Alec Hill: Called to Serve

World Relief has welcomed refugees to the United States since the beginning of the national resettlement program in the 1970s. In 1979, Grady Mangum, who oversaw our resettlement efforts, contracted with the U.S. Department of State to make World Relief the first and only evangelical organization authorized to resettle refugees at the time. A year later, Alec Hill opened the World Relief Office in Seattle, Washington. This is our first one of his two local resettlement offices.

Hill led the Seattle office from 1980 to 1985. After five years at the helm, he took a professorship at the University of the Pacific in Seattle, where he also served as dean of the School of Business and Economics, before joining InterVarsity as president. Today, Hill, the author of two books, just business and Living in bonus time: Surviving cancer, finding new purpose, We continue to connect with immigrants and refugees as mentors and friends. In a recent interview, he recalled his experiences as World Relief Regional Director in the 1980s.

You were instrumental in World Relief’s response to the refugee crisis in the 1980s. Did you have any memorable encounters with immigrants when you were young that shaped who you are and inspired your desire to work with displaced people?

My mother was a foreign language teacher. When I was 7 years old, we spent a long summer in Saltillo, Mexico with a family of 14 children while she attended college. She also led an international student club in high school, so there were always people from all over the world at home. In addition, women from Spain, Uruguay, and Mexico lived with us for many years. These global experiences sparked my young imagination about other cultures.

After graduating from the University of Washington School of Law, I quickly realized that I preferred working at the Department of Justice to being a lawyer. At the age of 27, I entered relief work, first with World Concern and then as Regional Director for World Relief in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. My team resettled 1,000 refugees a year through our offices in Seattle and Portland. We had a really great team of just about 10 people in Seattle that used a church sponsorship model. Volunteers have doubled our effectiveness. Looking back, this was one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with.

How has working with refugees affected your understanding of the Bible?

The words of the Bible drove me to refugee resettlement. Later, refugee resettlement led to a deeper understanding of the Bible.

God’s care and mercy for the disenfranchised, the forgotten, and those in transition begins at the beginning of the Bible and runs through it.

I led a Bible study on the Exodus with Cambodians at church. We were discussing God’s provision for the Israelites and when I started talking about manna, they suddenly started speaking in Khmer and I was confused. When I asked them what happened, they told me that when they were escaping from Cambodia, something like hoarfrost came out of the ground, and they ate it to survive.

They are telling me stories about the manna that saved their lives. To this day, I think about all the divine provisions I heard from them, especially what the Exodus meant to them. It changed my perspective on the Bible.

Looking back over the years since you first started working in refugee resettlement, can you tell us some stories about the positive impact refugees have had on communities in Washington State?

I was invited to World Relief’s 40th anniversary dinner near Seattle. The featured speaker was a young woman of Vietnamese descent who is a designer and entrepreneur.

She was talking about going out and talking with the regional director when her father first came. When I looked at her table where her father was sitting, my heart jumped. He used to be my go-to guy. He was very articulate and a great guy. And this was his daughter, the featured speaker at the banquet. His company employs many people and has achieved great results.

When I first met him, he was in his 20s, and now he is a man in his late 60s. I went up to him and introduced myself again. And we just cried and hugged each other. There was a feeling that we had found each other again.

How has your work with World Relief continued to influence you as you move forward in life?

Since my five years with World Relief, I have never been the same. I continue to have deep empathy and love for those who have lost everything and been forced to flee their homes. They have a resilience that most of us don’t have. They are truly wonderful human beings. These are the people we are called to love.

For me, this ability to empathize was instilled in me by my mother at an early age. My life has been one of loving the diversity of God’s creation and loving the stories of people. By the way, this weekend I will be speaking at a church in Cambodia that we founded 40 years ago. What a joy!

susan solomon yem I am an internationally published storyteller. She writes frequently about her refugee experiences and her own work in refugee resettlement at World Relief, where she also previously served as New England regional representative.