‘Real Life’ helping refugees adjust

Ah, the American supermarket, with its 8-foot-tall shrine of soft drinks, its bubble gum as big as ping pong balls, its lucky charmed necklaces (collect all 10!). And that’s just in the foyer, before you even enter the store.
A smart shopper knows what to buy and what to walk right by, which is why Jamal Omer, 14, and Mohammed Ali, 13, were at a Smith’s Food and Drug in Salt Lake Tuesday last week, armed with clipboards.
Jamal, from Yemen, and Mohammed, from Somalia, are part of “Real Life SLC,” a course in “urban living” for refugee teens, run by high school and college-age volunteers from YouthLINC.
The twice-weekly classes, coordinated by Ellie Nazzal, include hygiene, career goals, language skills and financial literacy, including how to be a savvy shopper. On Tuesday, 13 refugee teens from nearby South Parc apartments, learned how to comparison shop as they searched for the most expensive and least expensive aerosol cleansers, eggs, breakfast cereals and pasta sauce.
In the process, the students learned some math, some English and some shopping secrets: “They (grocers) put the most expensive items at eye level and the cheaper ones on the bottom shelf,” YouthLINC’s Smith Monson told Jamal and Mohammed, who were soon kneeling in the aisle, looking for bargains.
Real Life SLC is sponsored by a grant from GE Money Bank and is teamed up with the Hser Ner Moo Community Center at South Parc, named for the 7-year-old Burmese refugee murdered in 2008.
Wahe Dar, 14, and Wawa Win, 13, are also Burmese refugees, by way of a refugee camp in Thailand. They giggled their way down the Smith’s aisles as they shopped with Hillcrest High junior Danielle Shkapich.
Wahe explained what it was like to live in a refugee camp: “The policeman is like ‘where you going?’ ” she said, raising her hands up like a gun and jumping in the air. Then she and Wawa giggled and went off in search of some economical donuts.
YouthLINC, now in its 11th year, is aimed at creating “life-long humanitarians,” explains executive director Judy Zone. Its high school and college students volunteer in the community between 60 and 100 hours a year, and in return receive sponsorships that cover half the cost for them to participate in a two-week humanitarian project in Mexico, Peru, Kenya or Thailand.
———–
Source:- deseretnews

Comments

comments