them to see each other, speak their own language, and share their experiences. Most of the people that came to us are believers. So we're looking into options to have our worship service translated into Ukrainian or else to live stream a worship service coming from somewhere else.

REICHARD: Getting ready for all these people must have required quite a lot of effort. Tell us about that.

SCHMITT: When our church started praying about this, people started coming forward to say they had a room they could share or an Airbnb that they wanted to open up to refugees. And the number just kept growing every couple days, every week. Our church pulls from kind of a spread out geographical area. So kind of organically, hosts in different areas formed little WhatsApp groups, to talk about things like how to register the kids in local schools, or what steps are required to apply for asylum status in France. And then also just to talk about ways to get people together for social visits. And then we put out a call for people who aren't hosting but who are able to help with translation, with transportation, or teaching French eventually or other needs as they come up.

REICHARD: Who is part of this effort, I’m talking church to church?

SCHMITT: [3:43] As word started getting out that we were going to welcome refugees and through our church, other churches in our region came to us and offered more housing options. So this is something that has turned into a project across several churches in our region. And while that may be a bit of an organizational challenge, it's also a really beautiful thing to see the whole body of Christ working together to take care of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters.

REICHARD: We’ve been talking about church-related efforts here. But what about governments in Europe? Are they working together to deal with this crisis?

SCHMITT: [5:24] yeah, that's that's kind of an interesting question. The EU as a whole has taken a very welcoming stance towards Ukrainians coming in. And each country has provisions concerning refugees. However, what we've found is that even though the law is there, it's taking a while for that to trickle down to local governments, so they know how to handle the situation. France has an official website to sign up to host refugees. But that seems to be moving really slowly. So we found that we're pushing up against kind of the slow wheels of French bureaucracy, and we're trying to get them to move faster. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. In France, this kind of thing is first dealt with on a local level by the mairie, or the town hall. And over the past couple of weeks, we've found that the first time someone goes to their local town hall and asks, what do they need to do about well, to welcome refugees, the office doesn't quite know what to do. But then because of that visit, they check higher up and then a couple days later, they call that person back with the answer.

It's worth noting that while 3.8 million people have now left Ukraine, over the last month, most of them have stayed in Poland and other neighboring countries. Now, people are starting to move further west. So hopefully, we're helping the local authorities figure out the process before the next wave of people comes.

REICHARD: In the last five years or so, we’ve heard a lot about divisions in Europe. How has the war in Ukraine and the resulting refugee situation changed that?

SCHMITT: It's been a huge wake up call for European nations. And there's a really strong desire for democratic countries to work together in the face of this threat from Russia. You really see an about face on defense spending from countries like Germany and Sweden that traditionally have not been spending much of their budget on defense. And when I talk to people about this war and the mass refugee situation, there's this repeated refrain I keep hearing like we thought this was something from the history books. One woman from our church remember stories her mother told her about being a refugee during World War II, and that's actually what moved her to open up her home.

REICHARD: Human nature doesn’t change and our memories are short…any anecdote that comes to mind that you might share?

SCHMITT: Yesterday after their arrival, I had lunch with some of the women who will be going to be staying with my friend and it was this lovely spring day. And one of the women asked if we could eat outside and she said, "The fresh air is so nice. For a month our throats have been sore because of the smoke from all the burning buildings." She's in France with her daughter. And her husband and her 18 year old son have stayed in Ukraine to defend the country and distribute humanitarian aid.

REICHARD: So many family separations … so hard. Jenny Lind Schmitt is our correspondent in Europe. Great to talk to you!

SCHMITT: It’s always great to talk to you, Mary.

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