New Haven Independent

Ndikunkiko was one of about 150 volunteers, refugees, and staffers from IRIS — Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services — who celebrated the agency’s 25th anniversary Wednesday night at the Lawn Club. Click here and here for past stories about the group, which has been at the cutting edge of helping newcomers to the area and is now broadening and refocusing its mission. IRIS is now in the process of launching a legal clinic for refugees and immigrants.

She said congregants from Dixwell Congregational Church in New Haven and Mt. Carmel Church in Hamden are her lifeline. “They help you in different ways; you meet a lot of different people who get involved with your life.” She said when she arrived the only English words she knew were, “Hi, thank you, and goodbye.” Click here to hear her explanation of how her family got settled in.

In the past quarter century, Ndikunkiko and her family are three of the 4,000 refugees the agency has resettled in Connecticut.

Donna Golden and Annie Cohen (pictured left to right) are friends from Guilford who began volunteering with IRIS three years ago. They said they help with the everyday needs of newly arrived refugees - teaching English, furnishing apartments, taking new arrivals shopping and showing them the bus routes. Golden said her favorite thing was organizing a birthday party for the seven-year-old son of a mother and father - one from Sierra Leone, the other from Liberia - who had never had a birthday celebration. They’re still in touch with that family.

Golden added, “IRIS really focuses on the first six months - a rapid enculturation and getting them settled in education and jobs and housing. But what I’ve learned as I’ve been here longer is that they really struggle for a long time, and sometimes it’s hard to know how to continue helping them with their needs.”

Sergio Pallottelli and Franziska Huhn provided the beautiful music accompanying the reception. (Click here for a sample.) It was followed by dinner and a talk by Harold Koh, dean of the Yale Law School and an immigrant himself. His family came to New Haven from South Korea when he was a young child.

Koh was invited to speak because the theme of the evening — in addition to the anniversary — was to formally launch IRIS’s newest project, which began a few months back: a legal services program. Executive Director Chris George (pictured on the left, with Robert Fawber and the Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut, Laura Ahrens) said, “We have a great cooperative relationship with the Yale Law School, also with New Haven Legal Assistance, and volunteers from all over the state are volunteering to help represent asylum seekers and immigrants who are facing deportation.” IRIS incorporated help to non-refugee immigrants when it changed its name from Interfaith Refugeee Ministry in 2006.

Some immigrant and refugee services like to stay under the radar, but George, since taking over the agency three years ago, takes the opposite tack. “Raise the profile! Get the word out!” he said. “Increase public support for refugee settlement. It’s all a means to an end - improve our services, treat refugees the way they should be [treated], welcomed to this country and given a really good start.”