Trinity Jubilee Center comforting Somali PTSD refugees

Exeter's Christ Church recently completed a mission trip to Lewiston, Maine to help our Somoli refugees at the Jubilee Center. Pictured is the church's mission group with a mural they completed at the center. Courtesy photo

Exeter's Christ Church spreads the wealth during summer mission trip

By Peg Gaillard
newsletter@seacoastonline.com
August 12, 2008 6:00 AM
EXETER — In July, 25 members of the Christ Church community headed two hours north to Lewiston, Maine, to volunteer at Trinity Jubilee Center for a week.

After several months of planning and organizing, this multi-generational group of parishioners, age 11 to 77, was eager to get to work. The tasks for the week were repainting the large, badly deteriorated mural outside the center, serving in the soup kitchen and helping distribute food at the weekly delivery from the Good Shepard Food Bank Food Mobile, repainting a teen crisis center near the Jubilee Center and playing and working with the large population of Somali refugee children.

Helping refugees

There are currently upwards of 7,000 Somalis living in Lewiston and more seem to be arriving almost daily. There were a couple of children we met during the week who had only just arrived in Lewiston. As we read in the news, the situation in Somalia and in the refugee camps in Kenya (which is where most of these Somalis have come from) is volatile and brutal. One of the staff members at the Jubilee Center stated that virtually every Somali that was not born here has full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder because of what they have seen and survived in Somalia and/or Kenya, In other words more than 90 percent of the population of Somalis in Lewiston has PTSD.
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