BY CARA PESEK
J Alumni News staff
Al-Baaj, 35, and her family are living proof that Iraqis can successfully adapt to the U.S. / Photo courtesy Nebraska Mosaic–Gabriel Medina
Since the 1980s, thousands of refugees have rebuilt their lives in Lincoln. They’ve come from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Bosnia, China, Sudan and dozens of other countries, placed by resettlement agencies, or relocating in Lincoln from elsewhere in the United States after receiving good reports from family or friends.
But Lincoln’s refugee communities aren’t immediately visible — at least they weren’t to Jacyln Tan, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln student working on her master’s degree in journalism.
And over the course of the fall 2011 semester, she’s learned why.
“They’re not in the grocery stories or downtown,” said Tan. “They’re in their own communities.”
During the fall, Tan and six other UNL journalism students are working to make those communities more visible. Their medium is an online community called “Nebraska Mosaic,” which strives to be a resource for both non-refugees and refugees in Lincoln, said Tim Anderson, UNL associate professor of journalism. The site went live on Nov. 3, the same day as a celebration of the project at the Ross Film Theater.
The site currently features stories and videos by Tan and others about refugees’ lives in Lincoln. Among the first stories posted to the website were a profile of an Iraqi refugee who was helping to build his own family’s Habitat for Humanity house and a story about the recent influx of the Karen refugees — an ethnic minority who live mostly on the border of Thailand and Burma — into the Lincoln public school system.
The project began unofficially more than a year ago when Anderson and journalism professor Jerry Renaud taught a multimedia class together and required their students to write half of their stories about immigrants.
“What we discovered was that these were very rich and robust stories,” Anderson said.
That class piqued both Anderson’s and his students’ interest in Lincoln’s many refugee communities. It also spurred him to apply for a grant from J Lab, which aimed to fund journalism efforts based in communities that had either lost their voice or never had one, Anderson said.
The College of Journalism and Mass Communications received the grant, and, in fall 2010, Anderson and advertising professor Phil Willet offered a class, evenly divided between journalism and advertising students, that researched the refugee communities in Lincoln. The class’s goal: Find out what kind of news and information the refugees wanted.
Martha Riek of the South Sudan is learning English / Photo courtesy Nebraska Mosaic–Becky Gailey
With additional funding from a Knight Community Information Challenge grant, matched by the Lincoln Community Foundation, Anderson has been teaching the journalism class not only on campus but also at a Community Learning Center in Lincoln. At the Community Learning Center refugees join the college students to become involved in telling their own stories.
The semester was a learning experience, Anderson said. He and many of the students initially envisioned writing dramatic, emotional stories about refugees’ lives before relocation. But the research last fall indicated that Lincoln’s refugee communities, particularly those of Iraqi, Sudanese and Karen people, weren’t particularly interesting to the refugees: Nearly all of them had had painful and dangerous experiences before moving to Lincoln.
“What they were more interested is what is life like here,” Anderson said.
So the students focused on stories like the Habitat for Humanity house, about a local Baptist church that has seen its congregation swell with Karen refugees, and about the Family Literacy Program, which recently lost its funding.
Charlie Litton, Anderson’s graduate assistant, said it was also important for non-refugees to be more aware of their new neighbors.
“They’re not really welcome in their own countries, and they don’t quite fit in this one,” he said.
For his master’s project, Litton is working on an interactive map for the Mosaic website, which will include bus routes, listings of free and inexpensive community events and activities and other services that refugees might find useful.
In time, Anderson said, he hopes that refugees will want to contribute their own stories to the website.
Haider Al Haider, an Iraqi refugee who came to Lincoln with his wife and five children in fall 2010, attended the Nov. 3 launch event.
He first became acquainted with Nebraska Mosaic when Litton wrote the story about the Family Literacy Program, which had helped Al Haider’s own family, losing its funding.
It’s important for people outside the refugee community to be aware of circumstances like that, he said.
But he said it was also important for his family to be part of the Nov. 3 event, where he was joined by refugees from other countries, by UNL students and faculty and by others who live and work in Lincoln.
“I think it is necessary,” he said.
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