A very complex mix
What Amanda Lim brings as IRCO’s new board president
By Ronault L.S. Catalani

The Asian Reporter

There’s an old Sulawesi saying about power: “Trust most those who have truly sorrowed.”

As old school as it sounds, it’s still the wisest way to delegate power — ask any political science scholar. Indeed, this Old World prescription retains startling resonance for every modern day electorate picking its new president.

The proverb certainly applies well to Amanda Lim, the recently elected board president of IRCO (Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization), a Portland-based, nationally recognized and replicated resettlement agency. In its earlier identity and in its current form, IRCO has been assisting bewildered families, job-training ambitious newcomers, and serving energetic communities arriving from the former Soviet Union and its former East European satellites, from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and from the Muslim world, since 1976. Today IRCO does it all on an annual budget of about $9.8 million.

As strong as Ms. Lim feels about IRCO’s management record, she insists the agency would not have the model service delivery reputation it enjoys without the daily contribution of the organization’s extraordinary staff, drawn from those nationalities and ethnicities they serve. She also credits the ongoing support of IRCO’s constituent communities and compassionate funders. It’s all a very complex mix.

In her 8-to-5 professional life, Ms. Lim is a fiscal analyst for the State Office of Child and Family Health, a public health program of Oregon’s Department of Human Services. After work she has served as treasurer of the Seattle-based Cambodian Women’s Heath Organization, an educational effort for low-income, high-risk, pregnant women. Between breaths, Ms. Lim provides legal and medical translation for Khmer community members caught in circumstances more complex than families can handle on their own.

Understanding it plus living it. It is precisely this, as IRCO’s new board president puts it herself: a combination of her understanding an immigrant’s urgent needs plus her experience as an often-awed non-Western refugee, that has given her the insight and the empathy to contribute to IRCO leadership.

“When we first come to this country,” Ms. Lim says, “we all dream of a good future. Everything seems possible. But then there’s the unforeseen challenges — language problems, employment barriers, acceptance into our new society.” Then she adds with a smile, a mix of exhaustion and conviction, “you can only understand these things after you’ve struggled through them.

” According to IRCO’s new chairwoman, what fuelled her determination to succeed in America were her deceased parents’ words and deeds. Her father, Mr. Chiev Suor, president of the Cambodian-English College, was executed on orders of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. The Cambodian Communist Party terrorized the country, nearly eliminating the entire educated population beginning in 1975 and lasting until the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam’s cross-border invasion in 1979. “Before he was killed, my father told my mother, ‘when Cambodia is back in peace, if I’m not alive, make sure my children leave the country, and make sure they all have a good education.’”

Madame Lim Kim Heak made it to America in 1981 with nothing but sorrow and three frightened children. “I am inspired by her,” Ms. Lim says, her eyes at once sad and fiercely focused, “a single mother in her late 30s with no transferable job skills, with just her will, her strong will to learn about American systems.”

Ms. Lim’s mother raised and college educated her daughter and two sons on wages she earned on an electronics assembly line. “She took my father’s words and made them a mission of her own.” Tears of love, of pride.

Twenty-seven years into America, Amanda Lim says she’s grateful to have an opportunity to be a part of IRCO. She calls the agency “a path that guides and supports immigrant and refugee families toward self-sufficiency.”

The first woman to serve as IRCO board president (in the organization’s 31-year history) is not a bit bashful talking about how proud she feels every time she meets newcomers who have struggled to become successful citizens. She is also proud about working with IRCO’s committed board and management. According to fellow board member Monica Smith, Ms. Lim “works in a positive, collaborative manner with all members of the board, and on behalf of all the communities served by IRCO. “She is a strong voice for all immigrants and refugees.”

Confirming the efficacy of the old proverb, Amanda Lim is that kind of strength grown from great sorrow. The kind you can truly trust.

Approximately 60 refugees from countries including Nepal, Ethiopia, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Barundi and Cuba recently attended a workshop at the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization on public safety, basic laws and emergency services.

In the countries where many of the attendees formerly lived, people in uniform were not seen as friends or advocates. In fact, many saw police officers as figures of fear, if not terror. The IRCO workshop is designed to begin changing those perceptions while informing the new Americans about how to avoid trouble with the law, how to respond if stopped by police and when to call police for protection.

Specific topics at the Nov. 16 workshop included traffic and criminal laws, domestic violence laws, identity theft, using 9-1-1 for emergencies, making non-emergency calls to police and what to do if stopped by a police officer. It also included a section on bicycle safety.

The facilitator of the workshop, Aaron T. Olson, is a retired supervisor with the Oregon State Police. Most participants heard his words through an interpreter, as most had been in the United States for just one to three months.

Following the completion of the workshop, 11 bicycle helmets were given to participants. Olson organized the helmet program when he recognized the participants could not afford to buy helmets but that they and their children were using bicycles on the streets. He purchases the helmets from manufacturers at a special nonprofit price of just $2.50 each, and he solicits donations from various groups for the purchases.

IRCO and Olson have been partnering to present this workshop quarterly to newly arrived refugees since May 2002. Anyone interested in contributing to the bicycle safety program’s helmet distribution or interested in more information about future workshops contact Rowanne Haley at 503-234-1541.

Editor’s note: Rowanne Haley is the manager of Community and Donor Relations at IRCO.

ROWANNE HALEY
FOR THE MID-COUNTY MEMO