Born to Care

Those who spend their lives in service to marginalized people groups inevitably come to identify with them. Anyone whose days are filled with the stories of refugees, the poor, and the disadvantaged cannot help but realize that with only a tiny shift in circumstances, this could be their lot as well.

For SIL LEAD board member Serge Duss, however, the empathy he has for these people is not just something he picked up in the course of doing his job. As the child of refugees who fled Ukraine during World War II, Serge started his life in the exact same predicament as the people he later came to serve. Serge was born in West Germany in 1950 without a country of his own, and two years later emigrated with his family to the United States of America, along with hundreds of thousands of other displaced Eastern European persons.

He settled in Brooklyn and grew up still living between worlds: speaking Ukrainian at home and attending both a Ukrainian and English speaking church.

After attending Nyack College in the Hudson Valley, Serge worked for ten years as a newspaper reporter and editor for the Gannett Corporation, the largest publisher of newspapers in the United States.

In 1983, he and his wife Donna were part of a Bible study group that was studying a book called Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, by Ron Sider. When the couple expressed a desire to live out their Christian faith in service to hurting people outside the US, the others in the group encouraged them to go for it.

Serge and Donna contacted World Relief, the relief and development arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, and offered a year of volunteer service anywhere in the world. World Relief asked Serge to lead the organization’s programs at the Philippine Refugee Processing Center (PRPC) in Bataan Province in the Philippines. The camp housed a revolving group of about 20,000 Vietnam War refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos who had been accepted for resettlement in sponsoring countries – the majority to the United States. The camp was largely funded by the U.S. State Department and co-managed by the Philippine government and the UN refugee agency.

Refugees remained at the center for about six months. During that time they learned English, about Western culture and health practices. They received basic health care. World Relief was responsible for teaching English to elementary school age children and providing basic health education to expecting and new mothers and infants. Donna, a registered nurse, was head of the maternal-child health program for the entire camp. Nurses in the program were from the Philippines, the U.S. and the Netherlands. The couple’s sons – Matthew and Brian – were in fifth and third grades and attended Faith Academy in Manila. The parents saw their children about once a month.

This was a positive experience, and something really clicked for Serge. After serving as volunteers for a year and traveling a bit through Asia, Donna went back to nursing and Serge decided to shift his career from journalism to international relief and development. He began working with World Relief, heading up a program for persecuted evangelical Christian refugees from the Soviet Union (mostly Russia and Ukraine), who were coming to the United States under the sponsorship of evangelical churches—which back then were very welcoming to persecuted refugees: helping them to come to the United States, resettle, and contribute to American society.

Starting in 1991, Serge worked with World Vision—first in Moscow for three years as the Soviet Union country director, then in its Washington DC office, where he served as director of Public Policy and Advocacy until 2008.

At that point he left World Vision to serve as public policy and advocacy director with International Medical Corps—a global health humanitarian organization that focuses exclusively on providing emergency health services in countries where there are man-made disasters (conflict, civil wars, fleeing refugees) and natural disasters that produce internally displaced peoples. Some of those countries are Syria and neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. And in sub-Saharan Africa, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Libya and Chad needed the most help.

At the end of 2019 Serge retired from International Medical Corps and started his own consulting firm called SKD Strategies, which offers advocacy and government relations consultation to NGOs.

Serge’s involvement with SIL LEAD began before the organization even existed, when he advocated with the SIL leadership for its formation.

In 2011 there had been a seismic shift in USAID basic education policy, which required NGOs accepting funds for education programs to do their work in the mother tongue of the people they would serve. Studies showed that young children who were asked to switch from their mother tongue to a national language when they entered elementary school had a very difficult time learning. Serge believed that this shift provided an opportunity to better connect SIL’s vast network of highly trained linguistic professionals with the larger government grants and contracts that needed their expertise.

Serge has been on the SIL LEAD board from very early on. He has seen a steady growth in funding and partnerships, and the development of the Bloom software—which he says has made SIL LEAD a leader in local language book development, particularly for young children in their minority ethnic tongues. He’s been pleased to see the organization become more and more respected in the international development community, as word of what we have to offer has spread.

For our part, we at SIL LEAD are grateful to be able to draw on Serge’s vast experience an innate empathy in working with and advocating for vulnerable populations around the world.