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Outlook: Burmese Refugees Who Saved a US Church

Magazines & Reviews

Ye Win and vicar Michael Spurlock

27/07/2017 GMT

Burmese Refugees Who Saved a US Church

BBC World Service - Outlook, Burmese Refugees Who Saved a US Church

Vicar Michael Spurlock and refugee Ye Win explain how they did it.

The All Saints Episcopal church in Smyrna, Tennessee, was literally falling apart. But then a group of refugees knocked at Reverend Michael Spurlock's door.

In 2008, the All Saints Episcopal church in Smyrna, a small town in a rural part of Tennessee in the United States, was on its last legs. Most of the parishioners had left, and the building was falling apart. 
But then a group of Karen refugees fleeing the civil war in Myanmar arrived in the community - and the church's fortunes were transformed.  

For more than sixty years, Ahmed Kassab has had a behind the scenes view of Lebanon's recent history. All that time, Ahmed  has worked at the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek. In its heyday it regularly hosted music stars and heads of state attending an international festival that began in the town in 1955. But in recent years, Baalbek's situation close to the Syrian border has left the hotel empty of guests. Ahmed's been sharing his memories with Outlook. 

As a new clinic opens in the Afghan city of Kunduz, we recall the accidental bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital there in 2015. At the time Outlook spoke to Dr Safi Sadiqi, the trauma surgeon who was working in the operating theatre when the attack happened, and to Andrew Quilty, who took a distressing photograph of the aftermath of the air raid.  

High up in the mountains of northern Italy is a tiny village called Gurro. The locals speak a strange dialect that not even people from nearby villages can understand. They have peculiar surnames and the women's traditional costume features a patterned underskirt that looks suspiciously like tartan. 
In 1525 Scottish mercenary soldiers working for the French king were defeated in a battle not far from Milan. Legend has it that, while trying to make their way back to Scotland, the men stopped in Gurro where they got snowed in for the winter. Many locals believe they never left.

Photo: Ye Win (L) and vicar Michael Spurlock (R)

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