By Elaine McLevie | Project Leader
She was lying in her mother's arms, the center of attention, love and awe. For family members and Refugee Network volunteers alike, there was an almost electrical feeling in the air. Here she was, the first baby born in San Diego to a Bhutanese refugee family.
It is the children among the refugees who give the adults a reason to hope for the future, and a reason to undertake sometimes Herculean efforts to "make it" in their new homeland, so that those children will succeed. This baby is already that hope for the 20 Bhutanese families here.
The children are also a critical component in helping adult refugees learn English and understand some of the ways this society works. It is often through children who come to our tutoring programs or whom our outreach workers encounter, that we are made aware of special needs or concerns we need to address. For example, when we discovered that three children had not been attending school, we found that their single mother had been sick, and had not been able to drive them there. We also found that her car was no longer working. Network staff and volunteers provided food and transport, repaired the car, gave special tutoring to the children to catch them up in their lost weeks of schooling, and continued to help the mother.
The Refugee Network reaches out especially to those refugees who, for whatever reason are in special need, and do not know where to turn. That is more than two hundred families at any given time, touching the lives of more than 4,000 individuals in any year, of whom over 2,500 are children and over 800 are young adults. In 2013 your donations through Global Giving provided help like the example above to 23 familes from 5 different ethnic groups. That is awsome! Please continue to let others know about our project and what drew you to support it. We would love to have your input on what we could do to spread the word about how a little help at a critical time keeps hope alive. That makes a huge difference.
.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
