A refugee's Journey to Resettlement
90 Days
By Inge Kathleen Hooker
The International Center of Bowling Green (WKRMAA) is a non-profit organization founded in 1979 whose mission is to resettle and fill the needs of international refugees and immigrants in Kentucky.
WKRMAA helps assimilate its refugees by guiding them through a world of processes that they could not do alone. Each family gets placed into housing and receives help getting social security cards, food stamps, medical checkups, employment, English classes, school enrollment, second-hand clothing, and grocery shopping.
America offers new opportunities, yet it is an inexplicably unfamiliar place. When refugees from Thailand arrive, they have a couple personal items and then they plunge into a life of unfamiliarity – the language, the weather, the people, and then the customs. You’re taught a list of don’ts: don’t sleep on the floor, don’t eat with your hands, and boys must wear blue, never pink or purple! You learn how to sleep on a bed, eat with a fork, wear a scarf, but even using the toilet in America feels odd.
WKRMAA understands these challenges, and they first educate their refugees and then they purposely resettle refugees of the same ethnicity around each other so that they can form a strong bond, a community, where former arrivals can teach the new ones the ropes of their strange world. This community creates a lifelong support system vital for the resettlement success.
90 days is a story of a Burmese refugee family of six, two parents and four young boys. In January of 2009, they traveled from a Thai refugee camp to resettle in the United States. The story begins the day the arrived in the United States and follows them as they try to settle and adapt to their very new, strange life, in rural USA.
