Blessing the Books

SJ Holsteen serves asylum seekers and refugees in northern France. One of her displaced friends is a professor and author. His life as an asylum seeker has not been easy. But he still managed to have a new book published recently. SJ shares the story below.

“Pray for the books.”

“I would like you to pray for the books,” Jean Maffo asked my husband Sam and me.

A published author many times over, Jean Maffo had been working as a university linguistics professor in Central Africa. When his literature made him a target of political persecution, he fled to France where he sought asylum in Lille.

He has been a friend of IAFR Lille and a volunteer at our Refugee Welcome Center for several years now. We’ve had the privilege of walking with him in both the joys of gaining asylum and the sorrows of bureaucratic injustices that continue to bar him from accessing his lawful rights to housing and employment.

His faith has been a testament to us.

Jean Maffo's faith and perseverance in the midst of these great challenges have been a testament to us. Through the years of seeking asylum and experiencing homelessness, our brother has continued to express his God-given gifts of social criticism and creativity. He wrote a play called Les Facettes d’une immigration déchirante (Facets of a Heartbreaking Immigration) and worked with a publisher in England to self-publish his book.

"I would like you to pray for the books."

At the end of June, the first copies finally arrived! And with it, this sacred invitation from Jean Maffo: “I would like you to pray for the books.” Sam, Jean Maffo, and I laid our hands on the books and thanked Jesus for how He had protected and walked with our brother throughout his journey, for how God had given him gifts of creativity and perseverance to complete this project amidst great hardship. We prayed that many people would read his words and be moved by them to see immigrants and refugees as their fellow human beings.

“Immigration…scorches roots but plants seeds of resilience”

According to the book’s Postface (translated from French): “Immigration is not simply a voyage between places, it’s a crossing within one’s interior. It scorches roots but plants seeds of resilience in unknown lands. Each face encountered carries a story of loss and hope, of sacrifice and struggle, of choices made in urgency and of identity reshuffled in the light of a new horizon. This book is … an ode to humanity in its most vulnerable and most courageous state, to all those who have torn themselves from their past to forge a future, and left their homes to construct another.”

In the first line of the Acknowledgements, Jean Maffo lists local team members of International Association for Refugees Lille as partners in his writing journey. What an incredible honor it is to be in relationship with friends like Jean Maffo, who demonstrates by his compassion and ingenuity that refugee neighbors have much to offer our communities and our world (if only we give them the chance), and who generously invites us into that!

We pray with and for Jean Maffo, that he and all those created in God’s Image who have lost their homes to seek safety elsewhere would be welcomed with the dignity, care, and justice they deserve.

CLICK HERE to learn more about IAFR's work in Lille