 "Photo: The Phoenix/Brendan Brown")
 "Photo: The Phoenix/Brendan Brown")
 "Photo: The Phoenix/Brendan Brown")
During my first experience with a refugee family, I was sitting in the family’s house with another volunteer I had just met, being served fruit and tea, and was asked, as politely as possible, what exactly it was we were doing there. The “S” family (who, for privacy reasons, will only be referred to as a letter), like most refugees, have learned from their experiences to not always trust the help that is offered to them.
They are, among other things, warned about confusing American advertising and pre-approved credit cards and loans when they are picked up from the airport by resettlement organizations, such as the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago (ECAC). When the refugees land here, they are already in debt: every refugee family must pay back the cost of their airfare to America. From the airport, the refugees are rushed along in a whirlwind of paperwork and doctors before finally arriving in their apartment, most likely in Rogers Park.
In the recent Chicago Tribune article “Iraqi refugees struggle with the American dream,” many of the problems noted in the story are shared by the Congolese, Burmese, Eritrean, Ethiopian and Nepalese refugees partnered with Loyola Refugee Outreach and the students of Daniel Amick’s, Ph.D., Anthropology 361 service-learning class. Like the Iraqi newcomers, many of the LRO refugees are desperately in need of jobs and immersed totally in a strange culture that Americans themselves can scarcely claim to fully understand.
My volunteer partner Mary Williams and I serve as what Mary Pipher, author of The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community, calls “cultural brokers” for the “S” family from Nepal. This, as we explained to the “S” family, means that we are there to help. Helping the family’s teenage daughters with their homework, practicing conversational English with their middle-aged parents or even trying to explain how to use resources such as libraries or public transit are just a few services that Mary and I can provide. We try to help them interpret American life, most recently the bizarre tradition of celebrating Halloween.
The impetus for the involvement of Loyola students with refugees in Rogers Park came from the formation of the Loyola Refugee Outreach (LRO) program last year. Besides partnering students with families, the LRO raises money to provide refugees with CTA transit cards, collects winter clothing to distribute to refugee families and throws events for the families and their volunteers such as the Halloween party LRO held in Simpson Multi-Purpose Room last weekend. However, since the LRO is a newer club on campus, it does not yet receive funding directly from Loyola and as a result, the program is entirely dependent upon the money it raises from fundraising events.
The LRO is partnered with the ECAC, a group started by Ethiopian refugees 25 years ago this October. Though the ECAC was originally created to serve Ethiopian refugees, the group quickly expanded to include all the refugees now living in Rogers Park. Alex Hill, Loyola alumna and now employee of the ECAC acts as a liaison between the LRO and the ECAC to help partner students with families. When asked why she chose to work with refugees upon graduating, she answered, “I'm always blown away by … how quickly [the refugees’] hearts open to someone new.” This is something that I can personally attest to: just a few short weeks after Mary and I first met the “S” family, our time spent with them seemed less like service and more like spending time with friends.
The extended “S” family came here after spending 16 years in a refugee camp in Nepal. They left when their camp burned down, leaving them homeless for the first time since their forced exile from Bhutan some decade and a half earlier. After the fire, they lived in the forest outside of the smoldering ruins of the camp for two months with only some plastic sheets provided by the U.N. to shelter them from the elements. A week later, hail tore the plastic sheets apart. When the oldest daughter’s husband told Mary and I their story, he ended by explaining to us that, despite the great pain of losing everything that they had, they couldn’t help but laugh at the end of the day, if only because there was nothing else they could do. If there’s one thing I’m trying to learn from the “S” family, it’s how to laugh.
Though each volunteer’s experience with a refugee family is inevitably different, the theme of gaining as much from the family as the volunteer gives seems to be a recurring one. The 42 students enrolled in Anthropology 361 blog about their experiences at blogs.luc.edu/refugee. The stories of a family mistakenly given a mattress infested with bed bugs or a volunteer’s account of taking Nepali refugees to the zoo or the tale of a family’s eviction woes are all captured and updated weekly. The stories of the refugees are no longer set in Burma or the Congo but are the real stories of actual events happening within walking distance of Loyola’s Lake Shore campus.
To get involved with the LRO or to find out more information on the Anthropology 361 class, please attend the Carmen’s Pizza (6568 N. Sheridan Rd.) fundraiser on Tuesday, Nov. 10th from 5-9 p.m. for $10 all-you-can-eat pizza and all-you-can-drink soda pop. Currently, the ECAC has 20 families awaiting 40 volunteers from Loyola with more refugee families arriving weekly.
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