ACC Project Reflection

ACC Project Reflection

            Overall, I found the ACC end project to be a great wrap up to our class. Not only has doing my section of the project opened my eyes to a specific group of refugees, the Bhutanese, seeing the other groups that other students covered really helped broaden my view of exactly what and who refugees are. Throughout this entire course I have searched for stories and examples that define refugees as individuals, not just a group, and I think that this final project of “Working with Refugees” has really helped find these themes. Although each of the groups in class described an entire culture of people: Bhutanese, Iraqi, Burmese, etc., this separation alone showed the vast differences between each culture, including the background of their history, smaller cultural details, and the major reasons why their population has become refugees. This last fact, the major reasons why they have become refugees, is one of the most important parts of defining these people as individuals. With my focus group, the Bhutanese, I found that they were actually only Bhutanese of Nepali descent, who have been persecuted for their differing religious beliefs from the majority of the Bhutanese. While the persecution of people for their religious beliefs is a very common factor in that of refugees fleeing their country, with 1 out of 6 citizens of Bhutan being refugees, their story is completely different than any of the other countries, and vice versa. Along with finding the individual connections between each country and their people, I also found that each of the other sections really helped bring together all that we have learned about, like the title describes, working with refugees. While looking at the sections on each country, the description of refugees makes them seem extremely foreign, almost alien to those of us reading it here in the United States. However, when the project dives into the refugees and their place here in the US, it really gives them a personality, and again, individuality. In the tips for employers section, we explain how working with a refugee is really no different than working with any other employee, and the line from Chef Duffy that really drives the entire quarter home for me, “People are people, it’s pretty simple.”