When Pedro Arrupe, S.J., founded Jesuit Refugee Service in 1980, there were approximately 10 million forcibly displaced people in the world. Today, there are 120 million.
Helene’s devastation is offering a hard lesson: No community or U.S. region can consider itself safe from the extreme weather events that global warming is seeding and supercharging.
Most families have been forced to move many times and with each new displacement, families lose or abandon more belongings. Not many of them by now have clothing appropriate for worsening weather conditions.
Focus on the fate of Israel, its hostages in Gaza and the people of Gaza and south Lebanon means that little attention is being paid to other continuing crises around the world—Sudan, Haiti, Myanmar among them.