Outlining the missionary work and humanitarian assistance his agency provides. This is about 45 minutes. Good morning. I am thehodes moderator of this mornings press conference. At the istanbul ataturk airport was thomas kemper, the ceo of the United Methodist church, was in a lounge when three men arriving from a taxi began firing guns at the terminal entrance as they made their way inside the airport. The terrorists were quickly shot by security and then blew themselves up. This was another in a series of terror attacks in turkey in the past year. According to the new york times, kurdish and Islamic State militants have staged attacks across turkey killing more than 280 people. Thomas kemper, our speaker today, says the events that he witnessed and survived has become transformative for him personally. His moments with other survivors of the attack, people of many nationalities and cultures, has brought renewed determination to connect with people of all faiths and nationalities and examine what it means to be human, to be understanding, and to care about strangers who want to feel safe and want to be able to live their own lives. It is this moment of transformation and a lasting sense of importance of the dedication he brings to life, he will be discussing this morning. Just a few procedural notes as i turn the floor over to mr. Kemper, please remember to turn your cell phone to mute. Once mr. Kemper has completed his remarks, i will open the floor to questions. Priority will go to credentialed media and National Press club members, so when you are called to pose a question, please identify yourself by name and organization. Mr. Kemper . Mr. Kemper good morning and thank you for this opportunity to speak to you. I am grateful for the journalists. The experience in istanbul has changed my view of journalists. It started that night with Anderson Cooper and the way he interviewed, the possibility to not just give some background of what happened and eyewitness reports, but also to be able to express something i felt inwardly and also as a person of religious faith. Thank you for this and it is exciting to be here. Why was i in istanbul . Really, i was there on a layover. There is nothing more dramatic to it. I wasnt even there to visit some of our partners. I was there because i had a layover on the way to japan, and i had chosen to fly a Turkish Airline that had brought me. That was the reason i was there. But i am traveling a lot, you can see on the map, global ministries is the mission and development and Disaster Response arm of United Methodist church. We have projects in 125 countries. We have over 350 missionaries. Traveling and being at airports is part of my daily life. Global ministries understands as humanitarian network, a network of global health, Global Mission connections around the world. To give you some highlights of our work, very briefly so you understand the context of where i come from, here this is a picture from the kurdistan region of iraq. The United Methodist committee on relief, we work to supply food to give to internally displaced people in iraq from iraq war. This work is being done together with the International Blue crescent, the Muslim Partnership of the International Red cross, based in turkey. Another example of our work is in bangladesh. We have just we have just broken ground. Here you see the first result for recovery work after the cyclone there. These children are now able to go back to school on this path which was constructed. Here, our partner is muslimaid. You have partnerships with other faith organizations, especially in countries where it would be or difficult as a Christian Organization to be present and be in solidarity, especially after disasters. One Big Initiative of United Methodist church in the last year was what we called imagine no malaria, a campaign to raise funds. We have raised 69 million for fighting deaths from malaria around the world. What is important for us is that we are not doing this alone. We have partnered with a global fund in geneva to fight aids, tb, and malaria. 28 million of the funds we have raised, we have pledged, and 28 Million Dollars has already and 28 million has already been given to the global fund. We cannot do this alone. If we are not connected, we cannot build partnerships and it is not working. We were blessed to have the u. N. Foundation and the melinda and bill Gates Foundation to give us a start up for this campaign. So far from our side, we have impacted 4. 6 million lives through net distribution, training of midwives, Community Health workers, especially in africa. And we are now moving this campaign into the next step where we hope to reach one million children with lifesaving interventions. As part of a worldwide campaign, the u. N. Calls it every woman, every child, reducing child mortality. This is part of the Sustainable Development goals that the World Community has agreed on. We want to do our part in this effort. We hope to reach one million children with lifesaving interventions, remote breastfeeding, promote cures and prevent childhood diseases. In order to be an organization that helps someone else, we recognize the Health Challenges and issues here, right here in the United States. As part of the campaign, we are challenging our churches that we find 10,000 churches in the next four years that signup and are ready to engage in some healthrelated work and ministry in their community, and their neighborhood where the church is situated. It could be a physical activity, healthy diet and nutrition, tobacco and drugfree living, or issues around Mental Health, education, and Mental Health promotion. If you only look at this one number here about obesity. It has risen two times in children and four times in adolescents in the United States in the last 30 years. So we have Serious Health issues also in this country, especially for children and young people. As part of our work, we have missionaries, and i wanted to be very clear, these missionaries may look very different of what traditional people still think missionaries are. We call them missionaries from everywhere to everywhere. And minorities are from the United States. We have a program in the congo with our United Methodist church where we have an aviation ministry. Several planes, small cessna planes, which could reach any part of the congo and fly medical supplies, they do is location missions. They do in vocational evocation missions, and are an essential part of the ministry of the church. They are maintained by the missionaries of global ministries. Back to this fateful day in june in istanbul. As i said, i was on a layover. I was just there to rest at this airport, and here you see the lounge. This is a picture i took when everyone had left already come after the attack in that part. The lounge is a place of safety. You go there and you feel much calmer. I was stretched out. I had taken off my shoes. And i was sleeping, waiting for my next flight. While i was sleeping, suddenly i heard this blast, very loud, and then shooting. You dont think it is happening. At this moment, i really thought it is a film, it is a dream, nightmare. But then people started running by the bench where i was lying on, like in real panic. I did not think much, i just grabbed my shoes, i didnt put them on, i grabbed my bag, and started running as well. But then people came towards us from the other direction and we almost stumbled over each other and crashed into each other. And you can see this here, what really happened that we did not know at the moment, only later be found out, is that there were three bombs almost at the same time. It was not surprising in the lounge where the red arrow is pointing, there was a bomb very close to us. When we started running away from it, we ran into the other direction with the other bomb had gone off. It created an incredible panic for all of us. And i was really scared. I think, in the minds of everybody, ok the bomb has gone off, the panic is there, but now they come for you. It is this image since orlando, since paris, which was in the mind of the people. Where are these terrorists now . We have no information. We did not know these were suicide bombers. We thought now, they come for us. This was a room where i was hiding. It was behind the kitchen in the lounge. I found a little room. There was an asian man. We could not communicate, but we saw the fear in our eyes. We were hiding in this room here and others there was a young man from france and he was there with his girlfriend. He grabbed a chair and banged it against the glass windows trying to get out because we were kind of trapped in that corner of the airport. Everybody trying to hide. Everybody trying to find a place to survive. I posted from there shortly after and that really started this whole media interest and conversations and the many opportunities to speak. What i said here was, very scary, i am safe now, but terror coming so close. Let me give thanks for my life, to fight hate and terror everywhere. And it leads us into deeper solidarity with all who experience terror and violence. Not just once but every day and every night. That was really very deep inside me that i felt, for me, at this moment, i was terribly scared, i panicked, i was doing things just out of instinct. I was terrified. But i thought, there are people who experience this every day and every night. I dont know if you had a chance to listen to the audio on the new york times, if you days ago from aleppo. Just two or three minutes. If you hear this every day and every night, how can we be more solidarity with people who experience this every day, and not just once like in my case . And also as we were hiding and then being guided out of the airport, into even more chaos outside, i met people who opened my eyes, how especially muslims are mostly victimized by this terrorist violence. I set i sat next to a young woman who had a head scarf on. I would not have spoken to her, but she cried so much. She spoke some english and she told me, you know, i am from istanbul. I was here only to see off a friend at the airport, but then the bomb went off and i started running in now running, and now im at the wrong side because they would not let people out without showing a passport. So it took hours and hours to leave the airport. So she was there on the wrong side because she started running and now she had no passport. She did not know what was going to happen in the midst of this chaos. I was with a young man who was sitting next to me and we started talking and i met his whole family and he was from egypt. He had just his family had visited him and he had finished his tourism studies in italy. A muslim family from egypt, scared, and all of us wanted to see our families again. All of us wanted to live in wanted to survive. I felt an incredible connectedness with all of these people. As we moved out, we had to go through baggage claim, and really through the area where the area where the bombing had happened. We moved out and we passed the conveyor belts where people had left their luggage. They were not able to claim it. It is probably difficult to see it, but this is a flight from brussels. I could not believe it, there was these nonclaimed suitcases and baggage from brussels, where the last attack happened. We had two of our directors from the board of global ministries from africa. They had made the connection that day in brussels and were stuck for a week. There was this connection to people who had gone through an experience like this. Right there when i saw the flight from brussels in the unclaimed baggage. Outside, we were all put onto buses. It was extremely wellorganized. That was extremely chaotic, but if you think what had just happened, with so many people injured, so many deaths, the chaos in the airport, the turkish authorities worked really hard to allow us to get to hotels. This was the bus i was traveling with, and the two ladies in front of me, which you can see there, we were together with their family and we started talking together about our shared experience. And you wont believe it, they were from holland and live as refugees in holland, were on their way to mogadishu in somalia. And the son was sitting next to me, who spoke good english, saying, what the heck . He could not believe it how this could happen to a somali in istanbul. That is what they were used to in mogadishu. He said, these terrorists are attacking us everywhere. It came from a somali sitting there with me on the bus and we were traveling together to the hotel. And then, as i had said, this post led to a first interview on that night with Anderson Cooper on his 360 show on cnn. It was so interesting that i tried to say that we needed to come together as people of faith and nonfaith, if we really want to make a difference and overcome violence and terror and hate in this world. I got so many invitations to speak and to share this experience. And they opened up to share this from a perspective of faith and from a call to share responsibility as leaders of faith. That night, and the next 24 hours, there were interviews with cnn, al jazeera, bbc. For me, it was an opportunity to cope with the situation because i can talk about it, i could digest it. It opened a window to say, for me, to say, we as people of faith have to stand together. We really have to share in our humanity and our shared humanity to work for difference. I got back to the lounge two days later, and when we look into what i have learned and what we want to do is an organization in the future, i came back to the lounge two days later because my flight to japan was gone, the meeting had ended, and i was going home. There was still traces of the attack, the shattered glass, they had done an incredible job starting to repair and do everything, but you can still see the traces. I went back to the lounge and what was surprising to me, i did not feel secure. Although everything looked like normal. People were working on their laptops, having breakfast, they were talking to each other, reading the newspaper, but i wanted to cry and say to them, dont you know what happened here two nights ago . I was here for hours, and i feared for my life and that night i connected to so many people who were there. Now, it is like if nothing had happened. I felt more lonely at that moment in the apparent security of that moment, because i was not able to connect at that moment. And that led me to this a lot which i want to share with you. There are really two parts to afety, i feel. One is a path through connection, and the other is a path through separation. And, i lived for many years in brazil. I was myself a missionary there. We have this story out now, did he lie . Everybody could imagine that Something Like this could happen in brazil. Violence is a daily experience for people there. This is a picture from brazil. Gated communities, higher walls. I was there in the 1970s and it already started in the 1980s. Every time i go back to brazil, the walls are higher, the Security Systems are more sophisticated, but it does not stop the violence. The separation is not able to transform the society into a safer place. Brazil is an example of this. During our time of the ebola crisis, there was an incident a few of you have read about. The liberian government in monrovia sealed off a whole slum area. From one second to the other, out of fear of ebola. Then an extremely violent clash broke out which created even more cases because people fought each other. It only changed when the approach of the government changed from separation to, of course separating the ill and the diseased, but in a way to keep them connected to society nd in a way they can treat the complications. So safety through separation in this case can lead to more and not less violence. So, this experience in istanbul. We are walking out of the airport, this was right after the attack as we are waiting for the buses, thousands and thousands of people, this feeling of being connected with so many different cultures and faiths and no faiths at all. It led to this quote which i found by brene brown, where she ays, vulnerability is the birthplace of connection in the path to the feeling of worthiness, if it doesnt feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructed. Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection. Could this be, for us, a path to safety . Could this be a path to overcome hatred and violence if we are ready to share our vulnerability . If we are ready to share a vulnerability in order to connect across different faiths, across different ultures and countries . During the ebola crisis, i already quoted it, one very interesting experience was a joint task force of religious leaders. The chair was the bishop of United Methodist church in sierra leone, who was also Vice President of our board. We were very intensely connected with this whole effort. The religious leaders in sierra leone at that time came together because there was a need for technical responses. You needed a safe suit as a medical professional to be able to treat people. You needed to build hospitals from the ground quickly with military help in order to treat patients, but it was equally important to work for behavioral change, for changing the burial rights. Death and funerals are extremely important, and to touch the dead and to wash them and prepare them for burial was something that was done for generations with the blessing of the imams and the pastors. So to tell them not to do it without the blessing of the religious leaders, without the theological accompaniment of them, would not have been possible. Leaders doing this together, preaching this together, was essential for combating ebola at that time. And, of course, you can see this in the picture. You didnt touch each other when you met in the street, which is a revolution in africa. Any time you meet an african in a