Met with Bill Merriman, who is a deacon at St. Patrick’s Church on the near west side of Cleveland. He has been a lynchpin in helping refugees transition into Cleveland. The most recent arrivals to the city’s near west side have been families from violence racked Liberia. The Migrant Refugee Office here, working in tandem with a number of non-profit agencies, helps connect the new arrivals with such social services as: Medicaid, food stamps, language classes… Bill also said he, and a number of other regular citizens, have rallied as well, helping the Liberians (Somalians, Rwandans…) with shelter, furniture, food, tutoring… although they’re having a hard time getting any of them to become Cleveland Indian fans. (No mystery there, given the team’s last couple seasons.) Bill said helping the refugees is the essence of what the Gospel calls for: “…to welcome strangers.” (There are 13 million refugees worldwide. For more on this subject, see: Refugees International.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Met with Bill Merriman, who is a deacon at St. Patrick’s Church on the near west side of Cleveland. He has been a lynchpin in helping refugees transition into Cleveland. The most recent arrivals to the city’s near west side …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}