Welcome to the neighborhood
Pastor and his family move into apartment complex to be near new refugees
Comfortable in his Silver Spring, Md., home, the Rev. Eric So could not stop thinking about the plight of refugees — people forced to uproot their families, to leave their homes, to start anew in a strange and perhaps hostile place.
The pastor felt so moved that he made an unusual decision: He would uproot his own family. He would leave his own home. And he would start anew, right alongside the refugees moving into their first apartments in the United States.
So would not just be a pastor to these refugee families. He would be a neighbor.
Families from Syria live in the Parkview Gardens Apartments. As do families from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka, Burma and Congo. And for the past two years, so do Eric So, Lisa So, 2-year-old Xavier and 10-month-old Felix.
“I think probably the most compelling reason we chose to move into the neighborhood was really the story of Jesus,” Eric So said. “From the Scriptures, I see God sending his son, Jesus, into the world, so that he would dwell among the people.”
As the country has turned away from refugees, the Sos have turned toward them, with a radical act of selfsacrifice.
Spreading the gospel
When his two rambunctious toddlers finally settle down for their naps, So, 32, slips outside his family’s twobedroom apartment on the ground floor of one of the farthest buildings in the massive Riverdale, Md., apartment complex.
In the parking lots between the green-accented apartment buildings, children zoom in every direction on all sorts of wheeled toys — scooters, strollers, tricycles. A little girl with training wheels on her bike zips toward one ground-floor apartment, and So follows on foot.
This one sprawling apartment complex is where Lutheran Social Services, one of the organizations that the U.S. government has put in charge of resettling refugees in the Maryland suburbs, places most of its families. The group has placed hundreds of families there, it said. Ethiopian Community Development Council, another organization entrusted with refugee resettlement, has placed about 30 more families there, staff member Katherine Parra said.
These nonprofits rely so heavily on Parkview Gardens, Parra said, because they have found the complex is unusually willing to accommodate new move-ins with very few days’ notice. Plus, most of the families seem to like it there. Some have chosen to stay for many years, even after they get their footing in America.
With hundreds of refugees around him, So somehow seems to keep tabs in his head on all of them. The Well, the nondenominational evangelical church in Silver Spring where he is one of three pastors on staff, decided his mission work at Parkview Gardens was important enough that he should spend half his work time there and half in Silver Spring.
When he speaks to his neighbors his tone is gentle and laid-back. Less of a schoolmaster, more of a neighbor. A neighbor who also happens to be a tutor, a social worker, a résumé coach, an event planner, a therapist and any number of other roles that might be called for on any given day at Parkview Gardens.
So spots a seventhgrader trotting home beneath a bulky backpack. “I almost didn’t recognize you. You got new glasses!” he says to the girl. “You guys recently had some sort of celebration, right? I saw pictures on Facebook.” It was Diwali. She tells him a bit about the Hindu holiday, and he asks her about school.
Although most of his conversations with his refugee neighbors are about their myriad pressing needs — to get jobs, to learn English, to secure driver’s licenses, to find coats for their children before winter comes — So considers himself a missionary of sorts. He is never far from bringing any given conversation around to the subject of Jesus. “I see it as, for myself, personally, this good news of Jesus is the best thing ever in my life. It would not be consistent if I didn’t want others to at least hear it,” he said one afternoon, sitting on a playground at Parkview Gardens. Two women in hijabs walked past pushing strollers, followed by five children who run for the seesaw shouting in a jumble of foreign languages.
Not talking to his neighbors about Christianity, So said, would be like making new friends but not mentioning his wife and children to them. “As they learn about me, I can’t help but talk about Jesus because he’s so important to me.”
The ‘nastiest’ place on Earth
Eric and Lisa So had a new baby when he made his proposal to move, and he was not sure what his wife would say to the idea. But he shouldn’t have worried: “Amazingly enough, God put it on both our hearts.”
Not that either of them felt sure of their decision every day. At first, there were the living conditions to contend with. Lisa made the mistake of reading online reviews for their new dwelling.
She read about cars being broken into, children being molested. She read about heat that wouldn’t turn on in the winter and pipes that leaked. Somehow, she steeled herself, insisted on only one thing — a washer-dryer inside their apartment — and moved in.
Almost immediately, she encountered one of the scourges she had read about online: bedbugs. The itchy biters, nightmarishly difficult to eradicate, almost drove her back to Silver Spring right then and there.
Instead, she got to work. If she had bedbugs to contend with, her neighbors probably did too, she figured. She learned about bug-proof mattress covers and started teaching neighbors who couldn’t read the English instructions to use them on their own beds.
Until she stopped working after her second baby was born, Lisa was a nurse. Her neighbors soon learned that they could knock on her door to get answers to the medical questions that their doctors sometimes didn’t have the time or the language skills to communicate to them.
Lisa stopped one neighbor from taking too large a dose of his medication and taught a diabetic how to use the blood-glucose-monitoring device that a U.S. doctor had handed to her.
Another neighbor confided in Lisa that she had recently suffered a miscarriage, a topic too taboo to discuss in Afghanistan, where she came from. Shyly, she asked Lisa what had been troubling her most: Had she killed the baby by having sex with her husband while she was pregnant? Lisa assured her that the miscarriage was in no way her fault, and when Lisa asked the woman whether she wanted to pray together, the woman said that would be comforting, even though Lisa is Christian and she is Muslim.
Soon, Eric So hopes, he and his wife will be facilitating this sort of dialogue across such vast gulfs of faith, culture and life experience even more often. He has a new and even more ambitious vision for his ministry in Riverdale: He wants to plant a new church.
He can picture the place — a church open to all cultures. Open to all traumas. Open to all neighbors.