The Reality of Personal Relationships

I am about two and a half months into my placement at Catholic Charities Migration and Refugee Services, and am starting to get the hang of things. By that I mean I’m used to driving all over West Cleveland and Lakewood, picking up refugees and taking them to appointments, sometimes way outside the hours of the traditional workday. I’m used to running around the office with a tail of refugees struggling to keep up with me as I dart between copying insurance information, scheduling appointments, faxing overseas medical packets, fixing billing problems, and responding to all the needs of the caseworkers. Most of all, I’m used to constantly keeping a to do list in my head, hoping that I might finally get a day with enough down time to tackle all of the important but not urgent things like scheduling dental and ophthalmology appointments or updating my case notes. Of course, most of those days end up with me scheduling urgent appointments for babies with fevers or taking someone to the ER.

Seriously, this is the new normal of my life. But as I was reflecting on this daily experience, and feeling somewhat depressed about the quick-fix nature of my work at MRS, I stumbled across Thomas Merton’s “Letter to a Young Activist.” Merton writes:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually as you struggle less and less for an idea, and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

As I reflected on Merton’s letter, I realized that it fit perfectly with how I was feeling about my placement at MRS. Although I do see “results,” they are usually small and relatively insignificant. After all, helping refugees access the health care system is a work of charity. It addresses an immediate need, and while it is necessary, I always envisioned my year of service having some kind of justice component. Instead, the refugees keep coming, we help them get on their feet, and then move on to the next batch. Nothing we do helps solve the broader problems that force so many people to run for their lives in the first place. So in this sense, the work I do is “apparently worthless.” But Merton hits the nail on the head. When I can shift my focus from the enormity of the problem to the particular person I am working with, the “truth of the work” comes to light.


This is Teshome. He is from Eritrea and arrived in Cleveland in January. While I normally work with refugees who have arrived in the previous few months, I had the pleasure of helping Teshome go to a few appointments for his prosthetic arm. This particular doctor’s office happens to be a good half-hour drive away, so whenever Teshome had an appointment, we got to spend a decent amount of time together. We hit it off during these appointments, with his natural inquisitiveness meshing well with my own love of learning. He asked me about American society, culture, and language, and I in turn impressed him with my ability to roll my R’s in repeating a few words of his native language, Tigrinya. I always looked forward to these afternoon appointments with Teshome, especially on the days that the stress of the job was getting to me. This was a time to narrow my focus, give a few hours of my time and attention to one person, and have some fun while doing so.

This past Tuesday, I took Teshome to his final appointment in Cleveland. On Wednesday, Teshome boarded a bus for Alexandria, Virginia, to move in with a friend of his from Eritrea, who has been living in Virginia for a few years. We said our goodbyes, wished each other luck, and snapped the above picture. Thanks, Teshome, for showing me that “in the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”

-J.P.