Final Post

Today is the day!

We're here at the office for our last day as Sewa Houston Summer Interns and it's very bittersweet. We've learned a lot about the refugee community the past two months. From working with Alief ISD, the Los Arcos community, hosting immunization drives, and various other projects have kept us extremely busy. 

The Public Relations team has been busy keeping the public relations/grant writing team completed a wide variety of tasks this summer. Our responsibilities included: keeping track of each team’s activities, maintaining the social media accounts, organizing the email list, updating our event pages, introducing new features to our website, and writing reports for various projects, as well as a few minor tasks like creating a radio ad for our annual fundraiser, painting boxes for the Alief school supplies drive, and editing donation letters for the Uttarakhand Flood Relief efforts that Sewa has been focusing on.

Public Health has had quite a bit of exposure this summer. Initially, they started the internship by surveying the Bhutanese immigrants at the Los Arcos complex to learn which health issues affect the community. From the collected surveys, applying for insurance was one of the most prominent public health problem faced by the immigrants. To address this issue, they took a field trip with 7 of the Bhutanese families to E.C.H.O.S., an organization that helps people apply or reapply for insurance. They also created an insurance handout that would be useful for all the residents of Harris county. The handout contains information about different insurances and a list of low cost/free clinics. Over the summer, they also organized two very successful immunization drives, one at Alief, and one at the Los Arcos apartment, During both the drives, they immunized 154 children in total. In addition, they also organized an "End of the internship" summer celebration for the Los Arcos residents, interns, volunteers and donors.

The Family Services/Community Empowerment team worked in two fields this summer. For Community Empowerment, they offered weekly sessions which are geared towards teaching Bhutanese refuge community technical skills and small-business skills. During the summer, we taught refugee families skills in T-shirt printing, needlework, and jewelry making, which could help them earn a higher income and gain self-sufficiency. At the end of the internship, the refugee adults have made great progress in these skills. They created very good-quality products. They helped them market their bracelets and T-shirts and the clients loved their products. For Family Services, they worked on several projects that helped promote our Family Services initiative: (1) The team completed a presentation on Five Wishes, and introduced what is Five Wishes, how to complete Five Wishes, and How Sewa Family Services can help people complete Five Wishes; (2) We updated Family Services’ various databases on an on-going base, including the volunteer one, the clients one, and the cooperation organizations; (3) They set up a calendar for Family Services’ workshop. The workshop will be held in every other month. The subjects of the workshop include Five Wishes, Volunteer Orientation, Yoga for Senior Citizens, Family Relationship, and Parenting.  

The Children's Activities team has had a lot of hands-on experience with the kids in their program. Their biweekly visits to the los arcos apartments proved to require a lot of time and energy for the team, but they successfully pulled it off. Each time they were at the work site an activity was planned that turned out incredible in the end. The kids were entertained and quickly bonded with the team members. By the end of summer, everyone knew the kids that regularly attended programs and bonded with them. Most of all, the team helped the kids learn more about the classroom. The activities would always have a goal in mind that was educational.

This summer was extremely rewarding for all of us and we hope we've made an impact on Sewa and the Houston refugee community. We thank you all for reading our blogs and updates! 

Alief SLI, Immunization Drives, and Playing Catch Up!

Hello again! I know it has been a while since we've blogged, and we've got lots of updates for you readers!

First of all, as of the beginning of July, Sewa's Get Inspired Houston interns completed our month-long tutoring at Alief's Summer Language Institute program. As was mentioned in our previous blogs, the SLI program is a month-long voluntary summer school program for intermediate, middle school, and high school immigrant children who have lived in the United States for less than 2 years and are struggling with English language comprehension. Several interns collaborated with these students for four hours a week during the month of June, dividing their hours evenly between two or three classrooms. Their subjects were reading, science, and/or social studies, depending on which classroom a tutor was placed.

As mentioned, this proved to be both a challenging and rewarding experience. Several interns found that their students made great improvements in their language comprehension in just a few short weeks of receiving one-on-one tutoring. For example, I was tutoring a small middle-eastern girl in my intermediate classroom who was having a very hard time with even basic English. She was very shy, and whenever she struggled with something she would hide her face behind her burqa and hum while she tried to figure it out. Her teacher, Ms. Thompson, assigned me to her specifically, though I was also asked to go around the room during certain activities to help other kids with their spelling, writing, and comprehension. Though she was very shy at first, when she got something right, she was immediately more confident in her work and was usually able to complete it with more accuracy. Every time she did something correctly and figured out her assignment for herself, she became more independent and asked questions less frequently, though she also found that she had more confidence to ask questions in the first place instead of looking at me quietly for the answer. By the time I completed my tutoring, she was able to grasp the basic meaning of singular nouns, plural nouns, and past, present, and future verbs with relative accuracy. She also completed an entire worksheet by herself without my assistance, and I was very proud of her accomplishment!

At the end of the program, the principal, Ms. Hsu, and vice principal Dr. Jameson, organized a cultural event for the intermediate, middle school, and high school students throughout the last two days of class. Our interns and our AmericorpsVISTA supervisor, Aneel, attended the program for the intermediate children. At this event, teachers from different ethnic backgrounds were asked to bring in a dish from their country to share with the children, other teachers, and attendees at the event. And let me tell you, there was SO much food! The tables were overflowing with food from Mexico, El Salvador, Vietnam, South Africa, Bhutan, Panama, and other countries in South America, Central America, Asia, and Africa. It was delicious! After food was enjoyed, kids were able to go up to the front of the cafeteria and sing karaoke in their native language or perform dances they had prepared for the audience. After all the singing and dancing, the teachers played a recording of the Alief SLI "Theme Song" they wrote and prepared for the event, and all the kids got to go back to their classrooms with a complementary book to thank them for their dedication to their studies this summer. It was a very rewarding, fun experience, and I know we interns are very grateful for the opportunity to get to meet some of these children and to help them with their language comprehension and transition to American schooling.

In addition to the Alief program, we have successfully completed three immunization drives this summer! Our first drive on June 27th was held at the Alief annex, where children were pulled from their classrooms so they could be immunized according to what vaccinations were required by law. It was a bit disorganized at first, since we hadn't yet experienced what our roles were going to be, and there was quite a bit of running around and trying to find translators for a lot of parents arriving at the annex who did not speak English. Additionally, the intermediate kids were out during the first half of the day on a field trip and once they came back to the building they were all "combined" into different classrooms and mixed together, so calling certain teachers to send different kids down to the immunization area proved to be very difficult. Some children took a while to locate, but in the end we were able to locate them and successfully immunize them. All in all, it's estimated that we vaccinated over 75 children on the 8th, alone! We also learned a lot from our first immunization drive and used this experience to prepare for our second one hosted at the Los Arcos Apartments on July 8th.

That immunization drive proved a bit more troublesome. The weather was horrible and we were faced with bouts of heavy rains that ruined our posters, so that was a bit problematic. Additionally, while we were able to successfully prepare for large groups of people, the Texas Children's Hospital bus suffered a malfunction that led to the awning outside of the bus breaking under the weight of the rainwater. It took over an hour for the mechanic to arrive, since the bus couldn't leave without being able to retract its awning, and by the time the repair was completed it was too late to continue with immunizations. Though we were forced to end early, we were still able to vaccinate 13 children. To make up for the technical difficulties experienced on the 8th, we are actually conducting our third and final immunization drive today at the Los Arcos Apartment Complex from 9am to 2pm. Numbers and experiences from today's drive will be reported in another blog later this week, but from the sound of it it seems successful in spite of today's gloomy weather.

Our Intern, Shikha Shah, assisting a volunteer translator outside the Ronald McDonald immunization bus at the Alief SLI Immunization Drive on June 27th. 

 A close-up of the bus during the Alief SLI Immunization Drive on June 27th. 

Our Interns and Alief SLI helpers outside the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile at the Alief SLI Immunization Drive on  June 27th. From left to right: (front row) Emma Welch, Kriti Dogra, Miranda Mendieta; (back row) Shikha Shah, Shawn Hooper, Aneel Bhimani, Sarah Hiscock, Megan Nguyen, Lucinda Andrade, high school volunteer Rohan, Michael Shemenski, and assistant principal of Alief SLI, Dr. Jameson.

An inside look at some of the chaos of our paperwork room during the Alief SLI Immunization Drive on June 27th. Our translators and volunteers did an excellent job of adding order to disorder and helping things run smoothly!

As for individual internship teams, the Children's Activities team has seen a lot of success with their Los Arcos kids. The week following our last blog, for example, was "Earth Week," where the children were taught about the importance of the Earth and keeping it healthy for us, and were also educated on the recycling process and what recycling means for us as consumers. They then watched a video about how Earth Day came to be and when it was first celebrated in the United States. Once their lesson for the day was done, they made homemade bookmarks and drew about what they learned from the Earth Day videos and were asked to bring empty cans from their homes so they could make pencil holders later on in the week. An individual blog regarding updates from the Children's Activities team will be coming up soon!

The Public Health team recently took 6 immigrant families to the ECHOS public health office to assist them with applying for health insurance, especially considering the new changes in universal healthcare. At the moment, they are working on planning the End of the Summer internship event planned for this upcoming Saturday.

The event venue will be at Foerster Elementary, located at 14200 Fonmeadow Drive in Houston, zipcode 77035. It is scheduled for Saturday, July 27th, at 3:30pm and will have plenty of food, children's art, face painting, henna, hand-printing for the kids on a Sewa mural,, dancing, and plenty of other fun arts, crafts, and events to enjoy! Our dress code is semi-formal, and the theme for this year's event is "One World." This event is open to the public! If you would like to attend, please feel free. If you have any questions or inquiries, you can inquire through email at sewausa.houston@gmail.com or our website, houston.sewausa.org.

More information on our internships and end of the year events for our internship teams coming up soon, so stay tuned!

Week 2 and the Start of our Alief Friendship

Time for another update! Lots of things have been happening here in Sewa’s Get Inspired Houston internship program, and we’re really excited to share.

Most importantly, we started our volunteering with the Alief ISD program this past week! We didn’t know what to expect, but it was a pleasant surprise. Our first day was a little hectic; we were all a bit late, since we didn’t know that the program was held in an annex between the Hastings and Elsik high school campuses, so there was some confusion about where to park and Google Maps’ navigation feature wouldn’t identify the address for some. But we made it without too much time wasted. The building is really new and nice, with four main hallways connected to a central cafeteria that separates the intermediate from the high school students. For those who don’t know about the program, Alief ISD is a one-month summer school program for local children who need help with their school work and English language comprehension. It ranges from 4^th graders to 11^th graders and focuses primarily on reading, speech, social studies, science, and PE.

Our guide, Ms. Pabon, was very welcoming, warm, and easy to talk to. There wasn’t much to do the first day, just orientation, explanation of the ways that the program and kids work, and we chose our age group and subject preferences. It was decided that we would all be separated and inserted into different classrooms to help one or two kids who are struggling the most with school work and grasping the English language. Luckily, for those of us who don’t speak any language other than English, there is usually at least one other child in the classroom that speaks their native language and can help with translation. By Thursday our classrooms had been chosen and we were divided up to start volunteering and our schedule was set. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning from 10:15 to 12:20 we would split up our mornings equally between the intermediate and high school students, with intermediates in the first half of the morning and high schoolers before lunch.

In the classrooms, each of us interns were exposed to different experiences with different children, but one thing was clear to all of us: it is so incredibly difficult to be immersed in a school that does not speak your language. Coming to a new country can be hard enough, especially for children, but it is hard to imagine what it must be like to want to learn, but not understand what it is that is being taught to you. And for many of us, we realized that these kids were eager to learn, even when their language comprehension level was low, especially with the very young children. For one intern, there was a petite, shy girl who had recently immigrated to Houston from the middle east. She did not understand much English or the teacher’s instructions for her project on nouns, but once she understood the directions she completed them quickly and was proud to show her tutor that she knew her ABCs so well. Every time she was complimented on a job well done, she flashed the prettiest, most thankful smile. She was clearly very proud of the work she was doing and that she was doing it properly, even when she wasn’t sure at first what any of her instructions meant.

For our intern Michael, he assisted a student who could only speak Mandarin. He knew very little English and probably spent much of his school day understanding a very small portion of what was going on around him and what he was being asked to do for his assignments. When we were done tutoring for the day and talked about our experiences, Michael pointed out that he found it very hard to think of what he would do if he was ever in that situation, trying to learn in a country whose native language was completely different from his own, and it brought up an interesting perspective. What would we do if we were ever in this position? It is so difficult to empathize entirely when you have never really had to face such real and stressful language barriers. Some may struggle with this when they are studying abroad at school and exploring the local culture and tourist locations, but when it comes to learning, their courses are typically taught by English-speaking professors from their university whom they are familiar with (unless, of course, it is an immersion term for a foreign language). Thus, even when we're abroad, we are still comfortable learning in ways we understand. Since we were raised in classrooms that taught in English, how are we to know exactly what it feels like to be in the same situation as these kids?

These are questions that should be reflected on personally throughout our tutoring at Alief this month as we grow as individuals. The teacher Michael assisted mentioned to him that, though these kids come to the US with very little English comprehension, after about a year they start to understand the English language a lot better, and school work will then become much easier for them. But that first language hurdle can certainly be difficult and very trying for such a young child adjusting to new surroundings. It makes us feel very grateful and blessed to have had a schooling experience without hurdles like these, and blessed to be able to help these kids adjust as much as we can with the month of tutoring we are given. Hopefully, we can make a big impact!

More blogs to come in the future. Stay tuned for more updates!

-The Interns

Summer Interns: 2013 (Week 1!)

Hello everyone!

The Sewa Houston Internship program for the 2013 season is currently in its first week and we are already coming up with some ideas for the summer! All the interns here are very excited to start working our hardest to benefit the Bhutanese refugee community and to help better the lives of refugees here in Houston any way we can. There are a lot of important projects coming up over the next few months, so be sure to check this blog and our website (sewausa.org) for updates.

This year, there are 11 interns divided into 4 important areas of focus: 

PR/Grant writing team:

As you can see, our team has updated the GIH blog! Do you like the new layout? We've been busy updating our Twitter and Facebook accounts and will be introducing ourselves via twitter soon, so stay tuned! We are also working at posting more complete intern bios/profiles on our main website so readers can get to know each awesome person involved a little bit more. Our team has also been creating new photos for the website, will be visiting the Los Arcos refugee community, and have begun planning some advertising for the upcoming Immunization drives. We are hoping to have a public service announcement running on public radio 90.1 KPFT by July 5^th.

Children's Activities / Youth Mentorship:

Starting next week the team will be going to the Los Arcos and Alief worksites to help children and adults with skill-building, English tutoring, and adjustment to the American way of life. During the month of June, Alief ISD will be offering a summer program for refugee children grades 4-11 who have been in the United States for less than two years.  As a result, a majority of the refugee children in the area will be attending as they learn the routines and language of American schooling. This week the CA group has been planning and constructing many fun projects for the kids that they will really enjoy. Not only will they bond with our interns, but they will bond with each other within the community as well.

Public Health:

The Public Health team has been researching the Bhutanese/Nepali refugees in order to understand the community. This week they met some of the members of the Los Arcos community and are currently making surveys to hand out to the community. The team hopes to educate the community on the importance of their health and the basics of healthcare here in the states. Later on this summer, the team will be responsible for the immunization drive by contacting doctors, getting volunteers, and producing a big turn out from the community. We are in great need of volunteers because of the expected high-turnout from individuals seeking immunizations and physical exams. If you would like to volunteer your time to help us with paperwork, crowd control, managing patient intake, or translating (especially in Somalian), please contact us at gih@sewausa.org.

Family Services / Community Empowerment: 

Currently, the Family Services team has been busy coming up with ideas for the local community in order to provide them with skills that could benefit them in the future. They've been calling local craft stores asking for donations in order to supply the community with the resources in order to make these ideas possible. If you have any materials you wish to donate, please contact us at gih@sewausa.org. Any contribution is appreciated, particularly children’s art supplies such as glue sticks, scissors, colored paper, or toys.

Local Updates:

In addition to all our work, we wish to offer condolences for the four fire fighters lost in the 5-alarm blaze on May 31^st here in Houston and have been working to advertise ways in which local Houstonians can donate monetary support for the victims’ families. In times of tragedy such as this, when dedicated, brave people are lost to terrible accidents, we must stand together as a community and hold up those who have been hurt and have endured heartbreaking loss. Houston has risen above and beyond the occasion, showing just how loyal and supportive we are as a city. At 10 this morning, the Houston Texans offered up Reliant Stadium as a venue for a massive Houston Firefighter memorial large enough to house 40,000 visitors, and a prayer meeting was held last night by the local Indian community of Houston at India House.  If you wish to donate to support the victims and their families, please visit the Houston chapter of the Red Cross at www.redcross/tx/houston or www.the100club.org, a local group that has taken on the majority of the fundraising responsibility. You can also purchase memorial tee shirts from The 100 Club. All proceeds will be given to the families of the victims.

That is all for now! By next week we will have another update for everyone! In the meantime, please pray for Matthew Renaud, Robert Bebee, Robert Garner, Anne Sullivan, and their families in this time of tragedy.