“Surrounded by artillery, explosions and shellfire, the JRS teachers directed students to turn to the next chapter,” Kevin Hartigan told me of his first encounter with Jesuit Refugee Service.

In 1981, while volunteering in a refugee camp on Thai-Cambodian border with Caritas Thailand, a pair of Jesuits invited him to observe their work on the other side of the border, in the Cambodian war zone.. There, the very new JRS (founded in 1980 in response to the displacement caused by the wars in Southeast Asia) had built classrooms underground to teach children trapped under Vietnamese shelling.

That first encounter stayed with him throughout a lifelong commitment to humanitarian work.  The chaos was constant, but life carried on. “JRS became my heroes early on,” Kevin said. After more than 30 years with Catholic Relief Services, where he ultimately served as a country and regional director in multiple parts of the world, Kevin is now retired and serves on the JRS International Administrative Council.

He credits his parents with instilling in him values of service and social justice. His stepfather, a former priest, connected Kevin with faith-based organizations in Latin America, where he volunteered throughout his 20s. In graduate school he met his wife, Dominique Morel, who also went on to work for CRS after studies in Latin American politics that enabled her to interview Jesuit martyrs of the University of Central America in El Salvador a year before they were killed.

The couple served together in Haiti, Central Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. In some places, Kevin worked with or alongside JRS. In 2004, he worked with Jesuits in Eastern Chad to establish initial assistance to Sudanese refugees, which has become one of the JRS’s most robust education programs in the world.

“JRS is the only organization that takes such daunting responsibility for formal education for refugees to such a great extent, because this requires such a long-term commitment,” he said. It is a reflection of JRS’s commitment to accompaniment, being with people during their journeys, not merely providing services.

While several international organizations arrived in Chad to help Sudanese in those early years, as funding ran low and contracts ended, JRS stayed.

“JRS was the only one left educating children,” Kevin recalled, “staying with some of the most forsaken people in the most dire circumstances.” He went on to name other examples of otherwise-forgotten populations served by JRS  – work that he had been able to support as CRS Regional Director, including Bhutanese refugees in Nepal and Tamils in southern India. Most organizations do not have the donor support or infrastructure to remain somewhere long term. JRS, as a mission of the Jesuit Order committed to accompaniment, enters situations of displacement with the intent to stay with people as long as needed.

Importantly, Kevin explained that the quality of the education JRS delivers also stands out – something that struck him from his earliest days getting to know JRS’s work on the Cambodian border. Despite studying underground, in the middle of a war zone, children were receiving an education that rivaled that of their peers elsewhere. He saw the same results in eastern in refugee camps in Nepal and India.

JRS is further distinguished by its unwavering focus on human dignity, Kevin said, and its ties to a faith tradition. Since most humanitarian work takes place in deeply religious societies – mainly in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and parts of Asia – the common ground and shared values engender trust.

Some of the greatest resources to both CRS and JRS, Kevin said, are local churches. Churches bring knowledge of community dynamics and sensitivity to the most disadvantaged groups. “That kind of long-term church, and specifically Jesuit presence…ensures the work of JRS is well targeted, appropriate, and able to take advantage of opportunities to lift people up,” he said.

As a country director and later regional director with CRS, Kevin was responsible for the organization’s operations in Afghanistan for 18 years. While there, he was able to help in the  birth of another JRS program. As the only Catholic agency registered in the country at the time, CRS helped establish both the Society of Jesus and JRS in Afghanistan, hosting the first Jesuits to return to Kabul and Herat in the early 2000s. Today, JRS Afghanistan supports refugees, internally displaced people and host communities through support centers, supplemental education and livelihoods training.

When Kevin retired from CRS in 2022 he was drawn to volunteer for JRS in some way. On the Administrative Council, Kevin joins Jesuit leaders and experts from across the humanitarian world in advising the JRS International Office. He brings to this role  knowledge of the organizational side of international relief work, from staff development to government relations to donor coordination.

“I feel extremely lucky. It is a real privilege, especially now, to be with JRS at the end of my career,” he said. “I have done this kind of work all my life, and I’ve partnered with a lot of congregations, national Churches and international organizations, pretty much everyone you would have heard of,” he said. “And I can tell you, without question, there is no agency that does higher quality, more transformative work for more forsaken populations, in more difficult situations, or at a lower cost than JRS.”

Finally, Kevin shined a light on the heroism he witnessed among JRS staff. He remembered how Jesuits chose to keep working in the most dangerous conflict zones during the Sri Lankan civil war, how they stayed in Afghanistan even while, and after, Fr. Prem, S.J., was kidnapped, and how JRS colleagues disregarded their own security to do work in Syria during that war.  The courage and sacrifice of JRS staff is extremely humbling,” he said. “It is something not talked about enough.”