Tutors aim to make sure Aurora refugees’ needs stay on radar

AURORA | It’s an unseasonably warm September afternoon and Tsige Tewelde is sorting through stacks of change like a just-hired toll booth operator.

Wearily, but warmly, she eyes the diffident pile of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies laid out before her and unleashes nervous chuckles at the directives being steered her way.

“Okay, show me a nickel, can you show me a nickel?” asks Sharon McCreary, volunteer coordinator for the Emily Griffith Technical College, in a slow, measured voice.

“Um, no,” Tewelde responds sheepishly.

McCreary calmly nods before responding: “It’s okay, nobody knows nickel.”

Tewelde then correctly and quickly scoops up 42 cents in change at McCreary’s request.

For the next 10 minutes, it’s a similar series of hits and misses, smiles and furrows inside Tewelde’s third-story apartment across from the Anschutz Medical Campus on Quari Street. She tells the time according to a few pictures of clocks; writes her name and address; identifies who are the boys and who are the girls in an elementary drawing. All the while, McCreary makes subtle asides to Carolyn Mendez, Tewelde’s soon-to-be personal English instructor, regarding the linguistic skills at play.

“Ok, so no present continuous at all, but she’s in a really good spot to launch into that,” McCreary says. Mendez nods and jots down a quick note.

McCreary knows those grammatical launchpads well — she’s been performing these brief literary assessments for people just like Tewelde for nearly two decades. McCreary spearheads the Colorado Refugee English as a Second Language Program, which aims to bolster the English skills of recently relocated refugees both in their homes and at the Emily Griffith facility in Downtown Denver.

“When I started this 20 years ago, people would say, ‘there are refugees in Colorado?’” she says. “They tend to be under the radar.”

About 2,000 refugees moved to Colorado last year alone, the majority of whom arrived from Iraq, according to data tabulated by the state’s Department of Human Services. More than 500 Iraqi refugees and asylees moved to Colorado in 2014, with Burma being the second highest source of refugees with 445 people moving to the state over the same time period.

But not much has changed in the metro-area attitude toward refugees since McCreary started the tutoring program in the early 1990s. Even given the recent stories, images and videos of migrants and refugees inundating headlines worldwide, McCreary says she is constantly under pressure to find adequate volunteers to make the schlep to tutor in Aurora, where the vast majority of metro-area refugees reside.

“I call Aurora the black hole of volunteerism,” she says. “The majority of the refugees who participate in the in-home tutoring program live in Aurora, however, the overwhelming majority of the volunteer tutors who help them do not live in Aurora. Most live in Denver, Lakewood, and Centennial and … I’ve never been able to identify the reason why so few Aurora residents volunteer with us, yet our programs are popular in surrounding towns.”

About 2,000 refugees moved to Colorado last year alone, the majority of whom arrived from Iraq, according to data tabulated by the state’s Department of Human Services. More than 500 Iraqi refugees and asylees moved to Colorado in 2014, with Burma being the second highest source of refugees with 445 people moving to the state over the same time period.

McCreary points to the example of Tewelde, who came to Aurora from Asmara, Eritrea, last year, and Mendez, who lives in Centennial, as the archetype for the typical academic pairing and one that speaks to the lackadaisical stance of some city residents. She says that the program’s wait list is typically 15 to 20 people deep, and those looking for tutors often wait seven to eight months before being placed. There are about 100 tutors working with refugees at any given time, about 90 of whom are teaching in homes in Aurora, according to McCreary.

The fall is the program’s busiest time of year, McCreary says, due to the state receiving an influx of refugees between August and November. The tutoring program requires a commitment of two hours per week for four months, though most instructors stick with their students for about a year.

“But I have some other people who just become friends with the family, and to us that’s a great outcome because that’s real integration and that’s our overarching goal — for the refugees to become a part of the community and to make friends.”

Mendez, who is in the process of applying to school to study counseling, said that she’s eager to ameliorate as many of the difficulties associated with moving from Eritrea to the United States as she can.

“(Learning better English) can actually drastically change (Tewelde’s) life, so I can commit the two hours a week so she can talk to her daughter’s teacher,” she says. “I wish there were more things like this.”

For more information, visit www.refugee-esl.org.