City of Kentwood Mayor Stephen Kepley is congratulted after the signing of a Kentwood City Commission resolution on Tuesday, Dec. 17, which stated support of the continued resettlement of refugees within city limits. (City of Kentwood)
By City of Kentwood
In response to an executive order on Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement, the Kentwood City Commission adopted a resolution in support of the continued resettlement of refugees within City limits.
City Commission unanimously approved the resolution, which affirms resources and capacities are available within the City of Kentwood to devote to sustainable resettlement, which maximizes the likelihood refugees placed in the area will become self-sufficient and free from long-term dependence on public assistance. Kentwood is one of the first communities in West Michigan to publicly affirm its support of Executive Order 13888.
“Kentwood has long been able to welcome refugees facing persecution thanks to numerous corporations, faith-based organizations, schools and families with the resources available to support the arrival and integration of refugee families,” said Kentwood Mayor Stephen Kepley. “As the current home of resettled refugees from more than 90 countries, Kentwood City Commission is committed to ensuring refugees not only feel welcome to come to our City, but to truly feel a sense of belonging within our community.
“Kentwood’s quality of life has been enriched by the friendships and contributions of our neighbors from all over the world. We look forward to embracing those who seek to find refuge in our City for many years to come.”
In a heartfelt commission meeting, numerous community members, many refugees themselves, shared comments in support of the resolution. These included representatives from Kent County Board of Commissioners, At-Tawheed Islamic Center, the Vietnamese-American Community of Grand Rapids, Bethany Christian Services, Samaritas and Gateways for Growth.
“The approval of this resolution demonstrates the city’s character and commitment to all New Americans and says loud and clear what type of community Kentwood leaders want to create for all people who want to call this place home,” said Joel Lautenbach, executive director of Development at Samaritas and leadership team member of Greater Grand Rapids/Kent County Gateways for Growth Welcome Plan. “We want new residents from all over the world, including refugees, to be able to find a place to live here — to raise their families, to contribute economically and be successful, contributing members of our community.”
Project Coordinator Elvira Kovachevich of the Greater Grand Rapids/Kent County Gateways for Growth, whose objective is to develop and implement a welcome plan to address different sectors of obstacles for immigrants and refugees in Kent County, also spoke to the importance of the resolution.
“Seeing the City of Kentwood unanimously approve a resolution to welcome refugees to our community is more than a statement; it is a commitment to welcome everyone with open arms and promote belonging, no matter where you come from,” Kovachevich said. “As a child of refugees who works to welcome other New Americans to our community, the City of Kentwood’s affirmation of the value of refugees is inspiring; the City is truly serving as an example to others.”
Issued on Sept. 26, Executive Order 13888 requires official consent from state and local governments within 90 days in order for the federal government to resettle refugees in a given area, impacting all refugees coming through the U.S. Department of State.
Swithina Mboko is a professor at the Seidman college of business at Grand Valley State University. In this interview, she discusses the culture differences between Zimbabwe and the US, the trials of teaching in a foreign country, and her qualitative research surrounding refugee entrepreneurs.
In his native Congo, Kyezie Bwanangela found himself running for his life ahead of armed militias. Luckily, the young man found safety and eventual refugee status in the United States. The criminal justice major joins us to talk about corruption, leadership, and what is needed to regain democracy.
Editor’s Note: This story was first published in August 2016
Gloria Tungabose’s eyes flash as she tells of her father, killed in Burundi. Her mother’s ethnicity was Tutsi and her father’s was Hutu, and the two groups were engaged in a bloody civil war. Her mother, Butoyi, was arrested.
“My mom went to jail and was raped there and had my sister,” said the East Kentwood High School student, describing how men measured her mother’s nose to determine her ethnicity.
The family moved to Congo, where violence also raged, Gloria said. They eventually arrived at a refugee camp in Namibia, living off rations of flour, beans, oil, sugar and salt, carrying drinking water to their shelters and going to school. She was 10 years old, and would remain there for three years.
Rwandan refugee Sifa Nyamuhungu and Gloria Tungabose join each other at the lunch table
Sponsored by a local organization, Gloria moved to Michigan four years ago, to discover a place where snow falls in the winter, people ride daily in cars and buses and where she can go to school with students from many different backgrounds. Now she can graduate from high school, go to college and become a nurse.
“I feel like it’s a dream and I’m still sleeping. Am I in America, really?” she asked. “I just have to live life and accept the reality in it. Even though the past was horrible and bad, I want to make my future better and help people in the future.”
Gloria’s story is similar to many refugee students who attend East Kentwood High School. They’ve escaped war. They’ve ridden on top of trains to elude dangerous gangs. They’ve seen family members murdered. They’ve crossed oceans and lived in refugee camps. They’ve faced religious and ethic persecution unlike most Americans ever experience.
Now they are seated at their desks Monday through Friday, reading literature, learning algebra, studying U.S. history and taking Michigan Merit Curriculum tests. They dream of careers, financial security, a future without violence.
Fresenai Haileselassie, from Eritrea; Arafat Abdikarim Yassin, from Somalia; and Mohamed Hisabu, from Eritrea, are refugee students who attend East Kentwood High School.
A Mosaic of Backgrounds
School diversity is often painted with a broad brush: white, black, Hispanic and Asian. But in Kentwood Public Schools, where students there come from 89 different countries, that picture is much more detailed. Diversity means students hail from all over the globe: from bustling Indian and Chinese cities to mountainous Balkan countries, to African tribal communities.
“We have 61 languages spoken here, which creates unique challenges,” said Erin Wolohan, an interventionist who works with students learning English. “We have many, many languages and cultures, so we have to come up with unique solutions.”
Many students speak half a dozen or more languages, a result of growing up in several countries, as their families fled areas and resettled in others. Gloria speaks Swahili, Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, English, French and Portuguese. She has already graduated out of the English Language (ELL) Learner program, and her accent is barely detectable.
“I feel great. I am surrounded by different cultures. I feel at home,” she said.
Unique Challenges
Newcomers arrived in waves to the Grand Rapids area from Bosnia, Kosovo, Vietnam and other Asian countries, Burma, Nepal and Africa. Many have moved to the Kentwood area because of housing availability. In the 8,856-student Kentwood Public Schools district there is an English-language learner population of 1,686 students, 19 percent of the district.
“For the past two decades Kentwood Public Schools has experienced a demographic shift within our student population,” said Shirley Johnson, assistant superintendent of Student Services.
One way the district has responded is to provide cultural competency training to all employees to address the numerous challenges: logistic, communication and cultural. Teachers help with transportation and in reaching parents who don’t have cars or driver’s licenses, and who work second- and third-shift jobs. The district spends approximately $60,000 annually on translation services.
Two Kentwood schools, Meadowlawn Elementary and Crestwood Middle, have Newcomer Center programs for which students receive full-time, intensive ELL instruction. The high school also has many newcomer classrooms. Recently, in ELL social studies teacher Carlotta Schroeder’s class, students from Nepal, Burma, Congo and many other countries finished their first-semester exams.
Damber Chhetra, who came from Nepal five years ago, said his family came for better opportunities. “It’s a better life. I can have a better education,” Damber said. “I like the way the teachers teach. It’s different. They are so nice to the students.” He wants to become a computer engineer.
Burundi refugee student Gloria Tungabose gets her lunch.
Students Settle Where Housing is Available
Families often live in apartments, and children who come unaccompanied by parents live with foster families and have church sponsors. Many high school students, without families to take them in, begin living on their own.
There are several reasons the Grand Rapids area became a destination for refugees, Johnson said. Grand Rapids participated in the resettlement of refugees even before 1980, when the Refugee Resettlement Act was passed authorizing more organizations to help facilitate refugee migration to the U.S. Some local agencies include Bethany Christian Services, Lutheran Social Services and West Michigan Refugee Education & Cultural Center.
Placement of refugees is based on housing availability. Resettlement agencies work with landlords to get fair and affordable housing, said Susan Kragt, executive director of the West Michigan Refugee Education & Cultural Center, located in Kentwood. Because Kentwood and Grand Rapids school districts have newcomer center schools, most refugee children end up in those schools.
School is sometimes entirely new for refugee children. Many come from non-urban areas without formal education systems, putting them behind academically. For teachers, nothing can be assumed or taken for granted, ELL Interventionist Wolohan said. Even the volume of someone’s voice can seem aggressive to non-English-speaking students.
Students have cultural differences and experiences that affect attitudes toward education, the roles of men and women and how they interact with each other. They may have never seen snow before, so aren’t prepared for cold winters. There’s also pressure from family members for teenagers to go straight to work to make money, Wolohan said. Kentwood teachers encourage them to stay in school because they will make more money in the long run, she said.
Adjusting to the Culture
A key piece in breaking down barriers is helping students and their families adjust to U.S. culture, as well as educating teachers about their needs, Kragt said.
The center works with refugee students through its School Impact Program. The program provides orientation sessions for students and parents; holds workshops for educators on the resettlement process and the cultural backgrounds of refugees; hosts panel discussions with refugee students and offers eight-week peer support groups for middle- and high-school students.
Workshops inform educators about students’ prior school experiences, and alert teachers to the symptoms of culture shock and trauma that can leave refugee students feeling isolated and depressed, Kragt said.
“Unfortunately, sometimes our kids get bullied,” she said. “We talk about the trauma of what they’ve been through, but sometimes it can be more traumatic trying to fit into a new culture… Their classmates are looking at them going, ‘You’re different.'”
Also, Wolohan added, it’s incorrect to assume students are here because they want to be. While many came for a better life, often they wish they could have stayed in their own countries.
“It’s a lonely life, it’s a hard life. They know they are better off than where they were, but it wasn’t their idea,” she said. “It’s not like they woke up one day and said, ‘I want to live in America.’ We have that misnomer that we think they should be so thankful to be here, and they are grateful, ultimately. But that doesn’t mean they don’t miss their families. If they could go back to their homeland and have it be more free, they would.”
Nepali refugee students Bhim Chuwan, Chandra Subba and Jog Sharma have come a long way to be part of the EL program at East Kentwood High School.
A Welcoming Environment
Teachers are encouraged to lead by example in the classroom, giving other students “less permission to pick on that kid,” Kragt said. “These kids are not going to be the ones going around introducing themselves to everybody. They need people to reach out and say, ‘Hey, how are you?'”
The big picture is to help students acclimate permanently. A successful school experience is crucial to refugee families’ fortunes in America, Kragt said. Without students learning English, graduating high school and going on to college, refugees are apt to stay in an “enclosed community” apart from the broader society.
But in schools where there may be 21 foreign languages in one classroom, teaching is “a pretty daunting task,” she noted.
Her center provides after-school tutoring and other programs to help students catch up. More broadly, it strives to provide a welcoming culture for refugee resettlement in West Michigan. When Gov. Rick Snyder last fall sought to pause the state’s acceptance of Syrian refugees due to terrorism concerns, Kragt accused him of “leading with fear rather than reason” in a teleconference sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Western Michigan.
“We have a strong history of welcoming refugees (in West Michigan), and a lot of people are informed about refugee resettlement,” she said. “That’s allowing us to maybe push back on some of the misinformation that’s out there.”
Just walking the halls at East Kentwood High School helps dispel fears and promote acceptance. Students are often dressed in native clothes, speak their native languages and celebrate their traditional holidays, all while navigating the U.S. education system.
Wolohan said refugee students and the perspectives they bring add to the richness of the district.
“It’s an education you can’t buy,” said Wolohan, who’s had four children in Kentwood Public Schools. “What we have here doesn’t exist anywhere else. I think this is one of the most diverse schools in the country. For my own children, it’s given them more acceptance of other cultures and also a world view. It brings the world to them.”
That kind of attitude is one of the district’s core values, Assistant Superintendent Johnson said.
“We believe that our district reflects the real world. As students prepare to live and compete in a global market place, they will fully appreciate the rich differences among their peers, understand the value of diversity and be equipped to successfully interact within a multicultural society.”
SNN reporter Charles Honey contributed to this article.
Kenia’s story of her journey to the U.S. comes through the fuzzy lens of a child’s memory. She’s uncertain how long she traveled or even how old she was, but some things she recalls vividly: fear, thirst, hunger and preparing herself to die. It seems those things are harder to forget.
Her story unfolds as a series of unthinkable events when she teetered on the edge of death to escape the violence in her native Honduras and cross the U.S. border at an age when most American students are sitting at their school desks or headed to basketball practice.
Now a 19-year-old East Kentwood High School student, Kenia, who did not want her last name used, tells of the horrors she faced as a young girl traveling more than 2,000 miles on her own. The entire trek took months and she said along the way she was kidnapped, abused, threatened to be sold and hunted down by men who killed her father.
“It was very hard. I didn’t want to leave my country, but they killed my dad because he was black,” said Kenia. “I saw him covered with blood. I said, ‘Dad wake up, wake up,’ but he was dead.”
Her mother, who was native Indian, ran away, but eventually was killed as well.
So Kenia fled, walking for days and then riding bus after bus, before jumping onto a train that has been given the monikers “The Beast” and “The Train of Death” by those who have survived it. She climbed atop a rail car, where she experienced the blistering hot noontime sun and the cold dark of night, day after day. She doesn’t think she ever slept, because if you do, she said, you fall.
“I had to come without thinking,” she said. She left behind her grandmother, also now deceased, and other family members. “You just think, die or live? You come to U.S. or you die.”
‘Boom, He Was Gone’
She jumped on the train in Chiapas, Mexico, more than 400 miles from her home. Hundreds of thousands of migrants, most from Central America, take the route each year. Many of them are children like Kenia. As they pass by cities and towns, some people throw bread and others throw rocks at those on top of the train.
Kenia tells her story in a straight-forward tone. It is graphic. She remembers a friend whose grip slipped while trying to hold onto the train. “He yelled, ‘Let me go.’ … I screamed, ‘No!’ and boom, he was gone.”
When they weren’t riding, the migrants walked. Kenia said she remembers tearing open cactuses for drinking water. The only time she bathed was when they came upon a lake. She said she became very thin.
She remembers a group of men grabbing her. She was among several girls captured by human traffickers. Kenia is unsure how long she was with them, but said it was a long time. One day, however, while in a park, a boy realized she was in danger. He distracted the kidnappers and she took the opportunity to run away. It was just before she was to be sold. “It was planned already,” she said. “The man who wanted to buy me, he had the money ready.”
Another incredible occurrence was when Kenia had to cross the Rio Grande, which stretches south of Texas. It was a “very angry ocean,” she remembers. Unable to swim, the currents pushed her down. “I decided I would die there,” she said. “I woke up and said, ‘Am I alive?’ A boy was holding me.” Another boy had saved her.
She and the boy crossed the border into Texas, she recalled. Immigration authorities soon caught them. She begged them not to send her home. “I was like, ‘Please let me go! Please kill me now. Don’t bring me back there.'”
She was allowed to stay. She entered a home for refugees in Texas, and then began living with foster families. She was ultimately sponsored by Bethany Christian Services and moved in with a family in Kentwood.
At School in the U.S.
Kenia never went to school in Honduras because her family couldn’t afford it. Now, she plans to graduate next year from East Kentwood High School. Her native language is Garifuna, and three and a half years ago, when she arrived, she spoke no English. Now she speaks a total of six languages, including English.
She gets very frustrated with algebra, but likes biology and learning about animals. She gets good grades, recently staying up all night to study to earn a B- in biology.
She works at a nursing home. “I do that because I couldn’t help my grandma,” she said. She wants to go to college and become a nurse. Kenia said she still has a hard time trusting people.
Teacher Erin Wolohan works with many refugee students who have backgrounds as horrific as Kenia. They’re survivors, she said. “Kenia is hardworking and has tenacity,” Wolohan said. “I think she will do well if she keeps her eye on the prize: education and full employment.”
Kenia’s not sure how she’s come so far.
“I’m alive but I don’t know how I’m alive,” Kenia said. “I’m so glad I’m here, I don’t know what would happen if I was still in my country. My country is beautiful. The people is bad.”
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By: Erin Albanese – 
‘Boom, He Was Gone’