Resettlement Team Meeting Two
Day 16
This is the first chance we’ve had to get the resettlement team back together since the family arrived just over two weeks ago. Even so, we had only a total of 6 people available for the meeting. We’d usually hope for more, but things are moving forward pretty good, so a small core was sufficient.
Two of those present were not from our team. They were visitors from another church, quite significantly, the church that has resettled the relatives of our current family. Their team was surprised to recently discover all the extra people living in their family’s apartment. I can imagine that shock. Our meeting tonight was a good opportunity to explain our situation and also learn from their experience. This is their first resettlement experience and it sounds like they’ve been doing a great job.
Primary discussion was that of donations and move-in day. We have nearly complete coverage of all required items (i.e. those items required by the U.S. State Department ensuring that refugees receive a basic standard of living and are not just being dumped into tough conditions in a new country) and a fair number of niceties as well.
One of the interesting requirements is that each person have a bed. It turns out that finding complete beds is usually one of our more difficult tasks, especially when we’re working with larger families. What makes this requirement interesting is that often the beds go unused. In some case, beds are not typical culturally. So we provide them only to discover later they are used for storing other items, a gentle cushion upon which other goods can rest.
Often families have been living together in tight quarters so the are most comfortable to sleep all together on the floor. We’re not here to push them into what we would call “normal” behavior. But we make our “normal” available to them. In time separate beds and bedrooms become appreciated. We’ve not had a refugee family yet that threw away the beds to make more space available.
Our move-in day will start at 9 a.m. Saturday. We have several teams ready to pick up donations. Our previous Burmese refugee family, of Karen ethnicity, has volunteered to make lunch, comfort food for the new family.
Our meeting agenda also included discussion of the matching grant, a welfare alternative designed to financially help the refugees for 3 to 4 months while an aggressively looking for employment.
Whether they receive the grant or apply for the state welfare program is the refugee family’s choice to make. We strongly encourage acceptance of the grant because it saves our resettlement team from dealing with one aspect of “the system.” It also frees up the family to job search and study English without the well-meaning, but cumbersome requirements of welfare.
We also shared an update on the status of applying for a food card. Food assistance is available for low income families in Wisconsin, but each program is run by individual counties. We typically apply within days of their arrival, but since they are temporarily in Milwaukee county, we’ve been unable to make real progress. This could hurt later on as a delay will increase our need to provide food longer than anticipated and therefore at greater expense.
