Social Justice Capstone Paper

Document Type

Class Paper

Publication Date

5-2020

Abstract

In the spring of 2018, I spent my semester (my second semester sophomore year) living in Glasgow, Scotland working with a local church plant. As a Christian Studies major, this was right up my alley. I had studied different strategies and methods of church planting, evangelism, and other ministry-related topics at Ouachita; here I got to experience them and live them out under the supervision of long-term missionaries. While many of these things I tried to live out no matter what country I was in, it was a very formative time in my understanding of ministry and missions. While I was there, I had the opportunity to work with refugees, primarily from Syria and Iraq. I had some experience working with refugees prior to my time in Glasgow, but this time I had several months to devote to them, not just a week. My main task was teaching English to them, which I got to do at my church once a week. One of the families in my class asked my ministry partner and I to go to their home twice a week to do one-on-one English lessons, primarily with the wife who did not speak hardly an English. During the many days we spent over at their flat, I not only got to help teach them English, but I also got to help them with different legal paperwork regarding their immigration status and benefits (and also eat really good Syrian food). Because I was not informed of the U.K.’s immigration laws, I could only help to a certain extent. This got me thinking- how cool would it be to get to represent refugees legally? Or at least have enough knowledge of the process and program that I could help them in this tangible way? I began to look at ways at Ouachita I could study to do this, whether that meant more in the social work side or legal representation side. Either way, I wanted to be able to learn more about the government and immigration policies.

Comments

This Social Justice Capstone Paper was presented as part of the Social Justice Practicum (SJUS 4901) taught by Dr. Myra Houser.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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