On June 20th, 2008 IRCO held it’s first fundraiser.  Jazz For Peace™ was a warm and friendly evening concert featuring Rick DellaRatta, a New York  jazz pianist and vocalist and his Jazz For Peace™ trio at the World Trade Center auditorium.  About 200 people were in attendance.  The event raised over $15,000.

Rick DellaRatta made an instrument donation in IRCO’s honor to the David Douglas High School, where IRCO runs several youth programs.  Here Cherie-Ann May, band director for DDHS, accepts the saxophone from Rick with Sokhom Tauch, the Executive Director of IRCO, looking on.

Leslie Yoder greets regular visitor Shawana Young, a Senior and People with Disabilities Program Home Care Worker. After reading about Multnomah County senior services now offered through the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO) in the August Mid-county Memo, Yoder made a call that changed her life for the better.

Yoder completes paperwork with Young’s help. Despite being Yoder’s caseworker for only two months, the two have formed a strong bond. A Home Care Worker for eight years, Young does pretty much whatever needs to be done around the house in order to keep Yoder in a healthy environment.
Last November, the Memo published a letter from Mid-county resident Leslie Yoder expressing gratitude for an August Memo Pad article (“IRCO’s multiculturalism now includes mainstream clients”) about senior services offered by Mid-county’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization.

IRCO and other volunteer/nonprofit and government agencies assist families and individuals in compromised situations, many of who would otherwise suffer silently. Our region abounds with services to assist low-income, elderly and disabled residents. Unfortunately, many of those who qualify for such programs lack the information to benefit from them. As a free neighborhood newspaper, the Memo seeks to inform all Mid-county residents of the services that help to strengthen our community. We believe others may benefit from hearing Yoder’s story.

In 1999, Leslie Yoder, then a college instructor working on her doctorate, fell ill. Since that time, she has battled three chronic health issues that forced her to retire to her east Portland home while struggling to remain independent with the help of her two daughters, Beth and Briana.

A year ago Beth was offered job in the United Arab Emirates. Yoder, who had made many advancements since the inception of her illness, grew concerned over how to fill the substantial loss to her support system, a once-large network that had rapidly dwindled following the recent deaths of two close friends and her younger brother.
At first she tried to take it in stride, but stomach complications made the simple act of cooking difficult, and she only realized after collapsing one day that she was not eating enough to sustain herself. Reliant on Social Security, she worried about how to meet her needs on a budget. Then she read our Memo Pad article about IRCO’s senior services.

“I knew what IRCO was because my daughter had tutored Somalian children through that,” Yoder said, “but this article made the comment that 70 percent of people helped through IRCO were Americans, so I thought if nothing else I should start Meals-on-Wheels (IRCO doesn’t run Meals-on-Wheels, but can connect their clients to the program) until I can cook again because if they deliver me a meal I’m committed to eating it.”

After she made the call, “someone from the seniors and disabilities division came into my house for a two- to three-hour interview, very extensive. It covered every aspect of living, the physical, medical, and social, psychological, spiritual. It dealt with my ability to grocery shop, to clean, to keep the yard up. Within a couple of weeks, I had received something back saying this is the plan.”

As a result of the interview, the caseworker recommended a team of medical professionals who contacted her to offer their services, which she has since taken advantage of.

“It has been incredible. I think the caseworker and that team have improved my ability to stay independent, calm and physically healthy. I’m doing beautifully because of their support. It means a lot because my social world used to be very large and now it’s very small, so the Meals-on-Wheels meets needs in several areas. In addition to the nutrition is the smile of the person at my door.”

Illness humbles the once self-sufficient. For those who lack family or face it on a low income, it becomes harrowing as well. So Yoder, who described herself as a “voracious reader,” started collecting articles on public aid services. “I wish they had a comprehensive booklet of everything that is available.” She explained the conundrum of others in her situation, “There are other things out there, but you don’t know about it until someone tells you.”

Human Solutions, for example, has helped Yoder immensely. “At Human Solutions, I learned that I could apply for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program.” Her income level also qualified her for a reduced sewer bill, reduced water bill, reduced phone bill and $300 of energy assistance applied to her electric bill annually through Oregon Housing and Community Service’s LIEAP.

To help restrict her energy output, Yoder applied for Multnomah County’s Weatherization Program which, helps to reduce home energy costs for low-income homeowners by identifying areas of energy waste and staunching the leaks. It took a crew three days to properly insulate and correct ventilation issues in Yoder’s home.

Some programs provide people’s basic needs while also improving self-sufficiency. The organization GrowingGardens tackles hunger by installing organic, raised-bed vegetable gardens in the yards of those in need. It aims to improve nutrition, health and self-reliance by providing the (literal) roots of food and the know-how to get started. Yoder saw an opportunity to begin feeding herself again by starting small. “They are going to make (the garden) a disabled one so I can be able to sit down on the edge around it to work,” she said.

Often enrollment in one program will lead to the awareness of others. For example, Yoder’s Meals-on-Wheels representative dropped off an application for Rebuilding Together Portland, a volunteer organization that helps to improve security and independence for low-income families, the elderly or those with disabilities by rehabilitating their homes.

Yoder had recently received home repair services from another organization, REACH Community Development, which specializes in home repair services, affordable housing assistance and financial education for low-income families, but considered adding some more safety precautions after suffering a recent fainting spell.
Another group, Elders in Action, which aims to improve the lives of the elderly through community and consumer advocacy and assistance, inspired Yoder after she observed that many of the volunteers were themselves 55 or older.

“I have nothing but praise for the people I have encountered,” she said about the aid workers. “That’s why I was willing to tell my story. If only one other person reads it and realizes, I’m a middle-class American who used to be a professor or a doctor or whatever and circumstances have changed greatly to put me in this position here, maybe I should make a phone call to see what kind of help is available. It isn’t just the blessing of the goods and services — it’s the kindness and the respect with which you are treated that is so uplifting for anyone going through whatever hard time.”

Now Yoder thinks about giving back. Still concentrating on energy concerns, a stressful necessity for many, she has petitioned Portland General Electric and City Commissioner Dan Saltzman’s office on the advantages of solar power. Observing that her wood-burning stove and weatherized home caps her own use, she thought if she could somehow afford a few solar panels, she could possibly generate enough energy with her wide roof space to heat her home while donating the remainder to the LIEAP program to help others. “I am sure I’m not the only citizen who would want to do such a thing,” she said. “I see my concept as having the ability to change despair to dignity, hopelessness to hope, self-centeredness to a community focus,” she wrote to Saltzman’s office.

Amy Trieau, an assistant to Saltzman, responded to Yoder’s inquiry, noting that coincidently they had just received a solar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

This invigorated Yoder. “At least I’m presenting my ideas out there, and I feel good about that. Let’s say this concept became a reality, and let’s say that the people who receive help from my solar panels wanted to meet me and I got to meet them, wouldn’t that strengthen the bond of community?”

She noted that both Trieau and PGE “were surprised that I would want to donate the excess money back into a program instead of receiving the checks to supplement my low income. That had never entered my thinking. I want to be able to take that emotional strain away from someone else, one or two or three people.” One good deed leads to another and another.

HEATHER HILL
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO

We thank Leslie Yoder for sharing her story. She welcomes readers who benefit from it to respond in kind.

Assistance Agencies/Organizations covered in
this story:

Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization
10301 N.E. Glisan St, Portland
503-234-1541
www.irco.org

Human Solutions
12350 S.E. Powell Blvd.
503-548-0200
www.humansolutions.org

For Energy Assistance (LIEAP) at Human Solutions
503-548-0217
www.humansolutions.org/index.php?pr=Utility_Assistance&root=Programs_Services 

Multnomah County Weatherization Program
503-988-6295, x22312
www.co.multnomah.or.us/oscp/cpp/energy.html

REACH Community Development,
Home repair services
503-231-0682
www.reachcdc.org

Rebuilding Together
5000 N. Willamette Blvd.
503-943-7515
www.rebuildingtogetherportland.org

Growing Gardens
2003 N.E. 42nd Ave #3
503-284-8420
www.growing-gardens.org

Elders in Action
1411 S.W. Morrison St. Suite #290
503-235-5474
www.eldersinaction.org

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

Portland took in close to 2,000 refugees yearly, until the U.S. State Department implemented lengthier background checks following the attacks. Now, about 1,200 refugees arrive in Portland each year.

It may be less than the pre-9/11 peak, but that number still keeps Outer Northeast Portland’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization’s (IRCO) employees, most of them former refugees themselves, scrambling to get their clients acclimated to Portland’s sometimes bewildering environment.

The refugees come from Eastern Europe and from countries like Burundi, Ethiopia, Somalia and Myanmar, said Rowanne Haley, manager of community and donor relationships.

“Some of them have never seen traffic, television or even running water,” she said.

And, certainly, many of the children of those refugees have never before been personally introduced to Santa Claus – until Thursday, Dec. 20, that is when IRCO invited Santa to its gymnasium at 10301 N.E. Glisan St. While the jolly old fellow held little ones on his lap, elves distributed gifts and tried to keep throngs of eager children from surging onto the stage.

“Some of them are the children of Burundian parents who have been living in refugee camps for 30 years,” Haley said.

For many refugees, Santa and his bountiful sack of toys symbolize the advantages the United States has to offer, like free education, abundant food and freedom from persecution.

And, for the adults, Santa’s main helper is the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization.

Wherever they flee from, initially, every adult refugee in Portland gets assessed at Outer Northeast Portland’s IRCO, where they are taught the ways of American culture and get help learning English and finding employment. While the parents learn tasks like how to take a bus, ride MAX and read signs, their children are already enrolled in local public schools.

Often, the first workshop a refugee takes at IRCO is on basic English language survival skills.

“Someone coming in from Cuba, that’s an easier client for us to deal with because they have great education and literacy,” Haley said. “But for a Somali Bantu, their language doesn’t even have a written form.”

Nevertheless, the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, a nonprofit, does find jobs for the refugees, Haley said, even if it means some are hired to gut fish or slaughter chickens.

“The goal is self sufficiency,” she said.

At first, refugees earn about $8 to $10 an hour at their new jobs, but they tend to advance quickly, she said.

“They are willing to work. They will have two or three jobs each,” Haley said. “They see enormous opportunity here.”

By Merry Mackinnon

The Gresham Outlook

Immigrant children, many from conflict-torn nations, see Santa for the first time

By Nikole Hannah-Jones
The Oregonian

The children didn’t laugh or race about as they entered the winter wonderland with the sparkling white Christmas trees, dancing gingerbread men and enormous lollipops. They didn’t examine the mounds of brightly wrapped packages stuffed under the trees.

Instead, the babes folded somberly to the floor. No giggles. Barely even a fidget.

“Look at these children,” Victoria Libov says sadly. “They are not smiling. It doesn’t come naturally to them. But in America, it will.”

The world, with all its sorrows and conflicts and pain, came to see Santa Thursday. Children of every hue and scattered from their homes across the globe, gathered in a Northeast Portland gymnasium to find the joy of Christmas.

But as first they just didn’t know how. Long perilous journeys brought most of 240 children to the United States just months and for some just weeks ago. They escaped conflict-torn places such as Somalia, Ivory Coast, Uzbekistan and Myanmar, the nation formerly know as Burma. Some had lived their entire lives in refugee camps.

And now, the sat in a fantasyland put on by the Immigration and “Refugee community Organization, or IRCO, which helps refugees in Portland with jobs, Housing and language skills.

“Do you guys hear Santa?” a woman called out in a language they didn’t understand. The children stared, their eyes shifting back and forth and then locking on the white guy with the long beard and funny looking hat.

He snatched up a glass and chugged. “Santa Loves milk!”

Snickers escaped the mouths of a couple of kids. And prodded by adults, a few walked up timidly and shook his hand. Then they were directed to the presents, separated by gender and age, and told they each could have one.

A boy in a camouflage jacket grabbed the biggest one- a large rectangle sheathed in bright green. Girls in scarlet hijabs or in flowered head scarves took turns sitting on Santa’s lap and then picked packages for themselves.

They sat again, their arms wrapped around the gifts. As the first child tore into his box, smiles flooded the room. They threw paper to the floor as they unwrapped fire trucks and skateboards, soccer balls and baby dolls.

The room for the first time exploded with the laughter of children. A Burmese boy showed his new board game to a boy from the Ivory Coast who had just opened A Walkman.

“I’m happy and having a great time,” Khin Win Paw said through a translator. The Burmese girl had never live outside of Southeast Asian refugee camp until she came to Portland three months ago. She didn’t know who that red-suited man was, but she like him. Her father watched nearby.

“I’m so grateful,” Htay Win said. “I want my kids to be happy and have a Christmas because they’ve never had one before.” It doesn’t matter, he says, that the family is Buddhist. Life has been hard and he wants them to know joy.

That is why Luz Toledo, a job coach for IRCO and Venezuelan immigrant, started the Christmas party a year ago. “A lot of these kids have never seen Santa or had gifts,” Toledo said. “I wanted them to experience that, to be a part of it.”

She paused tearing up. “This is to welcome them and show them love. That we’re just one big family.”

The world came to see Santa Thursday, with all its sorrows and conflict and pain. And for just a few hours, the world smiled.

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.

At Immigrant community conference “The best revenge on a system that does not value you is to get an education. What a win-win!”

Those words were spoken by Claudette La Vert, a special education teacher in the Reynolds School District, at the African Youth Leadership Conference Sept. 29 at the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization.

Nearly 100 immigrant and refugee youth from a wide variety of African nations attended the conference, designed to empower youth between ages 12 and 23 to succeed in school and life. Additional goals were to establish a sense of community among youth from multiple (and often warring) African cultures and to increase personal self esteem and affirm cultural awareness.

Negussie Sado of Virginia State University, gave the young people advice on the necessity and methods of advocating for themselves in their schools. Sado emigrated from Oromia in Ethiopia to get an education in the United States.

Sponsored by and developed under the guidance of IRCO’s Africa House, the conference was organized by a committee of youth, including Fatuma Mohamed. Mohamed was less than two years old when civil war caused her family to flee their home in Somalia. For the next 14 years she lived in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the U.S. as a refugee in 2004.

Valerie Palmer, a researcher and director of the toxicogenomics laboratory at the Center for Research on Ocuupational and Environmental Toxicology at Oregon Health Sciences University, kicked off the day with a general address.

She used the stories of three children from different countries who all came to the United State and became educated, successful and are making positive differences on people all over the globe, urging the youth to follow their dreams, strive to reach their goals and make a difference.

Palmer, a Zulu who grew up poor on a small farm in South Africa, escaped apartheid at age 17 by traveling to England. When that country refused her asylum, she came to the U.S., where she completed her education and launched a career in research on the causes and cures of diseases affecting poor people in developing countries.

Also included in the conference were an African youth fashion show and African music provided by DJ Menzies.

The Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, elected new officers and appointed three new members to its board of directors. Assuming the helm as the board chair is Amanda Lim. Lim is Fiscal Analyst for the Oregon Department of Human Services Office of Family Health. Kristin Lensen, of Kristin Lensen Consulting, was named Vice President. Monica Smith, an attorney with Smith Diamond & Olney, acceded to Secretary.

New members are Rithya S. Tang, the Portland franchise owner of DNA Services of America; Rich Sayre, Global Project Manager for Footwear Product Integrity at Nike; and Raquel Laiz, a legal assistant at the law offices of Gregory and Gregory.