Back to most recent IRP news • Browse archive: 2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008
For Vicky Knight, safety plus opportunity equals success in refugee resettlement
Vicky Knight
Photo: Carol Fouke-Mpoyo
|
What constitutes "success" in refugee resettlement? For Vicky Knight, a member of the Accra, Ghana-based team that sends between 4,000 and 8,000 refugees to the United States each year, "success" is as basic as finding a life of safety and opportunity.
Knight is Operations Coordinator for the U.S. Refugee Program's Overseas Processing Entity in Accra, administered by CWS.
"The Western idea of success is quite high," she observed following her June visit to the Virginia Council of Churches Refugee Resettlement Program, during which she met five Liberian families whose cases were processed by her staff in Accra in 2004.
Four of the families are now self-sufficient, but members of a church group shared with Knight their discouragement that the Liberian woman they were co-sponsoring was still struggling to find work. "I contended that they had achieved more than they thought," Knight said. "The woman and her children came here by way of Ivory Coast, their country of first asylum and host to many refugees, a country now torn in half by a civil conflict that began in November 2002. Liberians get blamed for the conflict, are forcibly recruited into fighting forces, and get caught in the line of fire, and a number have disappeared.
"But here in the United States, they are no longer living in fear," she said. "They have electricity and clean water. The children are in school and have an amazing future they wouldn't have had if they were back home. They are beginning their new lives. They are successful!"
Knight added her admiration for refugee resettlement affiliates and congregational cosponsors, exclaiming, "What a difference those relationships make for refugees! It's the personal touch, the hand of friendship. It's where the program has a human face."
Photos of refugees with their cosponsors were on prominent display in several of the refugees' homes Knight visited. "Refugees and cosponsors obviously develop strong bonds," she said. "Seeing that was the best part of my trip."
Knight brings her background as an anthropologist to her work at OPE/Accra. She joined the staff in October 2001 as a field worker, then served as information officer before taking on her current responsibilities in November 2004.
While in Virginia, she also was part of the airport welcoming committee for two Meskhetian Turk refugee families, and met with the Virginia State Refugee Coordinator. She and CWS Immigration and Refugee Program Director Joe Roberson spoke during Sunday morning worship at Weavers Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg. Her itinerary also included stops at the Refugee Processing Center in Virginia, where she met with representatives of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), and appointments with the International Organization for Migration, Church World Service, and other voluntary agencies.
PRM sets targets for refugee departures region by region, and just increased OPE's target to 5,200 from 4,000 in FY 2005, thanks to supplementary federal funding.
"We'd gotten 3,500 out by the end of June, so we have as many as 1,700 to move in July, August, and September, most of them Liberians in camps in Ghana," Knight said. "We have to move very quickly to get them out, and are quietly confident that we'll meet our target."
Back to most recent IRP news • Browse archive: 2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008 • Back to top