Six years ago Colleen noticed an advertisement posted in the Cathedral’s weekly bulletin. “Help immigrants achieve Citizenship” She had never taught ESL before and was looking for a new place volunteer.
 

While she waited to be matched with a student, she imagined she might be paired with a Spanish-speaking immigrant, she knew a little bit of Spanish and thought that might be helpful. Instead, she found herself paired with Isa Cosim, a Cham man who had recently moved to Seattle by way of California where he had twice failed the Citizenship exam.

“He had a gravelly voice” she remembers, “He was always smiling.”

She recalls that when she first began tutoring, she’d teased him, telling him that when he passed the exam he would have to become a tutor as well.
Two years later, having successfully completed the exam he came to Colleen and said, “I have a student”. Startled, she imagined he meant that he had indeed become a tutor, and had already secured himself his first student. But no, he meant that he’d told others in the Cham community about how Colleen had helped him become a Citizen.
 

“And he did not have one student,” Says Colleen, “he had four.”
 

“There was a waiting list for Colleen,” says Jim Hodges. Since 2003, Colleen has been matched with seven citizenship students and all have become naturalized citizens.
 

“It has absolutely changed my life,” Colleen says as she walks home from a tutoring session. By choice, she is car-less, taking advantage of the Metro Flexcar program when she needs to keep appointments, buy heavy groceries or just go for a long drive.
 

A year into tutoring for the Citizenship Project, she left Microsoft, where she had been working as a taxonomist, designing the start-help button function on the windows desktop. “It had become unimportant me,” she said. Within two years, she had started her own company, providing research and indexing services to publishers, scholars, non-profit organizations and others who need help organizing information for texts, websites and programs.
 

Colleen has joined each of her students at the Immigration office for their exam. She sits with them while they wait to be called, and when they are, follows them into their exams as if every prospective US citizen is accompanied to their test by an elegant dark-haired technical writer.
Though she has received stern, frustration-born comments from a few examiners when they feel she is being too helpful or expressive, she says that “…most of the examiners have been very kind, you can tell they want our students to pass the test.” ▪