Regaining a Sense of Self and Individuality
Matthew House combats isolation and provides a sense of accomplishment through a student-led education curriculum
My name is Amy Ulrickson. I am the program director for Matthew House here in Arizona. The first time that I ever really interacted with a refugee was in 2003 when I was living in Houston. There was a gentleman who came to the church that I was attending who was Sudanese. He was trying to get his wife and his two sons to the United States. This was the first time that I heard about the undertones of this kind of experience and the logistics of reuniting families and how complicated that can be.
I moved around a lot, and later ended up in Seattle. One of my dearest friends there happened to be an Albanian refugee, and my other friend was Ethiopian. I found it really incredible that they were the ones that welcomed me as a newcomer to the city. They invited me to their homes and told me stories of how they wept for the first few years that they lived in the US because they were so lonely. Yet they had so much love. When I moved to Arizona, I was fortunate to find out that there was an English class starting with a group of 12 Syrian women.
Years later I started Matthew House with my friend Leisa. At Matthew House we want to provide English classes with excellence. We want to have a good curriculum, and good standards for our lessons. Many of our students have had to say goodbye to family and friends and community, so we want so much to build community into what we’re doing with our classes. Our students are assessed when they come to their first class, and then placed in their level of curriculum. We also have tutoring support for students K through 12. Sometimes classes are one on one because we don’t have many participants at a certain level. Really, we are student-led. The curriculum navigates the educational experience but if we had a student working on something specific, we tailor the course. For example, if a student is working on a GED then the class can help them achieve that goal.
We don’t want our classes to establish the goals of our students, but rather we want to know what their goals and dreams are and figure out how to utilize our curriculum to fit what they are passionate about.
One of our students is passionate about hair and makeup, so we’ve tried to provide lessons that incorporate that type of vocabulary for her. We also have many students who pursue citizenship. You can imagine how with so many of our families, much of their sense of self and identity has been stripped away. It is rewarding to help people regain their sense of individuality and be able to witness their accomplishment when they pass the citizenship test. It never gets old to see people so excited to feel part of our culture and part of this country. We don’t do this alone. We’re very lucky at Matthew House to have relationships with some immigration attorneys here in town. They are a phenomenal resource. They have been able to provide us with study materials and practice questions for refugees.
The immigration attorneys aren’t our only community partners. We receive donations to our organization through amazing people who believe in what Matthew House is doing and want to be involved. So through those donations we’re able to do things like purchase our curriculum. Our classes don’t cost our students anything, so we can supply them with the materials they need free of charge, which is important to us because we don’t want to deter anyone.
My heart is definitely drawn toward the needs of women especially, as newcomers in our community.
I think sometimes the biggest challenge for people is isolation and loneliness. They need friendship.
I’m lucky to have my parents close to me and my friends too, but these new friends have lost all of that. Which is why another service Matthew House provides is welcome groups, people from the community. Sometimes it’s a group of people who knew each other from a church or knew each other from an organization. They go through our training and then they’re paired with a family and we just encourage them to support this family and help them to navigate all the different things, whether it’s getting kids enrolled in school or medical appointments. That is one thing that’s beautiful for us to witness is how impacted our welcome team members are by the refugees they welcome. So in terms of women I think when we really invest in the relational aspect, draw them out of their home to find community, then everything else follows.
Our welcome teams interact with refugees and get to experience things that are different and unknown to them.
When you have the ability to interact, it changes your landscape. Things stop being numbers and names and places, and start becoming people you love.
We want to give everyone that experience because it creates a ripple effect that can potentially change generations.
Our team members obtain informed consent from each individual before an interview takes place. Individuals dictate where their stories may be shared and what personal information they wish to keep private. In situations where the individual is at risk and/or wishes to remain anonymous, alias names are used and other identifying information is removed from interviews immediately after they are received by TSOS. We have also committed not to use refugee images or stories for fundraising purposes without explicit permission. Our top priority is to protect and honor the wishes of our interview subjects.