Refugees from around the world are getting support they desperately need, while students working with them are learning life-changing lessons.
UNM’s Refugee Well-Being Program is a two-semester course that pairs sociology, psychology and anthropology students with refugees living in Albuquerque.
The students help refugees access resources like jobs, housing, school for their children and healthcare, as well as help with the basics of adjusting to a new culture.
In the process, students learn about the cultures, traditions and struggles of the families they are helping, through community meals and discussion groups.
Suha Amer is an interpreter and researcher with the program. When she and her family moved from Iraq as refugees in 2008, she said the program was like a lifeline for them.
“When you come to a strange country, you have no one here to help you,” Amer said. “It’s as if you do not know how to swim and you are thrown out on the sea. So a friend is really a life saver for you; it’s very precious to me.”
Because Amer was an English teacher in Iraq, she was recruited as an interpreter for her fellow Iraqis in the program. And the students helped her family immensely, showing her how to enroll her son in school and get him on a baseball team, and even helping her enroll at UNM, where she attended graduate school, she said.
Brandon Baca, research coordinator for the Refugee Well-Being Project, graduated in 2008. He became involved with the project when he took the course as an undergraduate, and he said it was a life-changing experience.
“It was really eye-opening, and it inspired me to do something positive with the refugee community, and also maybe even internationally,” Baca said. “Then, after I got paired with a family, I really formed strong relationships with a lot of the refugee community here. I was just amazed at how resilient they all were.”
Albuquerque adopts hundreds of refugees a year and is the only city in New Mexico that takes in refugees, he said.
Students enroll in the course Health and Social Inequalities, in the first half of which they learn the skills they need to work with refugees, as well as study the unique cultural challenges refugees face when trying to integrate into a new society, Baca said.
In the second half of the class, students begin working personally with families. For two hours a week they participate in Learning Circles, where Baca facilitates group discussions among the students and families.
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They then break into one-on-one groups, in which students help their refugee partners in an area of the refugee’s choosing, ranging from speaking and reading English to learning American culture and laws to filling out job applications, he said.
“It’s mutual, so it really gives students a chance to learn from the refugees as well, because they bring a lot of experience to our community,” Baca said.
The other part of the course’s second semester is advocacy, where students work on the ground with the refugees in their communities, helping them to access resources they otherwise may not be able to navigate.
“That sort of direct work in the community is a really rich experience, I think, for anybody studying this field, because you don’t see a lot of these applied classes,” Baca said. “It’s a really unique project to be a part of, because you won’t find it at any other university in the U.S. or even anywhere in the world.”
Amer said the help the project offers can make all the difference to refugee families.
“You don’t know anything about the culture here,” she said. “You don’t know the styles, the people, who to trust or not, what to say, how to behave. But when you have a friend to show you these things, you can adjust in a much better way and it is a huge help.”
The project, which began as the graduate work of director Jessica Goodkind, is in its sixth year. The team is doing exit interviews and research to continue finding better ways to serve Albuquerque’s refugee community, and Baca said the team would eventually like to expand the project to other universities.
Jonathan Baca is a news editor for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @JonGabrielB.
