[Music]
it was close to midnight and a loving
Iraqi mother was preparing her two young
children for a late-night departure to
the airport this was going to be a
one-way trip they were gonna catch a
flight to Istanbul Turkey to be reunited
with this woman’s husband and the
children’s father he had left weeks
prior after being marked for
assassination he had been a contractor
for the US military and someone wanted
him and the entire family dead the
mother anticipated that this trip was
going to be a dangerous one so she told
her children that if she gave the
command they should get down in the
floor and take cover as they were
approaching the airport just outside the
gates sure enough she started to hear
bullets fire she told them to get down
and she covered their bodies with hers
and it was life or death fortunately
their cab driver turned around got them
to safety quickly but during their
second attempt to get to the airport
they again were deterred by gunfire
fortunately on their third attempt they
were successful they made it to Istanbul
and their family was reunited they would
then live there for the next three years
in a refugee camp they began applying
for refugee status and resettlement and
they were ultimately granted that
resettlement in Houston Texas this woman
I heard her speak two years ago at World
Refugee day
her name’s of sinja and when she came to
the United States she did not know
English but she studied very hard and
eventually she was able to become a case
manager helping other refugees who
followed in her footsteps when she was
giving her presentation on world refugee
day she was also just a few semesters
away from becoming a petroleum engineer
during her presentation she said I am a
strong and passionate woman I will
always be determined have faith and help
others I was inspired by her
presentation but it was also a reminder
that her story is representative of the
many thousands of refugees who come to
our country every year collectively
their experiences their cultures form a
mosaic that enriches all of our lives in
2012 I was in a time of transition I was
going from the third year of medical
school to graduate school and I also had
started volunteering with refugees as an
Albert Schweitzer fellow this fellowship
in Houston supports students like me
wanting to do a Big Idea project in the
community I was going to work with
refugees for a year to try to improve
their health and well-being many people
are surprised to learn that Houston is a
major refugee resettlement city last
year Texas whelped welcomed nearly 9,000
new refugees and 2,300 of those came to
Houston
this makes Houston the us’s largest
refugee resettlement city we to date
have over 70,000 refugees from nearly 80
different countries but a majority of
our refugees come from Burma Syria Iraq
and the Congo I had no idea before
starting my project that I lived in such
a rich diverse multinational city well
what is a refugee the United Nations
High Commission for Refugees defines
them as a person who has been forced to
flee his or her country because of war
persecution or violence in June of this
year the UNHCR announced that there are
today over 65 million forcibly displaced
people in our world and over 16 million
of those are refugees well where do they
go when they leave their homes forever
they end up at places like
a refugee camp in Nepal a refuge for
people from Bhutan or they end up in
places like this attempt city in Iraq
that is a refuge for people leaving
Syria this is the largest Syrian refugee
camp originally built to house 2,000
people but as you are aware there’s a
crisis in Syria this tent city now
houses over 20,000 people just imagine
for a moment look at that picture think
of you or your family living there for
years feeding on rations not being able
to work seeing your children’s education
put on hold and it’s not too hard to
imagine then while people in these kind
of camps would make even further risks
to try to get to Europe or places where
they can resume their lives to make it
even more complicated less than 1% of
people in camps like these will
ultimately be granted a legal
resettlement somewhere else in the world
less than 1% the United States admitted
85,000 refugees last year that
represents less than point 1 percent of
the world’s refugee population so if
anyone tells you we’re letting in way
too many keep that in mind less than
0.1% of the world’s refugees legally
resettle to the United States once a
family has been granted resettlement in
the United States the State Department
then looks for a city that already has
many refugees from that person’s country
then they look for a resettlement agency
within that city that can handle the
case this is where my agency the
Alliance fits in the Alliance works with
newly arrived refugee clients and they
handle everything they find their first
apartment they situate it with furniture
and food and they picked them up from
the airport to restart their life in the
United States my observation was that
many refugees see resettlement here as a
panacea they’ve lived in refugee camps
for years they’ve heard about us in the
land of opportunity
and they think everything is going to
drastically get better the minute they
step off that plane the reality though
is that resettlement is complicated and
it’s hard
besides language and culture the support
that refugees receive when they get here
is pretty limited and Texas refugees
only get three months of financial
assistance that’s nine hundred and
twenty five dollars per person per month
and they only get eight months of
coverage under the refugee Medicaid
program there are other grants and cash
assistance programs that refugees can
apply for but they’re contingent on that
person being in English classes and
actively looking for a job the urgency
to get a job is immense and a lot of
times refugees have to take maybe the
first offer they get which means that
people who were formerly doctors and
lawyers and engineers in their home
countries work in very hard labor
low-wage jobs in the United States at
least for a time refugee families are
eligible for food stamps in Texas but
even that benefit is limited six hundred
and fifty dollars for a family of four
per month so as you can imagine applying
for these things the social services and
the health benefits requires a lot of
forms and because those are all printed
in English the refugee or family is very
dependent on their case manager to help
fill those things out it slows the
process down and it’s a big challenge
for someone learning English for the
first time about eight to ten months
after arriving refugees are essentially
expected to be financially independent
and self-sustaining a lot of newly
arrived people find this high bar a
really difficult task
they came here expecting everything to
be better and then they kind of get down
into a slump some of them fall into
depression and many fall through the
cracks of our healthcare system my goal
of my project was to help improve the
health awareness in some way of refugees
in Houston but I realized to do that
well I first need
to see the situation from their eyes so
I sat in on a newly arrived refugee
orientation at my agency I remember
there was a family from the Congo and
another from Iraq the teacher had so
much material to cover and the slides
were just a hodgepodge of topics one
slide was about public transportation
another one was about voting and then
there was just one slide on health care
and I thought how could you possibly
expect someone new to this country new
to this system to grasp the complexity
of that system and use it effectively
from one slide and I was looking at
these family’s faces and seeing how
overwhelmed they were and I thought that
tells me a lot the other thing that I
did was I held focus groups with people
from five different countries and in our
conversations I sought to learn more
about the challenges they face and the
things they wanted to learn more about
they told me that for the people who had
been here longer than eight months many
no longer had health coverage despite
the fact that Houston has a really great
County medical system they simply didn’t
know how to apply for him men and women
wanted to learn about health screenings
that were appropriate for their age
women wanted to learn about family
planning and all groups were very
interested in learning more about mental
health especially depression this became
the starting point for my work over the
ensuing nine months I worked really hard
to host Saturday classes these were
hosted at the apartments where the
refugees lived and we covered the topics
that they had indicated wanting to know
more about but I learned to be flexible
because you never knew what kind of
questions people would ask and case in
point it was not uncommon for a refugee
to bring in a medical bill that they
wanted some help understanding I
remember looking at a bill with one lady
for thousands of dollars and I was
scratching my head why did this happen
and what what really happens is that
when someone gets sick and they don’t
have a car
just go to the nearest urgent care or
free-standing emergency center that’s
across the street because that’s
convenient
they go there and it ends up being out
of network and they end up with a bill
for thousands of dollars that they can
never possibly pay and I saw in the
faces of my clients how confusing that
was because they had been told that they
had eight months of health coverage and
not understanding our system they didn’t
know why those benefits didn’t apply
everywhere just think how complicated it
is for a lot of you in the audience who
have health insurance to find a
physician who meets your needs who’s in
network and then throw in barriers of
transportation language and culture it
is a huge barrier another observation I
had was that many of my clients couldn’t
interact with the health system because
they couldn’t read the documents they
were receiving I recall a home visit
with a Congolese mother she was the sole
caretaker for two young children and she
had chronically uncontrolled high blood
pressure she said sometimes she would
get so faint and dizzy she’d pass out
but she was just waiting on health
coverage to be approved from the county
and then she would see a physician I
asked her to show me the form she had
been receiving and within a carefully
organized stack of letters there was a
letter right there that said you’ve been
approved for health benefits she didn’t
know what that letter said because she
couldn’t read it she also didn’t know
she had been approved because people in
our County refer to coverage as having a
gold
Cardon turns out that the county used to
send people a gold colored card and that
indicated coverage but years ago they
phased out that terminology and that
card in the place of a form letter to
explain fee reductions that is super
confusing for someone expecting a gold
card to arrive in the mail but as I saw
that case over and over again I began to
wonder sometimes skeptically if that was
by design
Abraham was one of the friends that I
met during my fellowship year he’s the
man on the far left side of this slide
he himself is a Bhutanese refugee
he’s been here for over 10 years and he
was my go-to guy for teaching my
Bhutanese classes on Saturdays as we
were doing those classes is sometimes
felt like we were spinning our wheels we
could only help a small number of people
like some of the people you see in this
picture because everything that was said
had to be interpreted and translated
twice from us to them and back so I
thought is there a way to get more
mileage out of this and then it clicked
one day what if we made videos that
explain the class concepts and then
translated them to other languages put
them on the internet and then people
could help themselves or case workers
could help them abraham thought this was
a great idea and he was happy to help so
he invited me over to his home for
dinner and it was so special to get to
step into someone else’s culture through
food and fellowship of spicy peppers
chicken and rice and then we did the
work of sitting down to translate my
video I thought it would probably take a
couple of hours it ended up taking
double that but that’s because Abraham
was insistent we record and rerecord
every line until it was absolutely
perfect like me he knew that people from
his country could use every leg up we
could offer and he was determined to
make this tool perfect so it would help
your people for years to come in that
moment and seeing his determination I
realized just how bright of a future
there was ahead for many of the people
that I had been helping that year
working on this project taught me many
important lessons and I’d like to leave
you with three of them the first is
refugees are some of the most courageous
and resilient people I have ever met in
my life
it is very disingenuous to say that they
have malice toward our country or that
they have it easy because they certainly
don’t refugees in my experience leave
their country under threat of death
sometimes they live in squalid refugee
camps for years and the ones that get to
come to the United States are incredibly
grateful to be here the second
observation I had is that when you find
a
like this one you should really throw
yourself into it and be open to the
unexpected twists and turns that it
might take I would encourage all of you
if you can to volunteer in some way with
refugees because no matter where you
live there’s a good chance there are
some refugees in your neighborhood and
if all you do is advocate for their
cause from hearing this speech that in
itself will be a huge help because I
think there’s a lot of misinformation
out there about them I was open to the
twists and turns that my project took I
was underprepared at first but with time
I learned to lead
I learned to fundraise and inspire
others around a common cause and then in
a really special twist toward the end I
met my life partner a woman who was just
as passionate about this cause as me
when I think about my very first focus
group with people from Burma it was a
sunny Saturday in the fall and we were
sitting in this classroom
it was mostly empty with 15 men and
women who had come hoping I could help
them as they learned about the barriers
facing them I wondered if I was biting
off more than I could chew but just nine
months later we were in that very same
classroom and the room was packed we
were all sitting underneath the American
flag there were lots of refugee clients
we had medical students physicians
interpreters our collective volunteer
force had grown immensely over the
course of the year and I saw how this
project had literally taken on a life of
its own and grown organically and I’m
happy to report the elements of it
continue even to this day so that taught
me the third take-home lesson from this
which is that it is a really great idea
to find some outlet for service in your
life as a student or a working
professional and to make it part of who
you are I would encourage all of you to
throw yourself in to those pursuits with
a passion and be open to the change that
it might inevitably bring to your life
because it most certainly will thank you
you
it was close to midnight and a loving
Iraqi mother was preparing her two young
children for a late-night departure to
the airport this was going to be a
one-way trip they were gonna catch a
flight to Istanbul Turkey to be reunited
with this woman’s husband and the
children’s father he had left weeks
prior after being marked for
assassination he had been a contractor
for the US military and someone wanted
him and the entire family dead the
mother anticipated that this trip was
going to be a dangerous one so she told
her children that if she gave the
command they should get down in the
floor and take cover as they were
approaching the airport just outside the
gates sure enough she started to hear
bullets fire she told them to get down
and she covered their bodies with hers
and it was life or death fortunately
their cab driver turned around got them
to safety quickly but during their
second attempt to get to the airport
they again were deterred by gunfire
fortunately on their third attempt they
were successful they made it to Istanbul
and their family was reunited they would
then live there for the next three years
in a refugee camp they began applying
for refugee status and resettlement and
they were ultimately granted that
resettlement in Houston Texas this woman
I heard her speak two years ago at World
Refugee day
her name’s of sinja and when she came to
the United States she did not know
English but she studied very hard and
eventually she was able to become a case
manager helping other refugees who
followed in her footsteps when she was
giving her presentation on world refugee
day she was also just a few semesters
away from becoming a petroleum engineer
during her presentation she said I am a
strong and passionate woman I will
always be determined have faith and help
others I was inspired by her
presentation but it was also a reminder
that her story is representative of the
many thousands of refugees who come to
our country every year collectively
their experiences their cultures form a
mosaic that enriches all of our lives in
2012 I was in a time of transition I was
going from the third year of medical
school to graduate school and I also had
started volunteering with refugees as an
Albert Schweitzer fellow this fellowship
in Houston supports students like me
wanting to do a Big Idea project in the
community I was going to work with
refugees for a year to try to improve
their health and well-being many people
are surprised to learn that Houston is a
major refugee resettlement city last
year Texas whelped welcomed nearly 9,000
new refugees and 2,300 of those came to
Houston
this makes Houston the us’s largest
refugee resettlement city we to date
have over 70,000 refugees from nearly 80
different countries but a majority of
our refugees come from Burma Syria Iraq
and the Congo I had no idea before
starting my project that I lived in such
a rich diverse multinational city well
what is a refugee the United Nations
High Commission for Refugees defines
them as a person who has been forced to
flee his or her country because of war
persecution or violence in June of this
year the UNHCR announced that there are
today over 65 million forcibly displaced
people in our world and over 16 million
of those are refugees well where do they
go when they leave their homes forever
they end up at places like
a refugee camp in Nepal a refuge for
people from Bhutan or they end up in
places like this attempt city in Iraq
that is a refuge for people leaving
Syria this is the largest Syrian refugee
camp originally built to house 2,000
people but as you are aware there’s a
crisis in Syria this tent city now
houses over 20,000 people just imagine
for a moment look at that picture think
of you or your family living there for
years feeding on rations not being able
to work seeing your children’s education
put on hold and it’s not too hard to
imagine then while people in these kind
of camps would make even further risks
to try to get to Europe or places where
they can resume their lives to make it
even more complicated less than 1% of
people in camps like these will
ultimately be granted a legal
resettlement somewhere else in the world
less than 1% the United States admitted
85,000 refugees last year that
represents less than point 1 percent of
the world’s refugee population so if
anyone tells you we’re letting in way
too many keep that in mind less than
0.1% of the world’s refugees legally
resettle to the United States once a
family has been granted resettlement in
the United States the State Department
then looks for a city that already has
many refugees from that person’s country
then they look for a resettlement agency
within that city that can handle the
case this is where my agency the
Alliance fits in the Alliance works with
newly arrived refugee clients and they
handle everything they find their first
apartment they situate it with furniture
and food and they picked them up from
the airport to restart their life in the
United States my observation was that
many refugees see resettlement here as a
panacea they’ve lived in refugee camps
for years they’ve heard about us in the
land of opportunity
and they think everything is going to
drastically get better the minute they
step off that plane the reality though
is that resettlement is complicated and
it’s hard
besides language and culture the support
that refugees receive when they get here
is pretty limited and Texas refugees
only get three months of financial
assistance that’s nine hundred and
twenty five dollars per person per month
and they only get eight months of
coverage under the refugee Medicaid
program there are other grants and cash
assistance programs that refugees can
apply for but they’re contingent on that
person being in English classes and
actively looking for a job the urgency
to get a job is immense and a lot of
times refugees have to take maybe the
first offer they get which means that
people who were formerly doctors and
lawyers and engineers in their home
countries work in very hard labor
low-wage jobs in the United States at
least for a time refugee families are
eligible for food stamps in Texas but
even that benefit is limited six hundred
and fifty dollars for a family of four
per month so as you can imagine applying
for these things the social services and
the health benefits requires a lot of
forms and because those are all printed
in English the refugee or family is very
dependent on their case manager to help
fill those things out it slows the
process down and it’s a big challenge
for someone learning English for the
first time about eight to ten months
after arriving refugees are essentially
expected to be financially independent
and self-sustaining a lot of newly
arrived people find this high bar a
really difficult task
they came here expecting everything to
be better and then they kind of get down
into a slump some of them fall into
depression and many fall through the
cracks of our healthcare system my goal
of my project was to help improve the
health awareness in some way of refugees
in Houston but I realized to do that
well I first need
to see the situation from their eyes so
I sat in on a newly arrived refugee
orientation at my agency I remember
there was a family from the Congo and
another from Iraq the teacher had so
much material to cover and the slides
were just a hodgepodge of topics one
slide was about public transportation
another one was about voting and then
there was just one slide on health care
and I thought how could you possibly
expect someone new to this country new
to this system to grasp the complexity
of that system and use it effectively
from one slide and I was looking at
these family’s faces and seeing how
overwhelmed they were and I thought that
tells me a lot the other thing that I
did was I held focus groups with people
from five different countries and in our
conversations I sought to learn more
about the challenges they face and the
things they wanted to learn more about
they told me that for the people who had
been here longer than eight months many
no longer had health coverage despite
the fact that Houston has a really great
County medical system they simply didn’t
know how to apply for him men and women
wanted to learn about health screenings
that were appropriate for their age
women wanted to learn about family
planning and all groups were very
interested in learning more about mental
health especially depression this became
the starting point for my work over the
ensuing nine months I worked really hard
to host Saturday classes these were
hosted at the apartments where the
refugees lived and we covered the topics
that they had indicated wanting to know
more about but I learned to be flexible
because you never knew what kind of
questions people would ask and case in
point it was not uncommon for a refugee
to bring in a medical bill that they
wanted some help understanding I
remember looking at a bill with one lady
for thousands of dollars and I was
scratching my head why did this happen
and what what really happens is that
when someone gets sick and they don’t
have a car
just go to the nearest urgent care or
free-standing emergency center that’s
across the street because that’s
convenient
they go there and it ends up being out
of network and they end up with a bill
for thousands of dollars that they can
never possibly pay and I saw in the
faces of my clients how confusing that
was because they had been told that they
had eight months of health coverage and
not understanding our system they didn’t
know why those benefits didn’t apply
everywhere just think how complicated it
is for a lot of you in the audience who
have health insurance to find a
physician who meets your needs who’s in
network and then throw in barriers of
transportation language and culture it
is a huge barrier another observation I
had was that many of my clients couldn’t
interact with the health system because
they couldn’t read the documents they
were receiving I recall a home visit
with a Congolese mother she was the sole
caretaker for two young children and she
had chronically uncontrolled high blood
pressure she said sometimes she would
get so faint and dizzy she’d pass out
but she was just waiting on health
coverage to be approved from the county
and then she would see a physician I
asked her to show me the form she had
been receiving and within a carefully
organized stack of letters there was a
letter right there that said you’ve been
approved for health benefits she didn’t
know what that letter said because she
couldn’t read it she also didn’t know
she had been approved because people in
our County refer to coverage as having a
gold
Cardon turns out that the county used to
send people a gold colored card and that
indicated coverage but years ago they
phased out that terminology and that
card in the place of a form letter to
explain fee reductions that is super
confusing for someone expecting a gold
card to arrive in the mail but as I saw
that case over and over again I began to
wonder sometimes skeptically if that was
by design
Abraham was one of the friends that I
met during my fellowship year he’s the
man on the far left side of this slide
he himself is a Bhutanese refugee
he’s been here for over 10 years and he
was my go-to guy for teaching my
Bhutanese classes on Saturdays as we
were doing those classes is sometimes
felt like we were spinning our wheels we
could only help a small number of people
like some of the people you see in this
picture because everything that was said
had to be interpreted and translated
twice from us to them and back so I
thought is there a way to get more
mileage out of this and then it clicked
one day what if we made videos that
explain the class concepts and then
translated them to other languages put
them on the internet and then people
could help themselves or case workers
could help them abraham thought this was
a great idea and he was happy to help so
he invited me over to his home for
dinner and it was so special to get to
step into someone else’s culture through
food and fellowship of spicy peppers
chicken and rice and then we did the
work of sitting down to translate my
video I thought it would probably take a
couple of hours it ended up taking
double that but that’s because Abraham
was insistent we record and rerecord
every line until it was absolutely
perfect like me he knew that people from
his country could use every leg up we
could offer and he was determined to
make this tool perfect so it would help
your people for years to come in that
moment and seeing his determination I
realized just how bright of a future
there was ahead for many of the people
that I had been helping that year
working on this project taught me many
important lessons and I’d like to leave
you with three of them the first is
refugees are some of the most courageous
and resilient people I have ever met in
my life
it is very disingenuous to say that they
have malice toward our country or that
they have it easy because they certainly
don’t refugees in my experience leave
their country under threat of death
sometimes they live in squalid refugee
camps for years and the ones that get to
come to the United States are incredibly
grateful to be here the second
observation I had is that when you find
a
like this one you should really throw
yourself into it and be open to the
unexpected twists and turns that it
might take I would encourage all of you
if you can to volunteer in some way with
refugees because no matter where you
live there’s a good chance there are
some refugees in your neighborhood and
if all you do is advocate for their
cause from hearing this speech that in
itself will be a huge help because I
think there’s a lot of misinformation
out there about them I was open to the
twists and turns that my project took I
was underprepared at first but with time
I learned to lead
I learned to fundraise and inspire
others around a common cause and then in
a really special twist toward the end I
met my life partner a woman who was just
as passionate about this cause as me
when I think about my very first focus
group with people from Burma it was a
sunny Saturday in the fall and we were
sitting in this classroom
it was mostly empty with 15 men and
women who had come hoping I could help
them as they learned about the barriers
facing them I wondered if I was biting
off more than I could chew but just nine
months later we were in that very same
classroom and the room was packed we
were all sitting underneath the American
flag there were lots of refugee clients
we had medical students physicians
interpreters our collective volunteer
force had grown immensely over the
course of the year and I saw how this
project had literally taken on a life of
its own and grown organically and I’m
happy to report the elements of it
continue even to this day so that taught
me the third take-home lesson from this
which is that it is a really great idea
to find some outlet for service in your
life as a student or a working
professional and to make it part of who
you are I would encourage all of you to
throw yourself in to those pursuits with
a passion and be open to the change that
it might inevitably bring to your life
because it most certainly will thank you
you
Please follow and like us: