MONTAGNARD REFUGEES COMING TO THE US (= NORTH CAROLINA) HAVE HAD VASTLY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES BEFORE AND UPON ARRIVAL. RECENT ADULT ARRIVALS OFTEN HAVE FEW SKILLS OR THE ABILITY TO ACCESS SUPPORT SERVICES.
1986: Widely traveled, multicultural, multilingual, literate Guerilla fighters, remnants of organized military forces, received extensive training and education in the Phillipines before arriving in Greensboro. They were assigned local American sponsors who helped them acculturate.
1992: Multicultural, multilingual, preliterate The 1992 group included many non-combatants who lived under harsh survival conditions but in the process were exposed to other tribes, languages, and cultures. In this example a Koho woman was forced to leave her village at aged eleven, spent years surviving in the jungle, gave birth to two children and eventually resettled in Greensboro. Although she never went to school or learned to read or write she learned many languages and since resettlement has always been able to find employment.
2008: Monolingual, preliterate By comparison recent arrivals often have no preparation and receive almost no support upon arrival except what extended family and community can offer. As Raleigh Bailey has described in his US State Department report, “The adjustment process has been more difficult for the 2002 (and afterward) arrivals. This group had relatively little overseas cultural orientation to prepare them for life in the United States, and they bring with them a great deal of confusion and fear of persecution.” Having never traveled far from their villages, they have less experience interacting with other Montagnard tribes or urban Vietnamese and so are less ready to adapt to a new environment. Low education and poverty further limit their abilities. They discover a struggling Piedmont economy with few job opportunities and reduced health and social services, which increase social isolation and decrease their means to break it by learning English through organized programs and classes.
In the 2008 example, a Jarai mother left her tiny farming village with her children and came to Greensboro to reunite with her husband. The family lives among Jarai Pleiku speakers, extended family and community members, and attends a Jarai Pleiku church. The father found work as a roofer with Jarai workmates and later with Jarai speakers on shift crews. The family shops at Montagnard stores and at Walmart which doesn’t require special language or cultural skills. Montagnard Dega Association, an ethnic self-help organization, suffered repeated staff and program cuts resulting in the elimination of ESOL classes the mother once attended. In cultural and linguistic terms, the family lives inside a Jarai community similar in size to the village it left behind. Or said another way, recent arrivals draw upon an even slimmer base of cultural skills and experience than previous waves, and lead lives that are extremely stressed because their model of living is inherently unstable (or to use current parlance, “unsustainable”).
Other examples abound. Many of the cases cited from our work with Dr Siu and community health workers involve Jarai new arrivals suffering from acute health problems, depression, etc. These remain invisible even to Americans health officials because preventive care solutions require communication, cooperation and ultimately agreement between medical providers and the Montagnard community, relations that have not been achieved by any local or State agency.
Limited horizons What are the geographical spaces available to Jarai refugees? As demonstrated in the 1986, 1992 and 2008 examples, they and the experiences associated with them have progressively narrowed. Perhaps even more important are the effects diminished physical space have on imaginative space or how individuals, families, tribes and communities think about the future, accepting or rejecting new ways of doing things, new models of living and sustaining themselves. Today, most continue to come from small farms and have rarely traveled, rarely traveled to urban centers and occasionally interacted with the dominant Vietnamese culture (selling cash crops, medical emergencies, law enforcement). Greensboro life almost parallels the physical dimensions of village life in Vietnam: limited travel to unfamiliar places, even nearby neighborhoods or Greensboro’s urban center, limited interaction with the dominant American culture (employment, medical emergencies, law enforcement).
American evacuation Since outreach to the Montagnard or Jarai communities (to most local Americans they are one and the same) has never been good, the Great Recession has meant the further retreat of Federal, State and local government services and the help of nonprofits and community-based organizations that used to bridge the huge gaps in new arrivals’ understanding of American health, education, housing and law. In the absence of American authority and its partner, American responsibility, refugees carry on traditions, beliefs and ideas drawn from their culture, life experiences and the community around them. This is not a matter of absolute choice — some outstanding individuals break this model (including the young, who become Americanized ) — but it is the overwhelming choice and “natural” (ie, conditioned or cultural) pattern most follow. Well-intentioned organizations like Piedmont Together
have sought participation by refugees like the Montagnards, asking them to imagine
alternative development plans for the 12-county region using aspirational, civic-minded language that stretches the conceptual and expressive boundaries of Jarai while evoking powers, relationships and spaces that are not in their experience. Gestures of welcome (“bringing people to the table”) tend to ring hollow in a bleak landscape emptied of services.
Into the vacuum of responsibility Ironically, the US, North Carolina and local officials are helping create a “Pays Montagnard du Sud des Etats-Unis”, a special living space for Montagnards in which they enjoy no autonomy or political power, where they struggle under laws and customs they barely understand and scratch out a living — not from intensive farming as they did in the Central Highlands, but permanent low wage, low skill jobs. This new Montagnard Country of the Southern US has over 12,000 Montagnard refugees of whom about 4,000 are probably Jarai. It stretches from Charlotte to New Bern. It is an invisible country to most North Carolinians, yet the people who occupy it are real. Ask officials if this country exists or has special policies in effect that deal with its inhabitants and they will say No — exactly what their Vietnamese counterparts would say.
1992: Multicultural, multilingual, preliterate The 1992 group included many non-combatants who lived under harsh survival conditions but in the process were exposed to other tribes, languages, and cultures. In this example a Koho woman was forced to leave her village at aged eleven, spent years surviving in the jungle, gave birth to two children and eventually resettled in Greensboro. Although she never went to school or learned to read or write she learned many languages and since resettlement has always been able to find employment.
2008: Monolingual, preliterate By comparison recent arrivals often have no preparation and receive almost no support upon arrival except what extended family and community can offer. As Raleigh Bailey has described in his US State Department report, “The adjustment process has been more difficult for the 2002 (and afterward) arrivals. This group had relatively little overseas cultural orientation to prepare them for life in the United States, and they bring with them a great deal of confusion and fear of persecution.” Having never traveled far from their villages, they have less experience interacting with other Montagnard tribes or urban Vietnamese and so are less ready to adapt to a new environment. Low education and poverty further limit their abilities. They discover a struggling Piedmont economy with few job opportunities and reduced health and social services, which increase social isolation and decrease their means to break it by learning English through organized programs and classes.
In the 2008 example, a Jarai mother left her tiny farming village with her children and came to Greensboro to reunite with her husband. The family lives among Jarai Pleiku speakers, extended family and community members, and attends a Jarai Pleiku church. The father found work as a roofer with Jarai workmates and later with Jarai speakers on shift crews. The family shops at Montagnard stores and at Walmart which doesn’t require special language or cultural skills. Montagnard Dega Association, an ethnic self-help organization, suffered repeated staff and program cuts resulting in the elimination of ESOL classes the mother once attended. In cultural and linguistic terms, the family lives inside a Jarai community similar in size to the village it left behind. Or said another way, recent arrivals draw upon an even slimmer base of cultural skills and experience than previous waves, and lead lives that are extremely stressed because their model of living is inherently unstable (or to use current parlance, “unsustainable”).
Other examples abound. Many of the cases cited from our work with Dr Siu and community health workers involve Jarai new arrivals suffering from acute health problems, depression, etc. These remain invisible even to Americans health officials because preventive care solutions require communication, cooperation and ultimately agreement between medical providers and the Montagnard community, relations that have not been achieved by any local or State agency.
Limited horizons What are the geographical spaces available to Jarai refugees? As demonstrated in the 1986, 1992 and 2008 examples, they and the experiences associated with them have progressively narrowed. Perhaps even more important are the effects diminished physical space have on imaginative space or how individuals, families, tribes and communities think about the future, accepting or rejecting new ways of doing things, new models of living and sustaining themselves. Today, most continue to come from small farms and have rarely traveled, rarely traveled to urban centers and occasionally interacted with the dominant Vietnamese culture (selling cash crops, medical emergencies, law enforcement). Greensboro life almost parallels the physical dimensions of village life in Vietnam: limited travel to unfamiliar places, even nearby neighborhoods or Greensboro’s urban center, limited interaction with the dominant American culture (employment, medical emergencies, law enforcement).
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| Going, going... gone |
Into the vacuum of responsibility Ironically, the US, North Carolina and local officials are helping create a “Pays Montagnard du Sud des Etats-Unis”, a special living space for Montagnards in which they enjoy no autonomy or political power, where they struggle under laws and customs they barely understand and scratch out a living — not from intensive farming as they did in the Central Highlands, but permanent low wage, low skill jobs. This new Montagnard Country of the Southern US has over 12,000 Montagnard refugees of whom about 4,000 are probably Jarai. It stretches from Charlotte to New Bern. It is an invisible country to most North Carolinians, yet the people who occupy it are real. Ask officials if this country exists or has special policies in effect that deal with its inhabitants and they will say No — exactly what their Vietnamese counterparts would say.
