Refugee stories: success and failure

Here are two refugee stories, says Joseph Nahas of United Africans of Utah: In the first, a woman is resettled to Utah and five years later she has become a U.S. citizen, can read and write in English, has a job and is planning to buy a house; in the second story, a woman is resettled to Utah and five years later is still on food stamps, speaks broken English, and is still on rental assistance.

The scorecard of Utah's refugee resettlement is full of both successes and failures, and it was with the hope of figuring out how to have more of the former that nearly 500 people gathered Friday at the Salt Palace for The Refugee Resettlement Conference.

The goal, Nahas told the conferencegoers, is "planting the seeds of self-reliance." Part of the answer, he said, is developing "exemplary leadership" among the leaders of Utah's various refugee communities.

The conference drew caseworkers, refugees, government representatives and volunteers. As Gerald Brown, director of Utah Refugee Services, told the group, "The only way we can get this done is together."

Last year's 1,200 arrivals included refugees from Iraq, Bhutan, Burma and Somalia. According to Brown, some 25,000 refugees have been resettled in Utah since an influx of Bosnians in the mid-1990s.

More than half are doing very well, he said. And the vast majority of the rest, he says, "given an opportunity, are going to be an asset" to the state.

Since the Refugee Services office was created two years ago, Brown said, refugees have benefited from more intensive case management, rental assistance, a refugee leadership program through Salt Lake Community College, and grants to 20 refugee community organizations.

Still, he said, "the problems we're facing now are big ones," including convincing local businesses to hire refugees.

The conference themes were neatly summed up in "The Refugee Resettlement Game," a board game created by Stacey Shaw and Jonathan Codell of the International Rescue Committee and presented at one of the conference breakout sessions.

At one table, a Croatian, a Burmese, a Bosnian, an Albanian and three representatives of the LDS Humanitarian Center moved a game piece around the board as they encountered typical refugee pitfalls ("rent is late") and successes ("child succeeding in school"). "It's not a race to the end," Shaw reminded them, "it's a race to self-sufficiency."

The conference included sessions for refugees, including one focusing on "Bridging the Cultural Gap Between Parents and Youth."