Refugee Outreach

So although my family visits have ended, as mentioned in a previous post, right now my class group and I are working to gather resources for our Community Resource Guide. This involves crosschecking resources and making sure that they are reliable. A few places that seemed to offer services didn’t seem to exist. What’s been helpful is the network that exists online, once you find a reliable organization, these have partners and you can then search these and come up with more results. Although there are lots of resources, there’s no compilation, and so there is a need to create an easy to access reference of multiple resources. Hopefully we can accomplish this.

On another tangent, this past week I had a family member come to the US for the first time, and was able to witness something akin to the first arrival experience of refugees. He doesn’t know english, and the US is very different from where he comes from. However, he’s very enthusiastic about being here right now which relates to the stages of adjustment. I look at his situation and then at the refugees, and see similarities and differences. They both don’t know english, but really want to learn it and succeed. The difference I see is in the amount of support that is received, the resources that are available at arrival. My cousin already has a job, which was facilitated through the network of family and friends. My family’s father spent almost four months looking for a job. This highlighted form me the importance of a built in support network at arrival. How would the refugee experience differ with more support, something like family support? I think it would make a lot of difference.

Tags: Spring 2011

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Spring 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.