 Let's officially start. Thank you all for coming. It's very nice to see some familiar faces and some new faces. Thanks for coming to Bear Pong Books for the book launch of Eleanor Georges' The Immigrant's Refrigerator. And also, a discussion on immigration with Laurie Stavrand from the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. I am thrilled to host Eleanor here tonight in Montpelier. I've been lucky enough to hear her read and to attend her workshops while I was a graduate student at Goddard College, where Eleanor directs the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her readings are always gorgeous. And her workshops always helped me generate thoughtful poems and ideas. And I have to admit, I was beyond excited to learn about her new foray into fiction. Eleanor is an award-winning poet. But I knew that her poetic voice and her affinity for imagery and narrative would produce something amazing. And here it is. From the senior who makes watermelon soup for the hungry train boy orphans riding to freedom, to the meat-eating Christian who declares, if the world were cooked in pork fat, I think it would be a happier place. These stories are delicious. I urge you all to pick up a copy tonight. And I'm sure Eleanor will sign one for you. Eleanor will read for about 10 to 15 minutes. And then Laurie will present a short video, we hope, of refugee interviews. And then the two will join in discussion about immigration and the issues that surround that. And then there will be time for Q&A. There will also be time for the book signing. Would you have refreshments on the table? Please help yourself. I'd like to remind everyone to please mute or turn off your cell phones. And to let you know, the front door is locked. If you need to leave before the reading is over, please use the back door, which is to my right. The bathroom is located at the back of the store to the right of the back door. I'd like to thank the Vermont Arts Council for featuring this event as a Vermont Arts 2018 program. Feel free to pick up a Vermont Art Sticker at the counter. They're free. And I'd like to thank Orca Media for filming tonight's event. If you're interested in seeing tonight's video or in learning about our other events, you can sign up on our newsletter, which has been passed around. Next week, we're hosting author Ricky Gard Diamond, she's the author of Screwnomics, which is how the economy works against women and real ways to make lasting change. And she'll be in conversation with the Vermont Commission on Women Director, Carrie Brown, who will talk about the state of women's economics in Vermont. Be sure to join us at May 1st at seven o'clock. But tonight, we have Eleanor Giorgio, many of you know her. She's the author of Poetry Collections, Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants, and Mercy, Mercy Me, which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award. She is also co-editor of the Poetry Anthology, The World in Us, published by St. Martin's Press. She has won an Astrea Emerging Writers Award, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work appears in journals such as BOM, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, okay, lots of them. She's an editor at Tarpa Lynn Skye Press, and as I said, the director of the writing program at Goddard College. Eleanor is originally from London, where she's been at the first 27 years of her life. Since then, she's lived in the US and now resides in Southern Vermont. And we have tonight Lori Stavrand, the Community Partnership Coordinator for the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. She's been there for nine years. And during that time, Lori has had the privilege to help resettle refugees in Vermont, whose home countries are Bhutan, Burma, Burundi, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Iraq, Wanda, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria. She has expanded programs at USCRI VRRP, including the Crossroads Youth Mentorship Program in partnership with Play in the Wild and the Mosaic of Flavors Cooking Class in partnership with City Market. And can I announce the big upcoming news? They're putting together a cookbook of stories and recipes from refugees. So I'm very excited about that. She's expanded public outreach and education, including the Destination BTV Annual Fundraiser shows at the Burlington Airport and the Refugee Simulation, the Refugee Journey Board Game. It's fascinating. That's great. Let's welcome Eleanor Chary from her debut short story. I'll make it official, I'll stand up. Thank you very much, everyone, for coming here today on this first really beautiful Vermont Spring Day. I hope that when you leave here, you'll go out and have a nice sidewalk cocktail somewhere. So I'm going to read for 10 to 15 minutes because I want to keep it brief so that we have time for everything that we want to do. I just want to say it's a book of short stories, obviously, but some of them are very long short stories. And rather than, you know, spend the whole 10 to 15 minutes reading one long short story, which I think might be a bit like children's bedtime and might put you to sleep, I thought I would read one short one and then give you a little flavor of two more so that that could also be a promotion technique to find out what happened. You have to buy this book so it could work both ways, right? So I'm going to, and I will say also, you know, people are reading this book that don't normally read my work because I've made the transition from poetry to fiction and people are scared of poetry and they're not so scared of fiction. So one of the things that has come up is, wow, it's a very beautiful book, but it's dark, meaning there aren't that many happy endings in the book. And apparently this comes as a surprise when people who know me because they, but they obviously don't know me very well. So, you know, there are some happy endings, some with humorous moments in them, but most of them are pretty serious. So, yeah. So I'm going to actually read the first one, which Sam mentioned in her intro. It's called Gus Butcher and I don't need to say anything. It becomes self-evident as I read. You know, there's one thing I should say because half of these stories are in first person. So when it's a woman standing up here reading, the assumption is that it's a woman till it reveals itself that it isn't. So this is in the voice of a man. Most days of the week, I stand outside the train station with two large plastic buckets of Gus Butcher. Nothing fancy, mostly mashed up watermelon, onion, cilantro, lime, more to quench their thirsts than to fill their stomachs. The boys come out from their corners. They are quiet. Like their bodies, their movements are small. In their eyes, I see the eyes of my own son. When they realize I have food, they simply say, please, senor. They don't need to ask. They're the reason I live in this border town. I'm here to feed them for the last time before they cross into the US or for the first time they cross back into Mexico. In either direction, I know their journeys have been long. I want to feed them. I need to feed them. If I don't, who will? My heart, oh, my father broke it a long time ago. Because of this, when I feel another crack inside my chest, it frightens me. As God is my witness, I don't know how much heart I have left. Both my own history and these trained boys are slowly grinding what is broken inside me into a dust. So I make soup. I cannot sleep when I think that the only thing these children were taken to their bodies are the half-finished cigarettes that others toss away. 14, 13, 12, friends, brothers, sometimes not often a girl. They are each other's trained family, road cousins. They hide on top of La Bestia. It is illegal, yes, but there is not much the authorities can do. How can they stop these traveling children when there are hundreds of them riding el train de la muerte each week? I was once one of them. I made it to the US two times, both times I was sent back. After months in the migrant children detention center, I was happy to be returned to my mother. It didn't matter how good they were to me. It didn't matter how good I was at my lessons. I still felt locked up like they were keeping me in a prison. The first time I thought, I did it. I made it. But that America was not like the one on television. TV America is everywhere New York. After the first time I thought, I would never ride La Bestia again, but I had to for my mother to build her a house with her own bedroom so she could stop selling food on the street. I wanted to put money in her hands and say, this is yours. No more cutting your own hair. I thought that finding my father in America would be the answer to everything. My plan was simple. I will tell him exactly where and how my mother and I had been living and he would help. Side by side, my father and I would work. Side by side, we would sign our names at the end of our letters home. Father and son, we would send her our love and our money. At the end of my second journey on La Bestia, I found my father, America. He said, it takes more than one night with your mother to make you my son. He turned his back to me. He closed his door and all the walls of my life already built on crumbling foundations would have fallen on top of me if I hadn't stepped sideways out of this old house into the new. My mother died one year ago, five years after my last border crossing, but I am still building a house for her in my head. I have counted the windows, 17. Also, all the rooms will be on the ground, no stairs because I want this house to wrap around everyone who enters. The first time I went on The Beast, I was lucky. I was part of a group, four boys and me. They protected me. We each took it in turns to stay awake and watch out for the others. All five of us had been witnesses to the solo riders. We'd seen how many of them rolled close to the edge of the train while they were dreaming. When someone rolled off, the train stopped for a moment. My oldest road cousin saw someone roll under the train. He didn't tell us what he saw, how the dreaming boy's body was cut, how his legs landed a few feet away from his hands until the biggest part of our train journey was over and we were close to the U.S. border, the border in all of our dreams. We all thought that when we got to America, we would be adopted by new families, born again into the life we were meant for. Of course we thought we were meant for it. We were just the same as the New York boys on TV, except their houses had kitchens as big as churches and refrigerators with so much food, sometimes things were piled on top of each other with a special place for eggs and cheese and meat. But now I am a 20-year-old father who feeds these road cousins gaspacho when the train stops to catch its breath in the station. The rest of the day, I drive a horse. This is my job for money. When I am driving, hardly a day passes when I do not have to repatriate a child's body. This is what the authorities tell me to call it when they give me a dead train child to take back to his mother. There are so many days I've had to repatriate a child's body, it would be easy to lose count. I have not lost count. I have repatriated 257 children's bodies. Each time I load a small coffin into my hearse, a small country turns to dust inside me. I have a wife now. She came into my life with a child, my stepson. I love him like he is my own. I make sure to hold my boy every day. I don't want him to take El Train de la Muerte. I can't imagine my wife says as she stands in the river washing our clothes. I'm smoking my first cigarette of the day before I have to drive a dead boy back to his mother. I can't imagine, she says again, how heavy it must be to carry the death of your child. It does not matter how many times my wife says, imagine. I do not imagine. I make gaz batcho. When the train's engine comes to a stop, the cousins jump down from its roof and I step out with my two buckets. Their hunger rids them of their fear of being out in the open. They form a line. I ladle my soup into their plastic cups. That's the end of that one. That's the opening story. I don't really know what else to say. Maybe when it comes to the Q&A, if you have questions about it, I can speak a little bit more about the process. But I think the original, if I remember correctly, I think the original seed that was planted in my body for that story was that I actually read a newspaper article about a man whose job it is to drive the bodies. He was a hearst drive and his job was to drive the bodies that fell from the trains back to their mothers. So of course, I hadn't thought about that before and I tried to imagine what this man's life was like and how he found himself in this job. So that was the initial impetus for that one. And this one is a long one and so I'm only just gonna read the first two or three pages. It's called Usman's Window. And it's about a Somali Bantu man who is resettled in Maine. There was no Somali, there wasn't a particular Somali man that I read about. This is a character that I created. But the detail, one of the details that stuck with me. So usually what happens is that there's this little detail that stays with me and out of this detail I try and weave a story. So I was thinking about someone coming from a very hot country resettled in Maine in the winter and I thought, oh my God, you know, Santa Fe would be better or New Mexico. And then I don't know. And so, but the detail that stayed with me was that in the research that I was doing, at least a handful of people said that they preferred to be resettled in a place that didn't remind them of home. So being in this environment was nothing like where they came from. And it was a way of keeping something at bay. Keeping something at bay. So that was the scene that I planted for this story. So it's a long story, but I'm just gonna read the first couple of pages and it's called Osman's Window. Once he got to Maine, the refugee relocation center helped him find a place to live. A room with an apartment with three other Somali men. Two of them shared a bedroom. Osman and the fourth man had bedrooms of their own. In his entire 22 years on this earth, he had never had his own room. Back home, he had shared one room with his three brothers. And in the refugee camps, he had shared a succession of tents with many, many other men too, not just men, but women also to protect each other from late night attacks. In his new room, there was one bed with a small table beside it and pressed up against the shortest wall, there was a chest with six drawers for his clothing, though what he owned couldn't even fit to fill two. When he closed his bedroom door to sleep, it shut out all sound except for his own breath. The solitude unnerved him. He lulled himself to sleep by placing his ear to the wall that linked him to the second bedroom, listening to the sleeping breath and the occasional snore of his roommates. The apartment was above a Halal grocery store on the main street. On the other side of the street were a number of stores that were run by more of his country people. From the window of his apartment, he could see the Mogadishu Business Center, which offered various services, tailoring, cleaning and money transfers. For the first few days, he pulled a chair close to the living room window and watched his band two brothers and sisters walking beside white people along the main thoroughfare, buying fish, oats, vegetables and even clothes. And it looked to him as if he had landed in a place of miracles. He'd arrived a little too early for snow. Even so, from the window he saw band twos going about their new main days, bundled up in coats and boots and hats. Though his apartment included heat, he wrapped a scarf around his neck and pulled a woolen hat down over his ears, just so that he could feel like he was one of the crowd. The newness of America, especially the cold, gave him hope that he could push away the bad memories that came with hot days. By the third day of sitting in an empty apartment, watching people walk by, his roommates declared the window, Osman's window. One of them hung a blanket over the chair and even moved a small table beneath it for Osman to rest his teeth. Osman wouldn't have dreamed of sectioning off any part of their apartment and calling it his, but his roommates never sat in that chair or covered themselves with the blanket. Their tenderness towards him made him want to cry. These men were not only careful with him, they were careful with each other. Tentative gestures that came from a lifetime of uncertainty filled the apartment. They walked barefoot over carpeted floors, often surprising one another, coming out of a bedroom, their bodies whinsing in response. They stirred the sugar in their tears quietly as they could as if the sound of spoons clinking against mugs could wake a sleeping predator. In just one week, the refugee relocation center found Osman a jog in a small facility that produced handcrafted chocolates. The couple that had begun the enterprise, part factory, part storefront, was also from another country. 20 years said Tulio Medina, but with every bit of chocolate we import, we have found a way to bring a little bit of Venezuela to Maine. And this makes us very happy. We hope that you too Osman will find some happiness here. Welcome. Tulio and Rita Medina both had mothers who had taught them how to make a variety of chocolate-based desserts. And years later, here they were with their own employees creating their own variations and selling their beans a bar and shaped confectionaries to gourmet stores all over the US to manors and to tourists who wanted in to buy their loved ones a special treat. Rita took her time introducing Osman to all the ingredients. She asked him to taste the cream, the fruit, the herbs, and the flowers. She offered him a chocolate that looked like a small sea creature. When he bit into it, a pink cream covered his tongue that tasted like the red berry he had just sample. What you have there Osman is a raspberry cream, sea horse, molded out of dark chocolate with a dusting of sea salt. Everything you have just seen has been artfully made into this perfect taste. Your job will be to pack the chocolate boxes. Do you understand? Osman could not respond to Rita because his mouth was still full of something so perfect that he was afraid to open it in case the taste escaped and never returned. Good, she continued, ushering him through an aisle of perfectly molded chocolates, stacked on metal racks, floor to ceiling. The chocolates were a variety of shapes and sizes, some of which looked like they'd been decorated with gold. Actually, I think I'll stop there. So that's just a taste, a chocolate taste. And then I'll give you a final taste of another one. Just, this makes no difference whatsoever, but a tiny little, you know, a tiny little thing. I'll tell you about this. Oh, I don't know. It's a much longer story. But the tiny stories are a really longer story, but the thing that I would tell you is that this book happened because for the first time in my life, I got writer's block and I didn't write for an entire year and my friend said to me, so is that it? Do you like to write anymore? And I thought, no. And so actually my partner said to me, just write anything. So I wrote anything and this was the first anything that came out that launched the stories that followed. And it's called, again, oh well, yes, I'm not gonna, I see the time. I'm not gonna, even though it's short, I'm not gonna read the whole thing because I really wanna keep strictly to time. It's called How Now. The top shelf of the refrigerator is where Ekaterina keeps the lining of a sheep's stomach. Cold but not frozen, ready to be unwrapped. Later she will cut the lining into rectangles, fill it with ground lamb, then roll it into finger-sized sausages. This stomach lining is white, which is also the color of the sheep's coat. The first time she needed a woolen coat was when she landed in this new country that wrapped her in a skin of coldness, one that required her to button up all the way to her neck. Though she had buttoned up, tuberculosis still found its way beneath the woolen collar, beneath her skin and into her lungs. By the time she was given a hospital bed, the landlord had put her family's belongings outside on the sidewalk, I'm sorry, he said. And perhaps he had been a little apologetic, but mostly his voice held fear. Ekaterina's mother, father and brothers huddled beside their suitcases until another immigrant family across the street took pity on them and offered the family temporary shelter. Pity for one another is something immigrants have in abundance, but they hide it from view. You cannot find pity tucked under an immigrant's arm along with his newspaper as he leaves for work in the morning. You cannot see pity in an immigrant's kitchen in the pot in which she is frying the lamb with onions, parsley, cinnamon, pepper, and salt. You also cannot find pity in an immigrant's bootstraps, but it had found a home beneath the bra straps that lifted Ekaterina's tired breasts. The middle shelf of the refrigerator is where she keeps her sheep's milk cheese. After removing it from the shelf, she will crumble it with a fork. It's freshness making this easy to do. Then she will sprinkle the cheese with sugar and cinnamon and wrap it in the finest leaf of dough. This cheese filled dough leaf is called arachbila, a finger. After it is deep fried, this leaf finger will be the exact shade as her flesh finger. If she is not careful, she could bite into her flesh by mistake, but she's not worried about this. Immigrants learn to be extra careful with all of their movements because their new countries have no tolerance for their mistakes. I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to just take a couple of minutes and see if I can. Computers and small children can't be wiped apart. It's really nice. It's great. Politicians? I don't know any of it. Is it you playing with this? Eleanor, I think you've gone back to like portrayal books. No, I just finished the second draft of a novel. Oh really? Yeah. Which I can't talk about because it's too soon. If you want to ask me questions that would be helpful for Laurie, even if you go in and do that. If that makes sense, and then people might not. I haven't taken a book for a while. I'm never going to write another poem. And I'm sure if I did that, then the only thing I'd want to write is poetry. You know, that's the way it goes. I just, you know, at the moment, what I need to say is longer than a poem. Actually, I'm sorry, that's the wrong sentence. What I need to explore is bigger than, is longer, not bigger, but longer than a poem. So that's what I'm doing right now. How did you come to the subject of immigrant? Okay, so can you hear? How did I come to the subject of immigrants? So, sorry, I just spent an hour and a half with Carla answering the similar questions from the radio show. So, you know, I don't make a conscious decision to sit down and write about anything in particular. But, you know, as human beings, I have found that the things that we're really invested in come out of a personal place. Yeah, come out of a personal place. If you have a family member who has been incarcerated, maybe you will suddenly be drawn to working with advocacy groups for incarcerated people. If you have, I can't think of another example off the top of my head. But, so for me, you know, I come from a family of immigrants who then, and then I immigrated myself. So it's like two generations of immigrants. But the displaced and the refugee side of it is because in 1970, both my parents are from an island called Cyprus, which used to be a British colony, had 14 years of independence. And then in 1974, Turkey invaded it and cut it in half. And my family happens to be from the half that Turkey took. So everybody was either a refugee or a displaced person. So stories about refugees and displaced persons and immigrants always speak to me in one way or another. So I was saying a bit dinner today. I think of myself like a magpie. I hear things and I collect and I collect and I don't know why. I just know that I have to have this little fragment, and I make notes and then I just allow and then I sit down and I just allow it whatever rises to the surface to rise to the surface. So the short answer is because I have this history with refugees and immigrants, really. Clara? I was wondering if you could speak to the title and the refrigerator. I've read most of your stories here and some of it is pretty obviously similar to a metaphor, but I'm curious to hear from you. Yeah, so the book is called The Immigrant's Refrigerator, but the second story is called The Immigrant's Refrigerator. And the refrigerator in that story is very important. The second story is about a young man from Northern Ireland who leaves his troubled country in the 80s and the 90s to come and make a new life. For himself in the United States, specifically New York, and he's going to a graduate program in creative writing and he's writing short stories, but he actually thinks, what the hell am I doing writing short stories? Anyway, so there's this adage in the creative writing world that you must never start with a gun being fired or never finish it with a gun going off. No, you never start with a alarm clock going off and never end it with a gun being fired. Anyway, so he gets all this negative feedback because he always has bombs going off in his work and all the people in this program just say, well, that's just, you just can't do that because it's too much of a cliche. And he said, but this is my life, right? This is not a cliche, this is my life, I live with it. So anyway, in one of his stories, he says, all my stories fail because instead of focusing on the mother, the mother who's dead, who's just been, the bomber's just gone off instead of focusing on the mother and the children that are dead in the front garden, I'm focusing on the refrigerator. He said, and then he says, no, I'm not actually focusing on the refrigerator. I'm focusing on what's inside the refrigerator, which what's inside the refrigerator is some raspberry jam. And then he says, no, I'm not even focusing on the jar of raspberry jam. I'm focusing on the seeds inside the raspberries. So for me in these stories, instead of focusing on the big thing, so I'm trying to focus on the little thing, I'm trying to focus my stories on the small things that people don't notice rather than the big things. So, and of course you'll see that originally every story in the collection had a different title and the title was one word and it was a food thing. So there's one story called pork is love, but it was actually used to be called pork and there's one story called what D minus Y equals and it used to be called hummus and gaspacho still remained gaspacho. So originally I thought, okay, all the stories will be one item of food that you find in this refrigerator, but ultimately that seemed too easy. And ultimately I wanted to make it more subtle than that and to talk about the small details. But there were refrigerators in most of the stories and there's a way to link them and there's food in every story, there's a way to link them. But I didn't want it to be like, I didn't want food to be the main thing. I wanted food to be the background. So that's basically an explanation of that. Yeah. How has it gone, Laurie? Did you? I think we're almost there. You're almost there? So one more question or you do it? Laurie, do you want one more question? One more question? Okay, anybody have a question? Which research do you have to do? It depends on the story. Some of the stories come from my personal experience, so not much. Some of the stories come outside of my personal experience a bit more. I try not to do too much of a delicate balance between being didactic and really allowing your imagination to take over. So I do it and then I try and forget about it. Everyone took, there's a different amount of research. It's not equal. I think the most that I did was for Osman's window. Are we there, Laurie? It is just not equal. It went to a company. I think what I'm gonna do is apologize. And if you wanna stay later, I'll try again, but I don't see how it's gonna happen. Let's apologize. Yes. So what are you gonna say? You are gonna see a Somali bachelor. And the reason why I see a Somali bachelor is because this is a person who we settled in Vermont in the Burlington area and has been here a little while and you see her over time talking about what's important to her. So a lot of the stories in this book are really dark. What's really important to remember is those stories, just like your life, they're a moment in time. And in a refugee's life, there are moments in time when life is really dark. It's impossible. And then there are really incredible joyous times. And the thing about refugees is they have to keep that hope alive. And that is one of the hardest things about our time right now. It's very hard. It's very stressful for people who are here, people who are overseas to feed that hope, keep it going. The people who we have resettled here come from families that are, many of them have family members that are still overseas who are even ready to come and they're not here. So it's so important for every one of us, just like Eleanor is doing, to support refugee resettlement, to give people hope. Because they're gonna do the work. It's not easy when people get here. It's not just about having a place to live or a food on the table. You're coming from a whole other culture. You may or may not know the language, but you've gotta know American English. You've gotta be working at the pace, American pace, which doesn't lead very much time for family and friends. So there's, basically in the US, a refugee has to hit the ground running because they have three to six months to become self-sufficient. In Vermont, we're very fortunate. We have more grants. We've gotten some competitive grants that can help people for a longer period of time till they're employed, till they're more settled. But in some places in the US, they don't even really have that three months because each person who comes to the US gets $925 a person. And that's it. So that's supposed to last for three months. I don't know what rents are like here in Montpelier, but up in Chittenden County, it doesn't go very far, as you can imagine. So people, what we're doing is we're helping people make a plan. We're receiving them, we're welcoming them at the airport, and then we're looking at who they are, what they wanna do, what their capacity is, what the opportunities are. And then we're helping them to start basic steps up the ladder. So first they're really tired. You can imagine you've been traveling for 30 hours. Everything's new. You could be arriving summer, winter, spring, fall. You could have family here. You could not have family here. Most of our staff are former refugees themselves. We always have somebody who can speak refugees language, so we're able to communicate with them, which is really critical. And from that point forward, they have to get brave enough to go out and see what the neighborhood's like. Walk down the street, go to the grocery store. Just the basic basics. Kids started school, starting a job. If you have had a job where you were a professional, you can be sure in the U.S. it's not gonna be easy to get back to that point. There's a lot of hurdles. The person in this video came and has had five children. She had a couple children before she came. She had some more children when she was here. She graduated from high school, so she finished her high school education. She finished her gun bachelors. And now she's studying for her master's. She's been given leadership awards in the community. She just wants to do it all. She wants to give back. She's so grateful for the opportunities she's had, her family's had, and a very inspiring woman. And one of the reasons I particularly wanted you to see this is when you see a woman in a job, please don't just put her in some little box. You'll think you know exactly what her life is like, and what her aspirations are, and her opportunities, because you can't do that. Every person is different in their life circumstances. I'd like to know what you would like to know. And I would like to say that refugees are a specific, with a specific immigration status. So you could, there's many different ways you can immigrate to the U.S., and to come as a refugee means you have to have no other viable option. This is like the last chance you have to really make a life. And the average length of time that someone has been a refugee from the time they fled their home until they come to Vermont is 20 years. So it is not quick. So yes. You started saying, talking about hope, and I wondered what you see is the most helpful people can do, the most helpful things people can do to make possible the admittance of more refugees and to reunify families. What should we be doing to make it possible? We live in a state where our congressmen are supportive of refugee resettlement and actually take a leadership role. So it's not a bad idea to tell them thank you. If you have friends and relatives who are in other states that are not supportive of refugee resettlement, engage them in conversation, share resources, help them learn more about who a refugee is, why should we have this humanitarian program? Because we've really got to move people to action. And one of the hard things about this point in time is there's a lot of action required on a lot of different fronts and people I think are feeling a little buffeted. This is really important. So that's one thing you can do. Another thing you can do is you can be really welcoming and look at what that means within the context of your own life. If you are wanting to get involved, wanting to volunteer, if you're meeting somebody at the grocery store, just saying hi and being a great neighbor so that you're supporting people here who are literally supporting other people who are not here. There is the thought some people have that refugees become more Americanized once they're here in the sense that they become more individualistic. And in fact, they don't, they're cultures much more collectivist. And so they're always thinking about helping their family regardless of where they are. It's not out of sight, out of mind. So Vermont is considered to be one of the best places to be resettled because we do tend to be closer to the collectivist way of being in the world. We do have great sense of community and support for one another. And so really making sure that the people who are coming feel that in whatever way you have within your daily life. You know, I'm thinking about the kids. I'm a teacher, wasn't I? And when I was a public school teacher, just a number of children of immigrants and refugees and that dynamic of how the young people became very involved in the United States life so quickly and then had parents. So that whole, that challenge of navigating the different cultures, you know what I mean? And then I went to Burlington High School so I was supervising a student teacher there. I'm relatively new to Vermont and I was amazed how many immigrant high schoolers were there. And I was thinking about the dynamic. Is there anything you can share about what your experience has been or what supports their art? Because it's the navigation, it's like a, it's layered. It is very much layered. The reason that people would go through everything it takes to get here and it's hard, you're going through a long process to do the resettlement and then you know you're leaving other family behind. The reason people will do that is they do it for their children because they know their life is not gonna necessarily reach a place where they wish it would be, but they hope that that's what would happen for their children. So once they get here, they're willing to do major sacrifices, work two jobs, whatever it takes so that their kids can be going to school. And then the kids are learning language faster, they're learning culture faster and you have that challenge where the kids are adjusting but they're starting to lose the language. You know the whole language or maybe not getting up to the same level of language is their parents and grandparents so communication becomes more challenging. It's one of the biggest stressors and also the biggest opportunities for refugees. So what it takes at the school level is being able to see each student for who they are. And we cannot assume whether it's a youth or an adult that they are a clean slate, they are not. And that kind of is an American way of thinking. We're gonna teach the world everything. We know the right way and we need to slow down, step back and meet each person, see what's possible. So with a student going into school probably they've got some English, they probably don't speak one language, they probably have multiple languages. They're able to see that, appreciate that, build on that. They have world experiences that have enabled them to mature in ways that our kids don't have to yet. They're more sheltered, just living in Vermont or even if you've moved around. So honoring, respecting those kids is really important first step. We've started a program, a mentor program, specifically for high school students that is based on nonviolent communication, the philosophy of nonviolent communication. And that starts with honoring yourself. So if we're used to honor themself, love themself, so that that's how they go out into the world as they're getting pushed and pulled by their parents and their community or by the school and their friends that they can stay more balanced in terms of what's important to them and sort of draw from what we're there seeing the strength for them personally and also how it relates back to their family because all of these youths are considered an important resource, support for their families. As they're getting more educated, they're going to work, they expect that they will then be taken care of, they are parents. So it's just, it's not written, it's just understood. What has happened is it's been really hard for everybody to see who people are and not patronize them. And in education, you can imagine how important that is. So you can't say, oh, I've met this one student, so now I've got it. Or this one group of people will resettle, the next group's going to be similar. You always have to be opening up your mind. And it is a challenge for educators, but it is also an opportunity. I recently had two of my stepchildren come to the US from the Republic of Congo. And my stepson who's in high school doesn't fit the mold that educators are thinking that he should be. And recently one of his teachers asked him if he would share with students, how do you do calculus without a programmable calculator? Can you imagine, in the world today, there are people who do not have a TI-84 and still they can do calculus. And I was just so thrilled to hear him say that because that meant this educator was truly thinking about the opportunity that everybody in the class had. So this kid had never used this fancy calculator and had to learn. And the other students, you know, that's like ancient history. I mean, how could you not do it that way? And so there's these great opportunities that are happening in these classrooms and these schools to open up our kids' minds. You don't have to go overseas to learn that there is another way to be. And then you are living around everybody all being exactly the same as you and it's easy to not be so mindful about your choices because, you know, it's just natural. This is how you do it and this is how you do that. And then when you see somebody else's, somebody like a refugee who's been resettled here is doing it really differently, then there must be other options. And so what has happened is people getting connected with refugees or settling is, a lot of people have thought about, well, what are the basics? What do I need? Why do I need it? What should I be grateful for? And I think that that is one of the biggest contributions that they're making. Thank you. Other questions? Would percentage or do most of the refugees who come here tend to be successful or do some of them want to leave the United States and want to leave for a moment? If I get too much of a change for them? You have the full spectrum. Because refugees are human beings and there's the full variety. Most of the people who resettle in Vermont end up being very successful. They end up being self-sufficient very quickly. Not talking about wealthy. Paying the bills, keeping a roof over their head, food on the table. And that is the baseline that we're aiming for. Some people are able to move ahead more quickly. We have quite a few families, especially because families live together multi-generationally, that will budget very carefully. And even on basically entry-level wages, save enough money to buy a house three or four years. Because they've got a plan. They're motivated. There are some people who come who are older and change is harder. You don't learn a language as quickly when you're older. If you've been living in a refugee camp for 20 years and not had good food and shelter and medical care, it does take its toll. But families, they support each other. And each person in the family plays an important role. So if grandma or grandpa wasn't there, it would be a huge hole. They're either offering their wisdom or helping to take care of the kids or just being there. So if they were on their own, that they would be on our own in our culture, they probably would be failing, but they're not in the context, in their cultural context. We've had, in the nine years I've been there, some people have moved out of state, other states. Usually they will do that to join family that's been resettled somewhere else. Sometimes people will go out of state because we have the glass ceiling. And it's really hard for a refugee, a former refugee, I should say, because you're not a refugee your whole life just until you get your permanent residency, which takes a year. Some refugees are getting great college educations and the people are not seeing that they need to hire them. You know, to be working in the schools or doing social services in the law firms or whatever. And that's one of the challenges we really want to work on now. It's 80% of people, 80% of jobs that people get are because they know somebody. And so that's another thing you could do if you want to be helpful, is to share your network and share opportunities. So we've got, we have some people who are moving to Ohio to think about politics. People are leaving Vermont, because Vermont won't give them a job and going to Ohio we will get a job at the level that they should be working. I'm not saying it's easy for everybody to get a job, but there is a clear pattern. And then we have people who move in, you know, because there's family here where they've heard, they've heard how safe and quiet Vermont is. And as a refugee, that's a big selling point, a huge selling point. What does it take for them to transition from refugee visa to resident? Is that do they have to have a sponsor and employer? Or how does that work? When a refugee comes to the U.S. on the State Department has selected them to come. So they're basically invited by the U.S. government. And they have refugee status. At the point when they've been here a year, they're expected to apply for their green card. That is part of the continuum. And so we have pro bono legal services in our office to assist people in that application process, which has gone from like a, I don't know, five page to 18 page application this year. So that's really important. And then at five years, they're eligible to become citizens. And so we also have citizenship classes that people can study and take the test and become citizens. It's, if someone has been here longer, sometimes it happens people are still thinking because they have an accent or maybe they dress differently that they're a refugee, but they're not. Any other questions? A few minutes ago, you mentioned nonviolent communication. Are you talking about the Rosenberg model? Yes. So one of the things that I do in the community partnership program is connect youth with different programs in the community, including summer camps. And so imagine you're going to a family, a refugee family that's been in a refugee camp for 20 years and you're telling them, I have this great opportunity for your kids to go to campus summer. And they're going to live out in the wild and there's no electricity. And sometimes it takes a little while so they understand what a great opportunity is. Sometimes they want to seize it because then they realize all the kids are going to really get some skills that they would need. So we, for many years, we were helping kids to go to this camp that's a play in the wild camp that's based on nonviolent communication. And it's also a multilingual camp and they honor every child's first language. So they feel that, and I'm sure you've all experienced this, when someone's speaking in the first language, you feel them, you see them. And then when they have to go to another language, it's like it's kind of dulled down a little bit in part because maybe they're having to think about the words but also it's the language itself and how the language works. So this camp has enabled kids to go and speak Swahili or, you know, and they actually have had camp counselors speaking these languages but if a kid speaks a language that isn't there, they still honor that in a lot of what their activities are because you can hear, feel, sense, what's someone saying, even if you don't know the words. And we've been able to have kids go to camp who've been here less than a month. You know, they arrive in the summer, what are you going to do in the summer? And it was so successful. You could see such a great transformation, great way to integrate into the US that we then decided to partner and do this program with teenagers. So if you want to be a mentor, we're looking for 21 or older, we're looking for men to be with boys and women to be with girls and you do get training in nonviolent communication. Any questions? Are the programs just in Burlington or are there like in Montpelier, is there anything? We are not resettling, and haven't resettled refugees in Montpelier for a long time. We have had some Cubans choose to live in Montpelier and the Cubans were called parolees. I love the language of the British people in the US, parolees, and that's really been it. And it's too far away to really create and your housing is too limited to really create a community here. So we have been working with an organization called CVRAN to try to see what kinds of connections we can create here. We're really hoping that people will choose to move from Chittenden County to the Montpelier area and build this, you know, like it's a secondary migration here. And hasn't happened yet, but it just takes one or two families and then people see how wonderful it is and it can go from there. And I think the key to that will really be this job upgrade we're talking about because there's certain kinds of jobs you have around here. The refugee resettlement program changed from what it was like in the 80s when it was done by churches or community groups and we sell a family or two here, a family or two there. People didn't stay, you know, they felt lonely, they wanted a peer group. So then at the federal level, the decision was made that's really create small communities within the whole community so that there can be some, people can put their roots down. I just had a question, so you mentioned that you haven't been resettling people here for a long time, but I know a number of families that are Bosnian refugees, but maybe they settled here a long time. They came in the 90s. Okay. I used to have a neighbor. I know she came, it was early 2000s though. Early 2000s, yeah, so that was when. Yeah, she was like 10 years old and I used to help her with her homework because her parents didn't speak English and even, you know, I think even now, they really just never learned. They were a little stubborn and I tutored her from like, like all through middle school and high school for many years and we're so close. She went to college, she got married now, we're still pretty close as it came to that. You know, I didn't realize that that ended because I do still see Bosnian, other Bosnian families in the area. Yeah, they stayed. Yeah. We resettled Bosnians in the very, primarily the berry area. We had a very small office for a short time. We found that most people ended up moving to Chittenden County and some people stayed. We also resettled Mishketean Turks in the Waterbury area, but once again, they didn't end up staying. You really want to help someone get a start and get sustainable. We've had, not in the last year, but years before that, many communities reaching out saying, we would like to have some refugee families coming to our area when we looked at housing. You have to have apartments. And you have to have public transportation for people to get started. And Vermont is pretty rural. And we're not large population centers. So we've been looking for other ways for people to be connected and engaged because the state of Vermont was resettling refugees, not Chittenden County. We did resettle three Syrian families in Rutland and they're doing really well. And they, I think they're gonna stay in Rutland. They're creating careers for themselves. And we had hoped that that would have been an ongoing program, but it couldn't be because what's happening with immigration and refugee resettlement at the federal level. Maybe someday it could happen again. We don't see one that, right now we don't see how that will happen until there's some changes. So I'm wondering if I can ask a question of Eleanor. Absolutely. I'm interested in who Jen Poff Books is, the publisher. Very interesting. It's an independent publisher that's based in Vermont. I'm not really sure what more to tell you. Do they specialize? No, no, no. I mean, they've published a little bit of poetry. They've published a little bit of fiction. But they haven't put that many books out, but they've been very supportive of Goddard College. They've published it on about two or three Goddard College faculty. And our faculty, in the program, we have to do keynotes and commencement addresses. And because we have two sites, we have a Vermont site and we have a Washington site, that means that we have about three, six, 12. We have about 12 keynotes a year and four commitments a year. And so we've collected them and made books. And the first year, I can't remember the name of the press. It was affiliated with Cal Arts, I think, put out our first edition. And then Jen Poff has just this month put out the second collection of MFA faculty keynotes and commencement speeches. So they're just a small Vermont press that's been supportive of the college, really, but has published also other people locally. You can find them online. Thank you. I'd like to remind everyone that tonight, 10% of the profits from the sale of Eleanor's book will be donated to the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. So that's a good way to help both our local author and the program, too. You know, I have one other question. Aside from money, is there anything else that people can donate that's helpful to resettlement to your actual program? So the basics, when people come, we have to set up their house. And remember, they've got $925, so we're not gonna go out and buy a mattress or a large pot or any of the things that you need just to welcome people home. So we do accept donations of things that are gently used and things that are new. And on our website, it lists what we accept. We also are looking for volunteers. We do have people who come from as far as Montpelier or further and will come up once a week and volunteer and be connected usually with a specific family or individual, and that's really the best when you get to know somebody. And it's, as a family friend or a mentor, even, it's not hierarchical with this. You know, it's really helping neighbor, even as a mentor. In that relationship, people find they learn so much about themselves. I am shocked at where I was nine years ago, eight years ago, yesterday in terms of who I am, what I thought, what I have to, where do I need to go as a human being? And it's not like you're gonna ask people to teach you. It's just like you're holding a mirror up to yourself and you're starting to notice entitlement, white privilege that is pretty shocking. And it feels good to be working on it. It feels really great. It can be tough work, but we as homeowners really need to do it. Some people think we are there. We are not there at all. And I would say, you know, no one on our staff, regardless of where they're from, think they're where they need to be. We can all learn how to be human beings. I'd like to offer you a sticker. So you could put this on your water bottle or a laptop or a car or a window. Everyone, everywhere equal value. We truly mean that because we all benefit from that. So, and then there's other information up here if you're interested, it takes some information. So we'd just like to invite you to support this wonderful independent book school to support for more refugees being resettled. And...