When Sokpak Bhell first arrived in the United States from Cambodia in the early ’80s, like many refugees she was relieved to be in this country, but adjusting wasn’t as easy as she expected.

In Cambodia, where she moved from one refugee camp to another, older people who had visited the United States told her that it was a clean, peaceful place.

“They said, ‘You can’t even spit on the sidewalk there,’ ” Bhell said. “They tell you, ‘It’s the land of opportunity.’ And it is, in a way. But you have to work for it, and it takes a long time.”

After hard work, Bhell now is established, with a home in Gresham and a career as an anti-poverty coordinator for Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO), where she has been employed for five years. Located at 10301 N.E. Glisan St., the organization’s main office provides employment, job training, interpretation, senior, family and domestic violence services, not only to the multi-cultural immigrant and refugee community, but as of last summer, to mainstream Multnomah County residents, as well.

Bhell’s work includes helping other refugees get settled, many of whom are shocked, as Bhell was, by the disconnect between their expectations of life in this country, and the reality they face.
“When they come here, it’s the opposite of what they think,” Bhell said.

Refugees coming to Portland largely from counries in Africa and from the Union of Myanmar (Burma), places where there is political turmoil, sometimes have problems getting established.

“A lot of the community currently coming from Somalia, for example, is having trouble adjusting,” Bhell said.

She said that unlike some groups, African immigrants don’t always have a tight-knit community in place where they can buy food and find others who may speak their language and practice similar customs.

However, Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization’s recently opened Africa House should alleviate some of that isolation, Bhell said.

A number of refugees arriving here find that they left behind very good careers, Bhell said. They were doctors and engineers or worked as skilled crafts people.

“But when they come here, they can’t use their skills,” Bhell said.
For one, language barriers can be daunting, especially when the skill is technical, as in medicine or engineering, and new education and certification may be required in order to practice their profession.

Like Bhell, Sokhom Tauch, the organization’s executive director, was a Cambodian refugee when he arrived here in 1975. One of the first Cambodians in Portland, Tauch, who had been in the Cambodian navy, said his initial employment in Portland consisted of low-wage service jobs.

“I did all kinds of jobs: dishwasher, janitor, busboy. When Oregon Employment Services sent me to a busboy job, I misunderstood what it meant. I thought it was about working in a bus and collecting people’s fare,” wrote Tauch in a short memoir posted on the organization’s Web site at www.irco.org.

In general, those who come to this country without any skills are the ones who face the most barriers to becoming self sufficient, Bhell said. It used to be that when immigrants or refugees settled here, many would find employment at the nearest factory. But now, according to Bhell, the economics have changed and manufacturing jobs have disappeared.

“A lot of people who face poverty, they don’t have a lot of skills,” Bhell said. “Manufacturing jobs and physical labor are the only things they can do.”

Bhell refers not only to the economic struggle of refugee clients she helps with rent and utility assistance and other services, but also to Outer East residents who may have been born here. A no-wrong-door policy assures that not just refugees and immigrants, but Multnomah County residents are eligible for the organization’s services.

“A lot of my clients were born and raised here,” Bhell said. “It’s first come, first served. We don’t discriminate.”

By Merry Mackinnon,
The Gresham Outlook.

The Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization will be starting new programs immediately in youth mentoring, health research and conflict resolution for newly arrived Africans, made possible by funding from new federal grants. Representing $1.4 million in funding over a three-year period, the projects have been funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Office of Minority Health and the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, respectively.

Partnering with IRCO in the youth mentoring program is the David Douglas School District. The project will serve 45 students over a period of 15 months from grades four through eight in two elementary schools and one middle school. Goals are to provide guidance promoting personal and social responsibility, to increase participation in academic learning, and to discourage involvement in gangs, illegal activities and promiscuous behavior.

Two projects directed toward increasing the understanding and use of preventive measures to protect the health of underserved and marginalized African and Asian and Pacific Islanders populations will be launched soon. IRCO will partner with the Multnomah County Health Department to increase knowledge and testing for Hepatitis B and HIV, as well as to increase the size of the pool of skilled medical interpreters fluent in those languages.

OHSU and IRCO will work together to research the most effective means to reduce the incidences of cervical cancer through culturally tailored intervention that will increase cervical cancer screenings in Vietnamese women. Vietnamese women experience the disease at rates five times that of white women in the United States.

IRCO’s Africa House will serve 115 refugees, mostly from Somalia, Ethiopia and Liberia, to reduce conflict between community members, to improve stability in family dynamics, to increase awareness of and access to culturally and linguistically appropriate services to help stabilize their living situations, and to increase community engagement in constructively resolving intercultural conflict.