Safety for refugees: President Carter’s legacy lives on in rural Georgia

Already a widow for four years, Chou Ly fled by foot from Cambodia through a rainforest loaded with landmines, along with her parents, sister, brother, and her 5-year-old son. She was 22.  The family took hours, beginning at 2 a.m., to cross into Thailand. It was December 1979, the final year of the genocidal dictatorship of Pol Pot, whose Communist Khmer Rouge army killed an estimated 21% of Cambodians, including her husband, Nong Sira. “They executed him,” she says. “That was the first person lost in our family.”

A year after her husband’s execution, the election of President Jimmy Carter altered the trajectory of Ms. Ly’s life forever. 

When he signed the Refugee Act of 1980, Mr. Carter raised the annual ceiling for refugees from 17,400 to 50,000 and opened the process for review and adjustment to meet emergencies. This created the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program, which provides housing as well as support to help refugees achieve economic self-sufficiency. 

As Mr. Carter was signing the legislation, three Christian families were camping on 260 acres in northeast Georgia. They’d been sent nearly 200 miles away from home to start a new community and were determining their mission. When, on transistor radios, they heard about Mr. Carter’s efforts, they made it their mission to welcome refugees. 

“We were just living in tents at that point, just about a hundred yards back here with cows all around us,” says Don Mosley, one of the campers. “We were beginning to hear more and more news about refugees. And we said, ‘Well, President Carter … he’s doing all this for these refugees.’”

A mission to help refugees 

Mr. Mosley, a founder of the ecumenical Christian community that came to be known as Jubilee Partners, is also co-founder of Habitat for Humanity. He and his wife, Carolyn, have been friends with Mr. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, for more than four decades, having first crossed paths in the 1960s, when they were all battling for equitable funding of Sumter County, Georgia, public schools. That campaign gave Mr. Carter his political start.

Once it focused on hosting refugees, Jubilee Partners began the work enabled by President Carter’s legislation. The first wave of refugees arrived at Jubilee Partners in 1980, primarily Cubans who had been expelled by Fidel Castro in the Mariel boatlift.

Ms. Ly was one of the first refugees to arrive at Jubilee Partners; her adopted home has gone on to host 3,672 refugees from 37 countries since 1980, according to Rachel Bjork, director of Jubilee Partner’s hospitality program. As refugee co-host, Ms. Ly spent 24 years providing an estimated 2,000 refugees the life and language skills needed to adjust to life in the United States. She now works as a food coordinator for the community.

Ms. Ly is in her 60s now, with a deep smile, two adult children, two grandchildren, and an American husband whom she married on Thanksgiving Day 1982, under a cedar tree in the common area of the community, wearing a wedding dress she made herself. 

“I see that Jubilee gave so much to these refugees,” Ms. Ly says. “A safe place to stay and recuperate from all suffering and trauma that they went through. And so I felt like, ‘Yeah? Why I cannot do that too?’ I was in that situation before. And so it’s my time to give back to the people who come after me.” 

The entire Jubilee community was built by its residents: the meeting and worship spaces, library, and 17 homes for refugees as well as folks who choose to live and work there (referred to as partners). Currently, partners and their families earn $20 a week for their work with refugees and are provided with room, board, and access to transportation. Upon joining, partners agree not to access or use personal funds while living at Jubilee so that everyone is living at the same economic level. 

Mr. Carter’s connection

None of this work would have been possible without Mr. Carter’s personal and legislative legacy. In early 1987, Mr. Carter, then on the board of Habitat for Humanity, asked for a board meeting at Jubilee Partners. It would be his first visit. 

“We didn’t have a place that I thought would be appropriate for what I expected was 20 or 30 leaders from around the world,” Mr. Mosley says. “And so we built this [library] building very quickly, as fast as we could.” He figured 30 people would show up. Sixty people did. 

With no furniture in the new space, everyone either stood or, like the Carters, sat on the floor. At one point during the meeting, the building began to tremble. “As I was standing there, I realized, ‘Oh my goodness, this building’s about to collapse,’” Mr. Mosley recalls. 

He told the group it was time for a 15-minute coffee break. Once guests were out of the building, Mr. Mosley says he put on his nail belt and “rushed around downstairs putting diagonal braces” under the building. 

A community of compassion

In the early years of Jubilee, Mr. Mosley says, a cluster of homes for refugee families and partners was built just outside the city of Comer because of concern about backlash from city officials. But an incident early on reassured them they’d be welcome. 

A group of Cuban refugees was stopped by two police officers in Comer because they were riding their bikes, without lights, at night in the middle of the road. The men were frightened, Mr. Mosley says, and one took a swing at the police officer. He missed. An incident that could have escalated into violence did not. 

The men were returned to Jubilee calmly and the next day the police officers, one of whom was also the mayor, visited. “Welcome to Comer,” they told the men, handing them a huge box of fruit as a gift. 

Jubilee continues to enjoy good relations with Comer, a city of 1,500 that sits northeast of Athens. An estimated 10% of the population is comprised of former refugees. 

The local public school has benefited from the children of refugee families, says Amanda Sailors, principal of the 400-student Comer Elementary School. “Our kids are a little family,” she says. “It’s an amazing culture; community and school are an open and welcoming place.” 

Jubilee Partners steps in when necessary, supporting students and their parents by communicating with administrators and tutoring children after school. “We’re working together to help get kids what they need,” Dr. Sailors says. 

Deeply impacted by Jubilee’s mission, former members continue to serve the community. “More than anyone, they’ve informed my idea of what living in an intentional Christian community with a charism [spiritual gift or power] of hospitality can look like in Georgia,” says former Jubilee board member Anton Flores-Maisonet. 

In 2006, he co-founded Casa Alterna, a nonprofit that provides hospitality and assistance to asylum seekers and refugees. During the pandemic alone, the nonprofit provided overnight accommodations to nearly 500 people from more than 50 countries.

“What I love about Jubilee is their ongoing witness to radical hospitality that is filled with integrity,” Mr. Flores-Maisonet says. “This is their life together.”

One of the few keepsakes Ms. Ly retains from her youth is a gold necklace her mother had given her before her first marriage. She says the Chinese character for happiness – or jubilation – is inscribed on the pendant. She’d hidden it during her escape from Cambodia. 

Having survived a genocide, Ms. Ly says she is grateful to President Carter and the Refugee Act he signed that enabled her to resettle. Ms. Ly says she had never heard of Jubilee Partners until she was sent there, and appreciates the opportunity to stay and care for other refugees. “I feel sure that God [has] brought me here,” she says, “and God [wants] to use me.”