 "Photo: Courtesy of Steve Harrigan")
 "Photo: Courtesy of Steve Harrigan")
 "Photo: Courtesy Steve Harrigan")
 "Photo: Courtesy of Steve Harrigan")
Missionary Steve Harrigan came to Loyola with the message that taking small steps towards helping people can mean leaps and bounds in the lives of those in need.
Harrigan was invited to the university last week for an event hosted by the Loyola chapter of STAND, an international student anti-genocide coalition. The Feb. 3 event, “Stand up and speak out,” featured a showing of the film Darfur: On Our Watch, which addresses the UN’s response to the genocide in Darfur.
Harrigan spoke about how he lends a helping hand to Darfurian refugees through solar-powered cooking devices, and he also discussed the ongoing concern and action he feels people should direct towards survivors of genocide, especially refugees.
Joy Bolger is co-president of STAND’s Loyola chapter.
“None of us can go out and save the world in one day,” Bolger said. “But Steve was saying, ‘this is something I can do, it’s one small step I can take, and even if I’ve helped five people, I’ve done my job for today’.”
Harrigan was born April 26, 1958, in Des Moines, Iowa. When he was 10 months old his parents, both missionaries, took him and his younger brother Dan to Sierra Leone in West Africa, where Harrigan would spend the bulk of his childhood and teenage years.
"I grew up with kerosene lamps, and cement toilets and mud houses and went to boarding school — a pretty different world than what people have here," Harrigan, 51, recalled
As a missionary for World Partners, a non-profit Christian organization based in Fort Wayne, IN, Harrigan addresses resettlement issues for local immigrants, refugees and asylees, offering them English instruction, employment, and driver’s education, among other services.
Harrigan was three days away from boarding a plane to Sierra Leone, when the Phoenix caught up with him to discuss his efforts to help underprivileged people in both the U.S. and abroad.
PHOENIX: You're the director for Solar Clutch, an organization that helps provide training and materials for refugees in Darfur to make devices called solar cookers, and you also work with the Darfur Peace & Development Organization as their Solar Cookers Project Manager. Can you explain what a solar cooker is and speak on the device’s importance?
Steve Harrigan: Solar cookers are basically made taking the sun and reflecting it with reflective panels that you can make out of cardboard and tin foil [...] you can cook food, boil water, do almost anything you can do with a crock pot. It's a protection [measure] for the women who are in the camps who are often raped because they are out wandering around the dessert looking for firewood.
P: What made you get involved in this issue?
SH: [World Partners] has Darfurian refugees here, so before this thing hit the news, they were telling me about the crisis back in their country and why they fled. I said, if we really care about them, we should be trying to help their families. So we had the opportunity to go to Sudan, to go to Darfur [...] and that was one issue that stood out. Muslim women [there often] don't tell anyone if they’ve been raped, because then they’re stigmatized, they don’t know if you will be ostracized from their family. They might never get married again, and it's just seen as a shameful thing. That's all just across the board, and there’s very little help for that, and they don't even talk about it much but it's a very big issue. So when we saw that, we said we needed to try to do something. Because I had been in Africa and done some solar cooking, I knew that it could happen.
We [trained locals to make the device] and trained people to teach them how to do it. I've went out four times to Darfur and I've been to Sudan five the last five years or so. So now I have guys on the ground that I can just send money to and they buy the materials.
To be honest with you, you can't guarantee the woman is going to keep using it, just because it’s a good idea. You're changing a lifestyle of centuries of how to cook. And this white middle class male is not going to go to Africa, in the middle of the dessert, and tell a woman how to cook -- it's not going to happen very easily. It's a huge social change.
P: Tell me about your work with World Partners. Why is what you do important?
SH: A lot of my efforts and work is to be here in the states trying to mobilize the American population, especially the church population, to see what their involvement is with the [refugees and immigrants] who are here, [to ask] 'do you care about them?' They are going to be a part of our society. It doesn't have to be Africans, it can be Burmese, it can be Chinese, and it can be whoever happens to be in your community. I try to bring awareness to our people about that and help the average American do something. Most Americans are very self-centered, almost as though the world revolves around us.
We're not very global. I think that if America is going to survive this huge global village complex that's coming, were going to have to become more global, we're going to have to embrace and adjust to some of these cultures that are not so European.
P: What are some of the different things you are doing to help Africans in the U.S?
SH: A lot of it has to do with people who have come here. For example, we have Somali refugees, and Sudanese and Chadian. And some of them are asylees, which is different from a refugee, an asylee comes and claims that their life is in danger, and they have to prove it. But here, they have no help. They have nothing, literally nothing from the government and they can't work. So they're in an even worse scenario than a refugee, a bona fide refugee at least gets some help from our government.
When we come across those kind of people, and a lot of times they're young men and young women -- we try to help them survive, we help them get food, learn how to work our system, how to drive, how to get their paperwork taken to the courts, how to find lawyers [...] we teach them English, teach them how to run a computer, things that they’ve never done before. For other people it's 'how do you write a check, how do you balance a budget?' A myriad of things that [Americans see as] common that we learn how to do just growing up, they have to learn.
P: What do you say to that person who says, "I'm not getting anything out of this; my country isn't getting thing out of helping Africa”?
SH: You change in the process of helping someone. You become that person who is caring and your children see that in you and that helps transform your society. The simple act of kindness, of caring, of loving and doing something begins to change your thinking patterns, because you're doing it not because you're getting something back. That is the greatest act of kindness, when you don’t get anything back.
P: Why are you headed to Sierra Leone?
SH: This is the kind of trip for encouraging people. I'm going to try to get some of the church leaders together, some of the old pastors, and we’re just going to spend time together. I can’t take away all their problems but I can be an encouragement. These are the people my parents gave their lives to, who I gave my life to.
P: How did growing up in Sierra Leone contribute to the person you are today?
SH: Basically, I came to America almost as a refugee. I looked like an American, I talked like an American. I could pass visibly as an American, but inside I was still thinking as an African. I didn't understand the jokes.
I would come every so often and try to fit in; kindergarten I was here, 7th grade I was here, and then I came home for college. And so, it wasn't quite enough to adapt to American society. I felt out of place [...] that has allowed me to really identify with refugees and immigrants who come here.
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