Understand immigrants' outlook, speaker urges

Bridging cultural gap vital in resettlement, he said at workshop.

Even for social workers and volunteers trying to look past their own preconceptions, building relationships with refugee or immigrant families can be both hard work and uncertain. The gap can be as fundamental as whether people think of themselves as individuals first or members of a group first, Brant R. Dykehouse with the Jewish Child & Family Services in Chicago told a Fort Wayne audience Tuesday.

Americans, even the youngest children able to speak, are likely to identify themselves by their names, while Burmese and other non-Western immigrants are likely to define themselves as members of an ethnic group, a family or a clan, said Dykehouse, who helps run a 10-agency project in Illinois designed to help refugees adjust to life in the United States.

It’s tough for Americans to relate to that, because here “everyone is divided into a single ‘me’ and not enough ‘we’,” Dykehouse said.

A number of speakers Tuesday at a daylong workshop at the Allen County Public Library downtown touched on the challenges both the public and private sectors face in helping refugees and other immigrants adapt to Fort Wayne, including the estimated 800 refugees due to arrive this year from Burma.

Among the points Dykehouse raised with the more than 100 people at the workshop:

♦ Although young adults in a refugee community may be more likely to cooperate with social workers, bypassing community elders to work through youth may harm relationships in the long run. Dykehouse told the story of Somali Bantu immigrants in Chicago. A young, technologically proficient Somali bonded quickly with social workers. But the top elder in the community gave this advice to the social workers: “He who sleeps with babies often wakes up wet in the morning.”

♦ Differing cultural standards don’t excuse overlooking serious crimes, such as spousal abuse. As Dykehouse pointed out, reporting reasonable suspicions of physical abuse isn’t optional.

“We have to accept the fact that as social workers … we are mandated reporters,” he said.

Source: News Sentinel, Aug20, 2008