World Refugee Day: A Global and Local Event.

By Kevin Brooks
Contributing Writer

From June 18 to June 20, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) will acknowledge and celebrate World Refugee Day. There will be celebrations all over the world, from refugee camps in Africa, the Middle East and South America to Geneva, Switzerland (home of the UNHCR) to national capitals in countries that host refugee resettlements like Washington, D.C.; Ottawa, Canada; and Canberra, Australia.

Fargo’s refugees and friends will celebrate World Refugee Day on Thursday, June 18 with an outdoor celebration on the grounds of Lutheran Social Services at 1325 11th St. S. from 1-5 p.m., and in the Atomic Coffee Community Room on Broadway from 7-8:30 p.m. with both events free and open to the public.

Established in 2001, on the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Convention, the UNHCR uses World Refugee Day to put a spotlight on a different refugee issue each year. The 2009 theme is “Real People, Real Needs.” According to the UNHCR website, “The needs of refugees worldwide including shelter, health, education, food security, sanitation, the prevention of sexual violence and even legal status in countries of asylum, are far from being met. Behind these unmet needs are not just numbers but real people with real stories.”

Global celebrations and awareness-raising projects include the Stop Genocide Now (SGN) broadcasts from a refugee camp in eastern Chad. Gabriel Stauring and Katie Jay Scott, the principal activists behind SGN, have been traveling to Chad about three times a year since 2004, when Darfurians first started gathering in Chad to escape the scorched-earth, genocidal program of Sudan’s brutal government.

Gabe and KJS typically post a daily video, as they did on their last visit, but for World Refugee Day, they will attempt a live internet broadcast directly from the remote refugee camp. Their work in Chad illustrates the WRD theme beautifully. They meet with refugees, ask them to share their stories and real needs and then SGN shares those stories with the rest of the world. Major media outlets no longer put the money or staff into sustained coverage of the tragedies in Darfur or the Congo, especially when U.S. military personnel or investments are not at risk, making the work of organizations like SGN all the more important.

International and national celebration events listed on the UNHCR web page include: “soccer games, film festivals, photo exhibitions, food bazaars, fashion shows, concerts and sports competitions – including lots of soccer in a nod to the World Cup in Germany. There will also be quizzes, drawing and essay-writing competitions, tree planting, seminars, workshops, speeches, public awareness campaigns, prayer meetings, poetry recitals and an auction of refugee art.” Major events include musical performances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and a now annual concert of African music in Chicago.

Local celebrations will be led by Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota, one of the most active resettlement agencies in all of the United States. An afternoon gathering will be held on the LSS grounds Thursday June 18, 1-5. Admission is free but a donation of household items is appreciated in exchange for food and fun, including popular games of the countries of refugees.

An evening event at Atomic Coffee, organized by the Fargo chapter of Stop Genocide Now, will give people a chance to sit and talk with refugee families about their experiences in Fargo so far, as well as their ongoing needs. Local support organizations like LSS and Giving + Learning will also be “at the table” to give participants some concrete ways in which they can more actively support the refugee population in Fargo. The local SGN chapter, founded when Stauring and Scott visited NDSU in April, is also looking to increase membership and plan future events, so that World Refugee Day is not the only day of the year people of Fargo remember and interact with our refugee population. Check out hpr1.com for further World Refugee Day coverage.

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Further reading

UNHCR website: http://www.unhcr.org/

USA for UNHCR website: http://www.unrefugees.org

Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota: http://www.lssnd.org/

Giving + Learning: http://www.givinglearning.org/

World Refugee Day, Chicago: http://www.wrdchicago.org

Amnesty International: http://www.amnesty.org

STAND: Genocide Intervention Network: http://www.standnow.org/

 

Refugee Statistics

Refugees live in camps for an average of 17 years.

Only ½ of 1% of the total refugee population will be resettled in a new country.

80% of the world’s refugees are women and children.

Chicago resettles between 2,400 and 2,800 refugees a year; North Dakota resettles between 200 and 400 refugees a year.

Did you know Albert Einstein, Madeline Albright, The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Han, Mark Chagall, Nadia Comaneci and Peter Drucker are all former refugees?

[Modified from Chicago’s WRD site]

 

 

Interviews with WRD Folks

Ann Marie Stewart

 

Contributing Writer

 

First Interview

Learning to Give, Giving to Learn: An Interview with Rachel Mertz, Volunteer Co-coordinator at Giving + Learning.

The Giving + Learning Program was founded in 2001 by Michele McCrae, briefly retired languages professor at Concordia College, to supplement the existing English language programs in place for Fargo’s growing refugee, or New American, population. G+L continues today, having experienced remarkable growth and community support. The program has grown to assist over 700 new Americans with the contribution of 700 mentors in the Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead, Minnesota. G+L has expanded to Pelican Rapids, and hopes to help other communities around the country replicate this model.

McCrae received one of eight $100,000 “Purpose Prizes” in 2008 for the incredible work she has done with Giving + Learning. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u7EOp9itHM

But Michele McCrae would be the quick to say that G+L could not have been as successful as it has been without the work of Assistant Director, Rachel Mertz.

AM: How did you first get involved in the Giving +Learning program?

RM: In 1998 I was living in Minneapolis and I heard from a teacher of mine that there was a surge of Bosnians coming to Fargo and he said “Fargo, of all places!” and I thought, ‘I cannot wait to get back home, I’ve got to meet all these people. I want to see how I can help.’ I was just ecstatic that there was all these new people who were not Norwegians coming to Fargo. I really had the intention of just coming to Fargo and meeting them like they’d be waiting for me. So in the summer of 1999 I was trying to help them out with anything I could. Then I began working at Cultural Diversity Services in 2002 and I was coordinating interpreter services and working with a self-sufficiency program. Working with resumes, helping people find apartments, finding donations, anything that they might need. A lot of odds and ends. I worked there for three years.

I met with director Michele McRae back in 2003;[her job was to] provide volunteers to work with the refugees and I got to know her and her husband really well. And it was perfect timing because I had been working with the refugee population since 1998 and so I already knew quite a few refugees.

 

I don’t think it’s an easy thing for anyone to ask for help. [Refugees] don’t come here [to the U.S] because they want to. I know they want to be where their father’s graves are, the house they grew up in, and it’s never easy to come and ask people for help. So I like to jump in and ask, “What do you need?”

Since then [1998], we’ve had thousands of refugees arrive from many different countries and it is a little overwhelming. So with the Giving + Learning program we find volunteers in the community to mentor a new American.

AM: What do you do at G+L when a refugee is settled here?

RM: I look at my list of new Americans and I talk to the volunteer for a while and try to figure out what their interests are. Maybe you lived in Liberia doing Peace Corps work in the 70s and you want to work with a Liberian. Maybe you are a nurse and you want to work with a refugee who is trying to study for a nursing degree. So I’ll take a look at talents and try to match everybody up to the best that I able. I’ll go with for the first appointment or if they need me for numerous other times. I’ll try to bring as many resources as I can that will benefit the mentee.

We had a large settlement of Burundis arrive this past year and they were living in tents in Tanzania since 1972 so there are generations growing up in these tents. They never established a school system or hospitals, anything. Not only did they have no concept of work, they have no concept of currency or literacy. So when they arrive here, they have never seen an automobile and they are told they need to drive one. Not only have they never seen winter, they’ve never seen a picture of snow.

Sometimes I look at my list [of refugees] and I want to cry because there are so many. Sometimes people will say, “I don’t have much time. I’m a busy person.” We only ask for one hour a week. Some people only have an hour to give some have more than an hour to give but anything is appreciated. For those people who don’t have time at all, there are donation requests to fill.

AM: What changes have you seen since you started working with refugees in Fargo?

RM: It’s absolutely incredible how much it’s changed here. I hear people saying all the time that Fargo isn’t diverse but I feel that I’m in the minority in my day-to-day life. Everywhere I go I’m hearing different languages. I meet people who have had a pretty racist viewpoint when it comes to immigration or new Americans. When they volunteer [with the refugees] and give back they say they are learning far more than they ever thought they could and their ideas about different cultures and immigration in general has changed. I don’t expect anyone to solve the world’s problems but anyone of us can sit down with somebody new to the country and be a friend and work on the alphabet together. This is the eighth year of the program. In these eight years we’ve had almost 700 volunteers and refugees matched up. It’s constantly growing. Every single day I get phone calls of new arrivals asking for help so pretty much any day I can have a waitlist of close to 100 people and I can never find enough volunteers to catch up with the refugee resettlement here. It’s constant and I think that as long as there’s war and turmoil in the world there’s always going to refugee resettlement here. There is such a need. There is such a need for volunteers.

(in bold italics) The Giving + Learning Program is desperately in need of funds to serve current and incoming refugee needs. Call (701) 271-7549.

 

SECOND INTERVIEW

 

INTERVIEW WITH DARCI ASCHE, Community Liaison, OF LUTHERAN SOCIAL SERVICES

Lutheran Social Services supports the Fargo area in a variety of ways: maintaining the Great Plains Food Bank, programs for children, youth, and seniors, as well as running one of the most active “New American Services” programs in the United States. These New Americans are not immigrants, but refugees, many of whom are being given a chance for a permanent home after 10, 15, even 20 years in a refugee camp.

Ann Marie Stewart: What are your plans for World Refugee Day?

Darci Asche: We’re planning to have an afternoon here on the 18th. We’re going to have some food, some speeches, some games, and just celebrate refugees. World Refugee Day really is a commemoration of the refugee situation internationally and to bring attention to the needs of a people who haven’t been lucky enough yet to be resettled into another country or into a place like Fargo. The theme this year is, “Real People, Read Needs.” It’s really focusing on the lack of resources for those that are still in that limbo between being able to go home or being resettled into another country.

We have a lot of individuals in our community who are refugees from places like Bhutan and Burundi that were for the most part warehoused in refugee camps. In the case of the Bhutanese, they were [in camps] for 17 and 18 years so many of the in area here went to camp as small children and came out to Fargo as adults. So they spent their whole childhood and adolescence and young adulthood as refugees. In the case of Burundis, they were in refugee camps since 1972, so for the most part, they were born [in these camps]. We talk about culture and people ask, “What is the culture of Bhutan?” Well, it’s almost irrelevant because these refugees have never been to Bhutan.

I know that with the Sudanese, when they came it was so difficult to tell how old they were. They didn’t have any documents that showed their date of birth. They would just estimate. Generally, you might have a nine-year-old kid who they estimate is five because they were so small. Now that they are getting that second generation [the resettled generation] and they have nutrition, you are seeing these six-foot-tall being as they are meant to be.

AM: You also work with the Giving + Learning Program.

DA: Yes. There are a lot of people in the area who have had exposure but not face-to-face exposure [to refugees]. They’ve had exposure in the grocery store or driving on the street but now [with organization for refugees and volunteers] these people are friends and people that they care about. It really is an excellent resource for our clients because it’s important for our clients to have a support network beyond LSS, beyond American Services. We’ve done some research with former clients for people who have been here for varying years and we asked, “What is the single most important thing in your resettlement that helped you to succeed?” Every person said, “Someone in the community who could help me understand the system, understand the culture, and help me know what to expect.” And it wasn’t a former refugee they were talking about or a family member, it was “An American friend.”

For me, I was really working a lot to help build the support network of former refugees to help newcomers. It’s hard to mobilize other folks to be volunteers and mentors. When they gave that response, I realized I needed to get my energy back in working with church groups and working with college students and working with a community that will connect.

AM: You’ve had to grow in the past few years.

DA: We have had to grow. At one point in the late ‘90s we were resettling 650-700 individuals a year. After September 11, there were 51 the following year. We hovered around the 100-150 mark for a couple of years after but last year we resettled around 400 and we’ll probably see that again this year. That’s just North Dakota as a whole. We are reopening our Bismarck office which was closed after September 11.

Really our newest arrivals are from countries that we have not had refugees from before. The Iraqis who are not Kurdish because we have had Kurdish individuals in the past but these are Arab, some are Christian, some are Muslim, some are Shia. So we have that particular group of people that are part of our largest population. Then we have the Bhutanese coming for less than a year and they will be our major caseload for the next five years.

For the ones that resettle here, we are getting them more connected in the community, we’re trying to keep them optimistic…they are very motivated so that’s not a problem. Winter was really tough on them. Living in a refugee camp you are very communal, you are very connected. Living in an apartment in Fargo in December and January, you are very isolated and disconnected and they were really struggling with those new feelings. What I tell them is that they have to stay strong because there will be people following them and they will need that support system built for them. They are not a difficult people to work with at all. Part of it is just the reality that there is just nowhere else for them to go so they need to make this work.

It is also our mission to get people employed and self-sufficient as quickly as possible and employers are definitely the key to that. We have excellent employers in the community but you know, we are always trying to cultivate more.. We can offer them financial assistance for eight months. That’s what our federal contract allows us and then from that point we’ve always had people employed. [The current economy] has made it more difficult. Instead of three to four months we are looking at five or six months later and that’s a long time to be working.

They really do see Fargo, North Dakota as their home. You’ll hear that a lot from the refugees. It’s really difficult now as some of the Sudanese that grew up are graduating college and looking for professional careers in the community and realizing that they may need to move outside of the state. This is really leaving home for them. They feel safe here. It’s a really great place to live.

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