Firstly, the refugees themselves must network for survival. They are outsiders in their new communities and often unable to utilize civil society structures in the same manner as permanent residents. Whereas a South African living in Guguletu might pick up a newspaper to search for local job listings, refugees cannot follow this same work pathway. These jobs are listed as part of the formal economy. They require set standards of South African education background, work experience, and social networking. Many residential landlords require proof of a South African bank account in order to take in a new tenant or at least personal references willing to vouch for the potential dweller. Refugees simply do not have access to these professional, personal, and educational backgrounds the way that South Africans might.
To succeed as a refugee, then, one must make use of the social networks already in place. Congolese refugees must make friends with other Congolese refugees. Zimbabweans must talk with other Zimbabweans. Somalis, perhaps more than other refugee communities, remain within the Somali community to sustain their livelihoods. This concept is not much different from that of 19th – early 20th century America: Little Italy, Chinatown, Poletown, and Greektown develop as survival mechanisms. Newcomers must cling to one another in order to acquire the possibility of social networking that most domestic residents take for granted. A setup of three Angolan families sharing a household makes rent much more affordable than that of one struggling alone. The vernacular echoes of Lingala take off the frightening edge of a newly unfamiliar linguistic soundscape. Rumours of work opportunities can filter through the refugee grapevine when a “brother” or a “sister” stumbles across financial prospectives.
Alas the suggestive encouragements I am beginning to send to CTRC patrons. Only as time moves on does the networking system shift. Years of living in South Africa equates to increased familiarity with the socio-scape, a better working understanding of English, necessary experience with the medical facilities, and where children are involved, mass exposure via the public school system. Such gradual life shifts allow refugees to move deeper into mainstream South African society for networking, opportunities, and daily life. The United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) deems a refugee/asylum seeker successfully re-integrated into the asylum state once he/she is “making full and complete usage of domestic civil society institutions.” That means schools, hospitals, clinics, churches, mosques, post offices, and banks (to name but a few). Such is the final goal of the Cape Town Refugee Centre, local informal networking the primary means to this end.
On an operational level, networking is also an essential component of the Cape Town Refugee Centre’s daily work. There is an extremely limited amount of assistance that a dedicated staff of 12-15 individuals can provide for a 150,000 + member refugee community. We must resultantly make usage of additional NGOs, government services, and institutions in order to direct refugees in the appropriate direction. This was perhaps one of the most difficult skills I have acquired over the past month. As individuals, refugees require an innumerable array of general human services: medical attention, government statutory concerns, legal aid, homeless shelters, work agencies, orphanages, trauma counseling, children’s court, primary education, tertiary education, skills training, psychiatrics. The trained social worker on staff has been working within the Western Cape community for 17+ years and can refer clients to individual facilities based on personal know-how, but for a foreign student intern this task has been quite daunting. It has required a lot of running to ask for appropriate contact information, questioning references, and re-assuring the client with third-party supervision. Without networking, moreover, the Cape Town Refugee Centre would cease to properly function. If a client were to walk in seeking work help, we’d have no choice but to politely escort them out and wish them good luck.
An important part of said networking is site visits. A representative of the Scalibrini Centre visited the CTRC one day last week to share information about that NGO, the other pre-eminent one in the area working with refugees. As we have been cross-referring clients to one another for some time, the aim of this meeting was to clarify the scope of our programs and ensure that we are not sending people in vain. There is already a substantial amount of bureaucracy that individuals must penetrate in order to receive assistance so minimizing these difficulties is much appreciated. Scalibrini assists refugees with English-language classes and job-seeking. Their employment help desk program was in fact one of my initial internship offers. There, refugees receive help formatting CVs, learn about job avenues and skills training available in the Western Cape, then personally set out to find their own work possibilities. The representative who visited the CTRC stressed these particular programmatic contours and urged us to cease from writing specified referral letters as this causes conflict with those who arrived earlier and have already been waiting for assistance. Although fairly superficial in nature, this meeting made me realize how various non-profit organizations must work together to best serve the community. Each has finite resources, but provided that these organisations communicate with one another what these resources are, as well as the validated avenues of contact between them; then the larger pool can be efficiently allocated to the community in need.
No comments:
Post a Comment