Day 29 We have a great core group of refugee resettlement volunteers. Some of our activities come off without a hitch because we’ve got experience. Some things work well simply because we have enough people sharing the load. When things break down it is often because there are not enough people to handle the task. With [...]
Day 28 Food cards arrived in the mail today! As one of our team members was attempting to explain the card and its usage to the family a 7th grade bilingual Burmese boy walked in. He was able to interpret some of the details simplifying the conversation. I often point out that interpreters are not [...]
Day 4 Normally the first week is rather intense, but every refugee resettlement case is a different situation. Sometimes, apparently, radically different. By accepting two resettlement cases, via an extended family of 8, we expected more work than usual. Yet, we have less work. The reason behind this unusual situation is two-fold. First the families [...]
Today I am beginning a resettlement case study. You are welcome to follow along and comment or question as needed. Tomorrow we will receive two Karenni families from Burma who have been living in a refugee camp in Thailand. Lutheran Social Services (LSS) has a large number of families arriving over the next few weeks [...]
Belmont University’s Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) team has put together a training video which can be used to show newly arrived refugees how to use a bank to work with their money. The video is published in several languages to that you can, ideally, show the video in the language of the refugees. (There [...]
