By Gretchen Keiser

On a clear March night, some miles outside Athens, Georgia, there are no city lights to diminish the brightness of the stars.

Car headlights point up and down as the vehicle rattles along on a good, but unpaved road into the woods. A few lighted buildings are visible, but the darkness is so deep that it’s necessary, once outside the car, to take careful steps to feel the way to the doorway. The only sounds are those of a country night.

Inside the building, a dozen or so people are gathered. After a full day of English lessons and other work, they have consented to answer a newspaper reporter’s questions.

Onel, a handsome young husband and father, introduces people and helps to translate English into Spanish. The questions, awkwardly phrased, just touch the surface of the odyssey these people have known. When did you leave El Salvador? Were you caught in the fighting? How did you get to the United States? Did you leave family behind? What do you hope for your future?

Three extended families are seated around the room. Onel, his wife, Estella, their seven-month-old daughter and his mother; a beautiful young woman, Maria Elena, holding two of her three young sons; and an older man, Narcizo Flores, his son, two nephews and a cousin, Carmen.

They are some of the 24 Salvadorans living temporarily in the care of Jubilee Partners, a Christian community established on 260 acres of land in Comer, Ga. It is the first secure haven they have known in years.

As Onel translated, a brief picture emerged of families separated and caught in the crossfire of violence in the Central American country of El Salvador. Onel and Estella spoke of six people in an aunt’s family killed. They left their young daughter behind with Estella’s father when they fled El Salvador because they did not have enough money to bring her with them. The Flores family talked about being caught in their home in the crossfire of fighting between guerrillas and government forces. One daughter was wounded. Another family member had been killed. Narcizo’s wife had stayed behind to care for her parents who did not want to leave the country.

Either on foot or traveling by bus they had arrived in Mexico and eventually entered the United States. In the southwestern United States, Central American refugees are arriving continuously as violence in the region continues and escalates. The United States has refused to recognize them as political refugees, so if they enter the country illegally seeking political asylum they are subject to arrest and deportation.

The question of their status has aroused growing concern among church groups and agencies working with refugees. The United Nations Commission for Refugees has designated all Salvadorans outside their country as political refugees. The Brownsville, Texas prelate, Bishop John J. Fitzpatrick, in whose diocese many Central American refugees seek shelter, has asked President Reagan to grant political asylum or amnesty to the Salvadorans while the Central American violence continues. Some U.S. church groups have risked fines and imprisonment to offer sanctuary to refugees who entered the country illegally.

However, the Salvadorans living in rural Georgia are part of a highly unusual approach to the growing concern. They are staying with the Jubilee community on an interim basis, on the condition that they will be accepted into Canada by that country’s government.

While the program is slow, and can only handle a small number of people at a time, it is a functioning and legal effort to bring some of those fleeing Central American violence to permanent residence in a new country, rather than sending them back to their war torn homeland.

The Christian community, which is an offspring of the Koinonia community founded by Clarence Jordan near Americus, Ga., calls the Salvadoran program Año de Jubileo, or Year of Jubilee. When it began in January, the program was an outgrowth of earlier community work and also a leap of faith, explained Ed Weir, who is coordinating the program.

When Jubilee Partners started in 1978, three families moved from Koinonia to Comer, continuing the community life pioneered by Jordan, and seeking a type of work that this new gathering could do to express its Christian commitment. The Koinonia community historically has worked to build low cost housing for the poor in Sumter County. Jubilee Partners “came up with the idea of establishing a welcome center for refugees,” said Weir.

Inspired and touched by the plight of the Vietnamese boat people on nightly television, the original group of three families began to construct a community designed to help refugees enter the country, learn something of its culture and begin a new life.

Since 1979, the group has grown to include nine resident partners who have made a commitment to stay with the community, eight children belonging to the resident families, and a varying number of volunteers who come to stay for several months at a time to help with the community structures on the Comer site.

They have been a first home for hundreds of refugees, including people from the Cuban Freedom Flotilla, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians.

Usually sponsored by church denominations, the refugees would come first to the bucolic expanse of Jubilee Partners for six to eight weeks of language training and other cultural orientations.

“We teach English for 18 hours a week, using an intensive, audio-lingual method,” Weir said. The refugees live in a cluster of buildings set apart from the homes of community residents, allowing them privacy and a measure of independence. A living allowance is provided so that they can do their own grocery shopping during trips to Athens. Police stations, schools and factories are visited and medical care is arranged. Community members and volunteers also teach practical subjects like sewing, nutrition and the ins and outs of maintaining an American checking account.

While Jubilee Partners is not tied to a particular denomination, their Christian commitment shapes the way they live. Community members live from a small allowance and share with those passing through a living sense of Christian service. Refugees are invited to take part in the community worship service or to attend church services of their own denomination.

The Year of Jubilee grew out of that Christian concern for the plight of Salvadorans who faced the trauma of refugees and the additional peril of deportation to a country at war. The community decided to try to help some by bringing them to Jubilee for orientation and then arranging for their immigration to Canada. Field trips to South Texas led to contacts with groups actively working to help the large number of Central American refugees crossing the U.S. border.

Negotiations with the Canadian government and with U.S. immigration officials made possible a fragile, but workable arrangement. Canada specified that those coming had to be in family units, leading to the particular cluster of people now living at Jubilee. Most will enter the country under government sponsorship and will continue to receive assistance until their English has reached a workable level and they can find work.

For the Salvadorans gathered in Comer, rescue came in the form of a brightly colored bus which traveled from Georgia to Texas with Year of Jubilee inscribed on its side in Spanish.

Facing enormous financial difficulties in financing the program, Jubilee Partners had, for the first time, sent out letters to supporters asking for contributions to launch it. Within a few days, enough had come in in hundreds of small contributions to pay for a $31,000 bus, discovered in nearby Monroe with only 10,000 miles on it and specially equipped reclining seats. In January, the bus departed for Texas with community members and returned with exulting people. The response of supporters has provided enough to sustain the program for awhile, Weir said. And the bus has become something of a symbol in South Texas, “of a kind of liberation, if you will, “ for those seeking shelter.

The Salvadorans look forward to permanent location this spring in a cold northern country far different from their own.

“We are hoping to start a new life, to have the peace we want,” Onel said.