Online Archives

BY LINDA WORTHINGTON
UMCONNECTION STAFF

Little did she know what was coming when Betty Willson said yes to a new calling in her life. Last summer, Darlyn McCrae, the conference refugee coordinator, asked her to find housing for a group of Turkish refugees.

We were essentially told that 'the refugees are coming, what are you going to do about it,' Willson said.

By the time Willson, a member at John Wesley UMC, put a notice in the local papers and an ecumenical committee was formed, the first groups of Meskhetian Turks had arrived. It was late June.

By mid-November, volunteers had met airplanes, found housing, navigated through tons of paperwork to obtain social services, enrolled children in school and started English classes for 86 people, from babies to grandparents, with more families expected.

The refugees, who speak Russian and Turkish, are from a tightly knit culture where families are closely bound together. They have managed well in spite of poverty, discrimination and injustices, said Susan Werson, executive secretary for Refugee and Immigration Ministries with United Methodist Committee on Relief in New York. Their resettlement in this country is a joint program between the UMCOR and Church World Service.

Being refugees is nothing new to this ethnic minority, who Joseph Stalin forcibly drove from the Soviet Union in 1944. In 1989, they were subjected to a pogrom in the Ferghana Valley of what is now Uzbekistan. Even that wasn?t new. The Meskhetians first fled Turkey generations ago and had lived in Soviet Georgia.

The Soviet relocation was so rapid that many left without proper identification, unable to sell their property or prepare for their departure. Some 10,000 to 15,000 Turks settled in an ethnic community in Krasnador, Russia, east of the Black Sea.

There, they lived in difficult circumstances, often subjected to discriminatory and abusive treatment by local authorities.

The U.S. State Department realized they?d never be fully recognized there, and that, in fact, they were a people without a country. The State Department asked the Virginia Council of Churches, which manages the CWS refugee resettlement in this conference area, to find homes for them. Thus they were sent to Washington County, Maryland, where there were already Russian-speaking people and to Hagerstown where there is a mosque, for nearly all Meskhetians are Muslims.

The first family came to the New Windsor processing center in June. Of the 86 living in Hagerstown the end of November, 33 are school age (counting three in Head Start) and 28 are in school, Willson said.

Generally when refugees come for resettlement, a family is 'adopted' by a church or several churches together. But in the case of the Meskhetian Turks, the committee organized differently. Rather than matching a family to a cooperating church, Dr. Siddiqui, the chairman, organized the committee along task lines, with individuals responsible for one area or another. Willson is in charge of transportation. She in turn reaches out to her church for volunteers to help as drivers.

Another volunteer, George Miller, is in charge of literacy. His job means getting everyone enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESOL) classes as soon as possible. The refugees, who came in July and are eager learners, have already passed the earliest English classes and are enrolled in advanced classes at the local community college. Part of Willson?s service is seeing that they get to classes since most do not have driver?s licenses (one of their goals) nor cars.

A grant from the Baltimore-Washington Conference has helped maintain the 1993 seven-passenger Voyager Willson uses to take five or six passengers to classes, social services, jobs or medical appointments. She has a list of 12 drivers, and some days they make three or four trips.

On this day, she picked up two men and a woman who were shopping at the nearby Thrift Shop. 'They spend a lot of time here,' Willson said. As they made modest purchases, their conversation flipped between Turkish and English. The two men talked of their jobs and, typical of the culture, the woman spoke only a little after the men finished.

Bakir, who has learned English since his arrival, was about to begin the 4 p.m.-to- midnight shift at the ice cream factory, where other refugees also worked. Islam, the older man, had already been working for three weeks at Teleflex Marine where they make cables for cars and boats. Zahuya, Bakir?s wife, stays home with their 7-month-old baby. She makes bread every three days, she said.

After taking them to their apartment, Willson drove to Hagerstown Community College, where five members of the same extended family were in English class together. They included husband and wife, Bakhran and Leyla, a nurse; their son Bakadir, 17; Sakhrob, Bakran?s brother; and Svetlana, a single mother with two daughters and Leyla?s sister. They arrived in the United States together four months ago.

All of this family are educated and were learning English rapidly, according to their teacher, Kris Carr, who attends Harmony UMC in Falling Waters, W. Va.

Bakadir, (with a Russian high school diploma) will be able to go to community college when he finishes, she said. The class lasts for 10 weeks, meets four times a week, for three hours a day (mornings).

Willson returned to transport the students home or to the Jobs Center at the Department of Social Services, across the street from John Wesley UMC. There she met Serhiy Dutchak, a case worker for the Virginia Council of Churches, once a refugee from Ukraine.

He would translate for those who needed it, assist them in applying for jobs, and hold a class dealing with problems and questions. The refugees must take classes eight hours a week until they get work, he said.

'Case work,' Dutchak explained, 'is one crisis after another.'

Gulmira needed help with a 'redetermination' procedure, something that happens every couple months to evaluate the status of a refugee, to see if she?d filled out forms properly, and had the documentation needed, before she would be interviewed. While she did that, Bakran and Sakhrob discussed a check one of them needed to write. 'They all have checking accounts, with at least a few hundred dollars,' Dutchak said.

Dutchak?s day had been full of difficulties from missing paychecks to missing phone calls. He is a mediator for what seem like large problems to the refugee, but are often easily solved. 'Yesterday,' he said, 'the ?boss? talked with two families ? these wanted to know why he didn?t talk to others.'

He is quick to recognize that his life and the lives of the refugees are made infinitely easier by the faithful volunteers, such as Betty Willson, who keep the systems and situations running as smoothly as possible.

'Without Betty?s help,' he said, 'we?d fall apart and I?d have to go back to the Ukraine.'