By Zoe Mintz

Contributing writer

”No Swahili — for the next hour we only speak English.”

Gathered around a dining room table on a Tuesday evening, Dina, a Congolese refugee who came to Syracuse two years ago, encourages her Congolese peers to transform their lively conversation into an English one before a volunteer teacher begins the lesson.

“It is the only way we will learn,” she says to her friends.

For many refugees living in Syracuse, this is one of the few opportunities they have to practice English. Every Tuesday evening, volunteers, participants, children and neighbors crowd the five-bedroom house in Syracuse’s North Side. Flashcards containing pictures and images of the alphabet are considered gold here. Whiteboards on which volunteers and participants practice spelling and writing litter the tables. The kitchen bustles with volunteers cooking dinner and quickly delivering plates of turkey stew to the various groups spread throughout the house.

The old-style grayish-green house on Lilac Street is home to Hopeprint, a local nonprofit organization founded in 2010 by Sean Haley and Nicole Watts. The two friends see Syracuse's refugee population as an untapped resource that can revitalize the city if given the environment to thrive. To pursue this goal, the pair bought a house for $65,000 in Syracuse's North Side — the neighborhood where most resettlement agencies place refugees when they arrive.



The idea behind Hopeprint was to found a home, not a business — an intimate place to form relationships and build bonds between the local population and the refugees. The home hosts four permanent residents — two refugees and two Americans — and offers weekly programs to hone language and job skills.

“We wanted to step in and be someone who could come along and guide them,” said Haley, vice chairman of Hopeprint and a student at SUNY Upstate Medical University.

In the United States, refugees have anywhere between three to six months to become self-sufficient — find a job, learn English, enroll their children in school and manage personal finances. Most come from United Nations refugee camps that are set up in conflict areas worldwide where they lived for years, or even decades.

According to most recent figures available from the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, Onondaga County resettled 1,140 refugees in 2010. The influx is due to the city's low-cost housing and large number of unskilled jobs. Syracuse receives 1,000 refugees each year, said Helen Malina, program director for the Center for New Americans Refugee Resettlement Program in Syracuse.

Although public assistance is available to them for the first three to six months, it is not enough time for them to acclimate to their new lives. This is where organizations like Hopeprint fit in to help refugees after federal assistance is taken away and they have to learn to be on their own, Haley says.

At the Hopeprint home, volunteers lead weekly English conversational groups, housekeeping job training, a nutrition clinic, a book club, and culture and life skills classes, all done in an intimate setting in the living room, dining room and bedrooms.

The classes are hardly limited to textbooks. Kiza, a Congolese mother of four, comes to every English class with permission slips, newsletters and homework assignments from her children’s school. She is not alone. Explaining an apple picking field trip, what Scholastic forms are and even the meaning of Halloween are common topics of conversation.

Hopeprint isn't alone in working to fill in the gaps where government assistance stops and life in Syracuse continues. The Syracuse City School District also provides English classes for new refugees. Classes run from September to June, three hours a day, five days a week. The Refugee Assistance Center, commonly referred to as Bob's School after the late, longtime program director Bob Huss, is the main refugee school operated by the Syracuse school district. After refugees arrive in Syracuse the medical history and educational background for each family member is assessed and they're placed in one of 15 classes according to their knowledge of English, explains Rozlynn Jakes-Johnson, an adult education English as a Second Language teacher at Bob's School.

Although learning the language may help get refugees on their feet fast, adjusting to the American way of life at times poses an even greater challenge. Many have witnessed war, death and starvation at the hands of their government or opposing tribes. In the refugee camps basic needs like food and medical care are scarce. However, despite the deplorable conditions in the refugee camps, many of its inhabitants are able to maintain a sense of community.



Agnes Aombe, 22, is a Congolese refugee who lives in the Hopeprint home. She was in the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya for five years before arriving in Syracuse. "There is a community in the camp," she says. "Here in America, people don't talk to their neighbors. No one cares about them. Life gets lonely."

This isolation is especially difficult for refugee women. Many have to take care of their small children and do not leave the home often. For those who are capable of getting jobs, the struggling economy combined with poor English skills makes this a difficult task to accomplish.

Women Transcending Boundaries, a local organization aimed at bringing women of different faiths, cultures and beliefs together, recognized this problem among refugee women and decided to do something about it. Two years ago Jennifer Roberts Crittenden, WTB president, established the "Sew What?" program. Every Thursday at the Center for New Americans on Prospect Avenue, volunteers and refugees come together to sew potholders, aprons, pajama pants and scarves. Regardless of where they came from, most refugee women have practiced sewing or knitting in UN refugee camps to pass the time.

Crittenden describes an Iraqi refugee she met a year ago. “The woman’s husband told me she was so unhappy and would cry every day,” Crittenden recalls. “She wanted to go home.” After participating in the program her mood improved dramatically. “Being able to do something creative outside of the home helped her become comfortable in this country,” Crittenden explains.

Dhana Adhikari, 41, is a Bhutanese refugee who arrived in Syracuse three years ago. She learned how to sew when she was 15 years old and is both a teacher and a student at Sew What? This role is not new to her. She lived in a Nepali refugee camp for 19 years, where she taught a knitting class.

“It has been a long time,” Adhikari says referring to the time she has lived in Syracuse. “No English, no job,” she says. Despite eight months at Bob’s School, she struggles with the language. However, her sewing skills have not gone unnoticed. Lisa Warnecke, a volunteer at Sew What? and Hopeprint found a way to combine the skills taught at the former with the community connections provided by the latter. She helped set up booths at the Art Mart on East Washington Street and Plowshares Craftsfair and Peace Festival to sell the class’s wares, Adhikari’s among them.

“When the program first began we had the idea of starting a cottage industry,” says Karen Settembre, WTB member and Sew What? volunteer. It’s only now, in the program’s second year, that this goal is becoming realized.

Saro Kumar is a volunteer at Sew What? and a child staff psychiatrist who has worked with indigent populations in Syracuse for more than 15 years. Originally from Malaysia, she and her husband immigrated to the United States in 1977. “Even though I was a doctor, it was not easy getting a job here,” she recalls. “I had so much difficulty trying to prove I could compete with the people here. Imagine how much more difficult it is for them,” she says, referring to the refugees.

“These people have been emotionally emasculated,” Kumar says. Several of her young patients have psychological disorders due to the trauma they experienced. Kumar recalls a young female patient whose family were refugees from a Southeast Asian country. For 13 years her father carried a piece of paper in his pocket that said “autism” on it in English. Perhaps it was given to him in a refugee camp where a doctor saw her, Kumar speculates. When he met Kumar for the first time he handed her the paper. “He had no idea that his daughter’s condition was not curable,” she says. Not only that, the young girl’s traumatic experience as a refugee aggravated her autism, causing her to become a paranoid schizophrenic, Kumar says.

Mental health is an important issue in the refugee community, but one that is difficult to address. Despite the fact that the Refugee Assistance Center offers counseling, many refugees are still suffering. Paul Ariik, a Sudanese refugee who came to Syracuse 10 years ago, sees members in his community that continue to be scarred by their past — they are lonely, antisocial and unable to cope.

In November Ariik began writing a funding proposal for a new counseling program that would educate refugees on mental health issues and the services available to them.

“Treating the emotional baggage many refugees carry is equally as important as finding them homes, jobs and even learning English,” he says.

“I drank water off of dead bodies, witnessed killings and rapes,” Ariik says. He sees how similar memories haunt members of the refugee community. “Like me, they came to America and have likely witnessed rapes, sexual abuse, killings and forced marriages.”