Building Cultural Bridges: Community Outreach & Advocacy for Refugees

 

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Being placed in a foreign land with no knowledge of its language, customs, or culture can be a disorienting and often terrifying experience. Yet many Arizonans are unaware that every year nearly two thousand refugees, who fled their countries to avoid religious, ethnic, social, or political persecution, experience this fear when they are resettled in Arizona with few mentors to guide them through their new environment.

 

Remembering the struggles her Cambodian family faced when they arrived in the United States as refugees, former ASU student Sambo Dul founded Community Outreach & Advocacy for Refugees (COAR) in 2002 as an ASU student organization that recruits volunteers to support refugees in their efforts to adjust to American society and educate the local community about the refugee experience.

 

“COAR is unique since our volunteers provide individualized support to these resettled refugees,” says Cara Steiner, an ASU student and the Executive Director of COAR. “Case managers from resettlement agencies do an amazing job providing hundreds of families with basic needs, but they don’t have the time to give refugees as much one-on-one support as they’d like. COAR’s primary goal is to provide that support system.”

 

“The experience of working with refugees is mutually beneficial,” adds Steiner, who mentored the Somali Bantu Abdi Idle family through COAR’s Volunteer Anchor Program. Volunteers in this program are paired with refugee families to help them with cultural adjustments. “Learning about the struggles they went through – thirteen years living in a refugee camp is not uncommon. Your kids could be born in a camp and be teenagers when you get out,” she states. “So to speak with someone who’s had to flee their country because of persecution is an education. It really broadened my world view.”

 

During her time with the Abdi Idle family, Steiner and her COAR partner Daniel Lebedies familiarized the family with the community by taking them grocery shopping and answering any questions they had about local customs. She helped the nine children practice their English speaking skills, and learned some words in MaayMaay – their Bantu dialect – in the process.

 

“I like when Cara and Daniel took us to Tucson,” says eight-year-old Maryan, referring to a time when Steiner and Lebedies drove the family to Tucson to visit their aunts who had been relocated there. Maryan also remembers how Steiner read stories to the children to help them develop English reading skills, and proudly demonstrates these skills to Steiner by reading her a picture book and spelling the names of her sister and all of her brothers.

 

Maryan’s father Abdi adds that Steiner helped the family deal with other serious matters, including taking one of his sons to a doctor when he became sick and helping Abdi understand the paperwork involved in the job application process.

 

Gradually, the friendship that developed between the COAR volunteers and the Abdi Idle family became strong enough for the family to share some of the terrifying events they experienced as refugees.

 

“These stories are not easy to tell,” states Steiner, who emphasizes that teaching cultural sensitivity and respect to volunteers and the community at large is an important aspect of COAR’s work. “They’re stories of losing family members, of losing children – a lot of times new volunteers will want to ask the families, ‘What happened to you? Why are you a refugee?’ and that’s not appropriate. We try to stress that what’s important is that these refugees are people.”

 

Since many of these refugees are students, COAR offers Reaching Higher! a semester-long college preparation program held at ASU at the West campus that familiarizes these students with college entrance requirements, from taking SATs and ACTs, to writing essays about their personal histories, to applying for financial aid and scholarships. Each student is also assigned a mentor, often an ASU or community college student, who provides refugees with one-on-one help.

 

At a recent orientation meeting for Reaching Higher!, Ayawovi Afanou, a refugee and former teacher from West Africa who studied at both Phoenix College and ASU before becoming a COAR volunteer, spoke to the refugees about the value of pursuing higher education.

 

“I can tell you [attending college] is not easy – it was not easy for me,” states Afanou who spoke no English when she arrived in the United States and feels relieved that a college education helped her family get off welfare. “But I can tell you guys who are still young – stay in school and study hard. If you study and reach higher, you will be so proud and if they take away your welfare you don’t care because you know you have enough with your education.”

 

Afanou’s words resonated with many of the refugees at the meeting, who dream of becoming surgeons, pharmacists, astronauts, teachers, and accountants. All believe a college education can help them reach their goals and spent much of their time asking mentors questions about the American college system.

 

The educational and cultural backgrounds of these refugees vary tremendously – since its inception, COAR has worked with refugees from a wide range of countries including Vietnam, Iraq, Liberia, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

 

“Very few people realize that this vast, diverse, and really valuable population is in our community,” says Steiner. “These people bring with them a wealth of experience by virtue of coming from a different country and a different culture.”

 

To help share this experience, COAR holds community events, including film screenings and panel discussions about refugee issues, through its Awareness & Advocacy program. Refugees willing to share their stories are encouraged to do so – at a COAR screening of The Lost Boys of Sudan, some of the Sudanese refugees who had been resettled in Phoenix gave the audience a first-hand account of what they went through.

 

Recently, COAR has entered into a further collaboration with the Tempe Historical Museum, which has hosted two of COAR’s Southeast Asian Refugee Film Series in the past year. The film series complements the museum’s award-winning exhibit “A Proud Journey Home” which educates the public about the experiences of Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees through oral histories, photographs, and objects from these communities.

 

For all the support they provide refugees, however, many COAR volunteers feel they are the ones who benefit most from this program.

 

“This is something I see in a lot of volunteers – the recognition of the value of different cultures and backgrounds,” states Steiner. “A lot of times people use the label ‘refugee’ and turn these people into an ‘other.’ But somewhere along the line you recognize refugees are people and in that process they cease to be the ‘other’ and become an ‘us.’”

 

Since its inception, COAR has worked with over 170 volunteers and served over 600 refugees. However, hundreds of new refugees continue to arrive every year in Phoenix – which has become one of the top destinations for Bantu Somali refugees – and COAR is always in need of volunteers and resources. Find out how you can get involved with COAR by visiting its web site.

 

To learn more about how ASU is engaged with the community, please visit ASU in the Community’s Program Database which connects you to a wide variety of specific ASU outreach efforts.

 

Michael Jung, ASU in the Community feature writer
Michael.Jung@asu.edu
(480) 965-0335