Journey Of Faith Starting Out In A Small Town

If one American could take credit for the recent Russian migration to Spokane it is Linda Unseth. In the past six years, the sweet-voiced pastor’s wife resettled at least 1,000 Russian-speaking refugees in the Spokane area.

She managed to do this from Connell, Wash., a town of 2,640 people cradled in wheat fields between Spokane and the Tri-Cities, where the fire station siren still announces the noon hour.

Unseth’s office helped break a pattern of settling most refugees in cities within easy reach of social services and low-income housing. Unseth and a few other World Relief directors began in the late 1980s placing them in rural towns in Washington, Montana and Idaho.

Many eventually moved to Spokane and other cities. But small towns gave them the rock-solid start they needed, Unseth says. Rural churchgoers assist refugees as well as or better than big-city social workers and can help them to assimilate faster.

Quick assimilation is the key to success for refugees in Unseth’s view. Refugees should attend American churches, learn English quickly and, above all, get jobs.

“We work really hard at trying to help them understand welfare is not an entitlement,” Unseth says. “We do our best to help them understand the American work ethic.”

One Russian man teased her, “Mrs. Linda, some people don’t like you because all you talk about is rabota, rabota, rabota (work, work, work).” She replied, “Well, Anatoly, that’s the way it is.”

Unseth, 49, directs the Eastern Washington efforts of World Relief, an agency that resettles refugees in the United States. It’s an arm of the National Association of Evangelicals. Her boss calls her the ideal World Relief director.

“She equips the community to help the refugees adjust,” says World Relief western area director Ron Curtin. “She works very well in the church community, in the social service community and with the refugees themselves. She moves easily from one culture to another.”

Unseth began working for World Relief in Seattle in 1984. She took the job to help put the first of three sons through college and because her husband, Stan, felt his Nazarene church should reach out to refugees.

“We felt that was God’s will for my life,” she says. “My first priority is my husband’s ministry because he is the head of my house. He gave my desires to me.”

The couple moved to Connell in December 1987 and Unseth opened a World Relief office the next month, coinciding with the start of an unprecedented flood of Christian refugees from the Soviet Union.

Christians who had heard about the Russian refugees called Unseth to volunteer their help. She found sponsors in Medical Lake, Endicott, Wilbur and other small towns.

Unseth now travels the back roads of Eastern Washington to build support among evangelical churches. And she works the phone in her small office next to Connell’s Value Plus grocery store, sometimes finding a sponsor for a refugee family with only two weeks’, even two days’, notice.

She resettles Vietnamese, Laotians, Haitians and Bosnians as well as Russians. The Russian refugees present an unusual opportunity to help people who have been persecuted for their beliefs, she says.

Unseth believes Christians can live their values by sponsoring refugees, a commitment that means providing housing, food, clothing and transportation for at least 30 days.

“When we take a family we are stepping out in faith,” she says.