community resources
Stories
Citizenship Stories
Abel Chavez
Naturalization Client
Hi my name is Abel Chavez. Thanks to the citizenship project with St. James and the help of Jim Hodges, it was possible for me to become a United States citizen.
Two years ago I heard about the citizenship project via an announcement posted on my apartments. I decide to give them a call and make an appointment. There I met Jim Hodges who was interested in my case and was willing to help with the process. Jim mentioned that I could be eligible for a waiver on the application fee. After filling all the paper work I was able to receive the waiver. Seven months later I became a citizen of the United States.
Becoming a U.S.A citizen was the best thing that could ever happen to me. It opened many doors not only for me but also for my family. Jim was interested in helping me with my daughter’s citizenship. Once again, Jim walked me through the entire process, because my daughter is a minor, the process was smooth and fast. Thanks to Jim and the citizenship program, my daughter and I now have a better future in our country.
I am happy to know that my daughter has better opportunities in this country such as attending college and travel to many parts of the world. My daughter and myself would like to give a special thanks to Jim for all the help he provided us and his patience. Arlette and I could have never done it without his help. We are very proud to be United States citizens.
Chakho Muradov
Naturalization Client
Chakho Muradov, an 84-year-old housebound Meskhetian Turk, became a U.S. citizen in his living room, surrounded by his family, on April 4, 2012. Muradov would have been 16 years old the night Stalin’s soldiers gave him the choice of boarding a cattle car or getting shot to death. Along with 100,000 other Muslims, Muradov was deported from his home in Meskheti, at the Georgia-Turkey border, to Central Asia in November 1944. Even after Stalin’s death, when Kruschev lifted their migration restrictions, the Meskhetian Turks had nowhere to go. The Cold War had claimed their homeland, repatriation permits were not being issued. The Meskhetian Turks spent decades in the Soviet Union branded “enemies of the people.” Many of them were not allowed to get an education, own land or claim citizenship.
Until this spring, Chakho Muradov had been stateless for 68 years.
In 2006, Muradov and his family were part of the large Meskhetian Turk community resettled in South King County. Last August, Muradov’s daughter, Fakhria, contacted Tania Rzhondkovska, student liaison at the St. James ESL Program. Fakhria wanted to help her father become a U.S. citizen. But Muradov, suffering from dementia, arthritis and pulmonary heart disease, can no longer speak and only sometimes understands Turkish.
Tania and Jim Hodges, Citizenship Coordinator at St. James ESL came to the Muradov's home to help Fakhria and her father complete the citizenship application, including a fee waiver and disability waiver. Tania translated from English to Russian for Fakhria, who spoke to her father in Turkish. But Muradov’s condition was so delicate, his daughter wanted to know if her father could take the U.S. citizenship test at home. Jim and Tania weren't sure it was possible. They'd never had a client ask for in in-home exam. It was possible but required another lengthy application process. Finally, Muradov was granted an in-home exam.
On the day Chakho Muradov became a United States citizen, he was surrounded by his three daughters and one grandchild. Tania and Jim welcomed him to to his new American family.
ESL Student Stories
Lupita Zamora
ESL Student
Lupita Zamora started tutoring three years ago after an interpreter at Harborview Medical Center told her about the program. She knew that the one-to-one instruction was better for her than learning English in a class, “I think the personal learn is better for me. My problem is listening to people. People talk quickly and shorten words. My tutor will explain the difference; this is professional talking, this is casual talking. I have questions, my tutors says what questions you have.”
Lupita spends her time working and volunteering in the community: with domestic violence victims at Consejo Counseling Service, with parishioners at St. Mary’s, and with Spanish speakers about the city’s recycling program. When she first moved to Seattle, her lack of English made it difficult for her to volunteer. Being involved in the community meant participating in meetings and civic forums where everyone spoke English. She could only understand a few words and wasn’t sure how to ask questions.
Her tutoring lessons are often based on the volunteer workshops and community meetings she attends. “I prefer St. James ESL because it is more personal. More attention. I practice talking, reading and writing. For example, my tutor say, Lupita, take the blackboard and write a discussion on what you did yesterday. She supervises me, she review every homework.” Now, when Lupita attends volunteer meetings or community forums she understands what is being said. Now she raises her hand to ask questions.
Currently she is facilitating county-wide focus groups in Spanish with new Latino parents. Her goal is to moderate a forum on immigrant development in English, to lead the discussion and answer questions. For Lupita, learning to speak English means being able to connect with more people and become more involved in helping the community.■
Habiba Ali & Alexis Bloom
ESL Student & ESL Tutor
Shocked, Habiba’s mouth drops open as she raises a hand to her cheek, perplexed and
disgusted. I’ve just told her I sweeten my tea with honey. Oh, the horrors!
Apparently, she has never put honey in her tea and has no intention of doing so.
Later, when she points to ingredients she regularly combines, I make my own
horrified expression, half-serious, half-teasing as the other students laugh at
my overly-dramatic antics.
Most of our lessons are fun and light-hearted like this, though there are
certainly moments of frustration and confusion. None of these women, three
Somali refugees and one Ethiopian, have been educated formally. None are able to
read or write in their native language. With little more than one year of
teaching ESL, I am faced with the challenging task of teaching these amazing,
dedicated women how to speak, listen, read, and write in English.
I try to keep the class fun, engaging, and practical; I want their first formal education experience to be positive. The concept of an object or idea represented two-dimensionally on a page is foreign to some of them so I use materials that are real-life, tangible objects they can see, touch, hear, smell and sometimes taste.
To practice using “I like…” I brought in food items and lined them up neatly along the desk, from pasta to lemons to ginger. For lessons on money, I used kidney beans to teach quantity before bringing in a jar of coins. As they begin to understand and speak more English, I will introduce written letters, sounds, and words.
Someday, maybe Habiba will be able to describe Somali foods using a few simple sentences or tell about the time she learned that people in America do things differently, like sweeten their tea with honey. ■
Volunteer Stories
Meredith Smith
ESL Tutor, Literacy* Americorps Member
Meredith Smith tutors employees at Lighthouse for the Blind, a group she describes as a "unique and verdant mix". Teaching English to this group of blind, visually impaired, and sighted students can be challenging.
"Teaching vocabulary is quite difficult, but I have found that using tactile strategies leads to better results."
In a lesson on sequencing, Meredith taught target words like ‘first,’ ‘second,’ and ‘then.’ "To help them practice, I had them make trail mix, in a certain order, following directions and using one ingredient at a time. Using their hands helped them stay focused and interact with my targets." At the YWCA in Auburn, her students are older immigrants and refugees from Russia, the Ukraine, Somalia, Mexico and Korea. "...they have an incredible wealth of experience that they bring to each class," she says. To teach them how to give and receive directions she built a small obstacle course. Using their new vocabulary the students guided each other through the course. Later, she had them practice the vocabulary in their journals, where they had to write the directions from their house to the YWCA. "There is so much excitement with all of my students...The enthusiasm the students bring to class easily outweigh the challenges."
Jenna Serghini
ESL TutorLiteracy* Americorps Member
Jenna Serghini tutors two groups in South Seattle. One group, mostly Burmese, Somalian and Eritrean women, speak little or no English and cannot read or write in their own language. She describes the group dynamic as “very serious about learning English. They are easily frustrated until they realize they can do it.”
“There is a lot of repetition of basic things they really need to know. What is your name? Where are you from? My previous class was at a higher level, they could ask someone to rephrase a question, but these students don’t have those tools yet.”
A lot of writing exercises can overwhelm them, many have hardly held pencils, so she uses a different approach. “Your drawing skills have to be pretty good,” Jenna laughs.
In one lesson she asked her students to draw their favorite foods. She demonstrated how they could draw a chicken, a goat, a sheep. Then she tried to explain the difference between cow and beef and why you wouldn’t say, “I like to eat cow.” “The reward is the grateful feeling you get from students just for caring about them…trying to teach them something they need.”