DUIN: Chaplain at airport counsels travelers

By Julia Duin (Contact) | Sunday, August 17, 2008

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A few weeks ago, a delayed flight left me marooned at Washington Dulles International Airport. My screeching 3-year-old was running about the gate area. People were glaring and someone even filched my newspaper.

I began walking my daughter down the B concourse where I saw an empty glassed-in, soundproof chapel. We darted inside. The room had two stained-glass windows, a Muslim prayer area and rows of blue-upholstered chairs facing a small marble-topped table.

To the left were shelves of religious books, pamphlets and a film about Jesus playing on a TV. I was trying to interest my daughter in watching a kid's video when a 60-something man appeared. It was the Rev. Ralph Benson, an American Baptist pastor and retired Army chaplain.

The affable Mr. Benson helped me install the video and handed me a brochure about his work.

"I walk up to people and talk with them," he said. "Basically it's just being there to provide an evidence of care and compassion in the airport."

Actually, it's more than that. Airport chaplains are the first called on if there is a plane crash or terrorist attack. Someone has to be there to soothe hundreds of distressed people and grieving families.

Their work went largely unnoticed until after Sept. 11, 2001, when people began having legitimate fears as to whether they would live through their flight.

Three hundred people a day walk through the doors of the Dulles chapel. "That's 100,000 a year," he said.

A chaplain stint at Dulles is not restful. Some of his days begin with 4 a.m. Bible studies for French-speaking Congolese immigrants who handle baggage for United Airlines.

The airport's 36,000 employees are a United Nations of peoples and faiths, including Amharic-speaking Ethiopian airport employees who use the chapel for evening Bible studies.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Interfaith Chapels Inc., a nonprofit organization.

Its Web site, www.airport chapels.com, describes a stunning amount of work per year in the chapels at Dulles and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, including 178 hospital visits, 7,800 miles of walking about airport concourses, aid to 47,580 travelers, prayer with 14,456 travelers and counseling to 3,963 people. Mr. Benson says he counsels two or three people a day.

"Right now, the airline industry is going through a very difficult time, which puts stress on employees," he said, "and those employees need to talk about it."

Many of his counselees are Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) employees who do security at the metal detectors. The TSA workers at Dulles feel especially pressured, he said, as Dulles was one of the airports the Sept. 11 terrorists used to access the doomed planes.

And then there are interventions with people who aren't supposed to be at the airport.

Mr. Benson remembers one disturbed homeless person who knew four languages. He got the man transferred to a local homeless shelter and into therapy. It turned out that the man was a well-known author who had simply neglected to take his medication.

"The next time I saw him," the chaplain said, "he was in an Armani suit and grateful for the part we played in his life."

• Julia Duin's Stairway to Heaven column runs Sundays and Thursdays. She can be reached at jduin@washingtontimes.com.

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