Compassion drives elderly refugee worker

Having spent a decade in several hotspots like Vietnam, Philippines, Somalia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe working with refugees, 70-year-old Father Eugene Birrer is a man who has seen the depths to which human misery can plunge.

A disciple of world-renowned Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, author of the hugely acclaimed A Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Fr Birrer has interesting views on education, democracy and Kenya’s bungled IDP resettlement programme.

The missionary came to Kenya in 1991 and set up the Nairobi Archdiocese Refugee Assistance Programme (Narap), on Wood Avenue through which, he says, more than one million refugees have passed.

Despite dealing with traumatised people daily, he has not become immune to the anguish that people have gone through. 

“At one time, a young Rwandese woman came to register and while I was interviewing her, she began screaming her heart out. After calming down, she explained that she he had just seen the man who killed all her family members outside our gate. It took quite some time to counsel her and bring her to a semblance of normalcy. With the help of the UNHCR, we later managed to resettle her in Canada,” he says.

Left for dead

In July 2008 he, too, was on the receiving end when he was attacked and left for dead by a man suspected to have been hired by a former employee of his organisation.

“I had 40 stitches to my head. Indeed, my attacker thought I had died because he later called my number and when I answered from my hospital bed, he hung up,” he says.

What angered him, he says, is that one day an investigating officer called him to say they had found the suspect and if would like to ask him some questions?

“I thought it was their work to investigate and in any case, how can you bring an attacker with his victim in a face to face encounter?”

Nothing came out of the investigations and both the suspected killer and the person who hired him are still at large.

He has left his apartment in Kilimani and lives at the refugee centre he set up.

“I have worked with refugees for 30 years only to become one of them,” he says.

Asked why he did not thrown in the towel after almost losing his life, he says: “Even Jesus knew in advance that he would be betrayed, persecuted and eventually killed but he did not run away.”

He says he will not abandon his mission to resettle refugees and help underprivileged Kenyans make a living.

One way of achieving this, he says, is through pragmatic education, thus his passionate love for Paulo Freire.

“Paulo Freire is my role model. He helped illiterate farmers in Brazil to learn to read and write in 60 hours. Yet here in Kenya, I hear there are Standard Eight graduates who cannot read and write,” he says, adding that such an education system clearly needs to be reformed.

“But reforming education should not be about the number of years but quality. It should not be about moving from 8-4-4 to 7-2-3 as has been suggested. Corruption and tribalism are Kenya’s greatest ills but you don’t have that in the syllabus. What children learn instead is, that if you steal a rubber or a biro from a classmate, you get punished, but they also learn that in this country you can steal billions of shillings and get away with it. You may even become an MP and a minister,” he says.