Hello friends! This is Michelle. Updating this has made it on to our chore chart, so here I am, dutifully blogging before I take out the trash for the week. Because our house news is probably not so interesting to anyone outside Winona (we've been keeping to our grocery budget! we painted Margarite's sickly green room bright red and purple!) I thought I'd write more about what exactly I do at my placement.
First, my basic biography: I grew up just outside Portland, Oregon. I'm an only child. I was an animal science major at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. Someday I might want to be a teacher or a scientist. I was drawn to my work because of my experience studying abroad in southern Madagascar and because of my deep love of logistical planning.
My placement is in the Refugee Resettlement Services department of Lutheran Social Services. We work with refugees during their first 90 days in the country to connect them with basic resources to start their new lives here: housing, health care, immigration assistance, employment services, education, social contacts in the community... My office has a tag-team model of case management that I'm still trying to figure out. Basically we have several lead case managers, who speak the native languages of most of our clients, as well as several specialist case workers, who are really good at finding housing or who understand the tangled political workings of family reunification paperwork. I am the furniture and education specialist, so I'm responsible for furniture and school enrollments for all of our clients. My day-to-day tasks are varied: sitting in the office scheduling appointments, selecting sofas at the used furniture warehouse, researching ESL schools, filling out school enrollment paperwork for families at the district placement center, entertaining toddlers while their parents take English placement tests, showing clients where their kids can get on the school bus...
Before I started I felt completely confident in my abilities to find furniture and enroll refugees in school. Now, three weeks in, I realize that it's much more difficult than I'd expected. So to end, here's the story of one of my first school enrollments, for two Somali clients we'll call Abdi and Mina-Mina.
Because it was my first week, their lead caseworker had set up the school enrollment appointment for me. All I had to do was meet them at their house, which happened to be just two doors down the street from mine, at 9:30am to walk one block to the English Learning Center where they could register for classes. I felt like I could handle this. But when I got their house and knocked on the front door, no one answered. I wandered around the house like a creeper, banging on all the side doors and still, no response. Just as I was starting to make some contingency plans, Abdi walks up from the street, with some juice he'd just bought from the Somali mall across the street. "Abdi? Hi! Are you ready to register for English classes?" "Oh, I didn't know what time you were coming, but let me put this in the fridge and we'll go." This seemed like a great development: we put the juice in the fridge, he grabbed his I-94, and we set out. As we were walking, I asked where his wife, Mina-Mina was. He didn't seem to know, but assured me not to worry about it, that she would meet us there. We were the fourth ones to arrive, and after we'd gotten our number and sat down, I asked again about Mina-Mina. He called again, didn't reach her, and then his phone died. Now I was starting to get worried, because the tour was starting and registrations only happen once a month and also because Mina-Mina seemed to be wandering around by herself. Abdi suggested I ask Sadia, one of the other caseworkers, for Mina-Mina's number, and I suggested that Abdi go on the tour while I tried to track down Mina-Mina's number. Then I realized that I didn't have Sadia's number, so I called five other people from the office before someone picked up and gave me Sadia's extension. I called Sadia. She didn't pick up. I thought about who else to call. Their lead caseworker had the day off to celebrate Eid, the end of Ramadan, so he was out. I finally decided to call their anchor (a local sponsor), because I had his contact information with me. But when I called their anchor and explained that I was a caseworker trying to contact Mina-Mina so we could register her in school, he refused to give me her number because he was so upset that Mina-Mina still hadn't received medical care and she was very sick, very sick, and how could she even remember English when she hadn't seen a doctor and he'd worked with refugees for fifty years and this was the worst he'd ever seen. I tried to explain that I was very sorry and would pass his concerns on to their main caseworker, but really I just wanted to get Mina-Mina enrolled in English classes, but he would have none of it and said he would call her himself. So I was back to square one, only more concerned because now Mina-Mina might be mentally unstable as well as alone and unaccounted for. Abdi came back briefly, but then had to take a placement test, which took a very long time. During this wait, Sadia finally called me back and gave me Mina-Mina's number. But because Mina-Mina didn't speak any English (because she wasn't there to enroll in English classes!), I had to wait for Abdi to call her on my phone. Two hours later, Abdi and Mina-Mina reconnect at the main office, where it turns out Mina-Mina had been meeting with Sadia all along. At this point, it was still unclear to me if Mina-Mina even wanted to learn English, plus I was already late for my next appointment, so I left them in the main office, knowing that at least Abdi could start English classes and Mina-Mina was no longer roaming the streets alone.
So that's a very long story with very little to show at the end, but really that's how this job is for me right now. Maybe someday I will orchestrate my appointments with smooth efficiency and effortlessly communicate with clients in the Karen, Nepali, and Arabic I will have picked up in my free time. But right now I run from appointment to appointment, not always knowing what to say or how to say it, just hoping that at the end of the day, or several days, my clients will find their way back to the classes we've enrolled them in. And usually they do! Just the other day I saw Abdi walked down our back alley on his way to classes at the English Learning Center. I hear back from other case workers that their client's kids are making it to the bus stop and off to school. The improbability makes it all the more rewarding in the end.
