It’s a weekday morning, and several adults are divided up into two classrooms at the Stalnaker Boys and Girls Club in Springfield. Their young children are in a nearby classroom.
These are refugees learning how to speak English, and their teachers are graduate assistants in the English Language Institute at Missouri State University.
The Welcome Family Program began in 2022 – just a year after U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan. Jennifer Johnston, director of teacher training programs at Missouri State University’s English Language Institute, said that’s when a large group of Afghan refugees came to Springfield and needed to learn English right away "because they have to get jobs pretty quickly after they get here. They only have a few months of financial assistance, and so they have to get into working," Johnston said.
ELI had been asked by the International Institute of Southwest Missouri to provide a program for the incoming refugees. The initial program lasted four months before funding ran out.
But last year, Springfield Public Schools secured a grant to allow the program to return, particularly for parents of refugee children in the district.
The childcare ELI provides prepares kids to go into public school. They learn colors, numbers, letters and things like how to be quiet and stand in a line. But it can be difficult for them to begin the learning process.
"A lot of these kids have been with their parents nonstop through their journey getting here," Johnston said, "and there's some real separation anxiety going on when they get here."
Iris Kidula is originally from Kenya and came to the U.S. more than 25 years ago. She coordinates the Welcome Family Program for ELI and said many of the children came from refugee camps where there’s a lot of insecurity.
"That is why we have some kids that will stick with their mothers because of the situations they've been through," she said. "They don't want to leave their mothers because that's their protection."
They both love seeing breakthroughs happen – when children who won’t leave their mom’s side, finally go by themselves into the kids’ room. Johnston called the program “a soft landing spot for them.”
On this morning, the children were watching a "Peppa the Pig" cartoon. Muhaymin, a toddler from Myanmar, was fascinated by the screen in front of him.
Eunice Nyagake is one of their teachers. She is an international graduate student at MSU from Kenya and has worked in refugee camps back home where residents don’t even have basic needs met. That allows her to understand where her students came from.
"The smallest of things that you need is maybe food, a roof over your head, and you're good to go," she said.
Refugees who are part of the Welcome Family Program not only work on their English, they also learn about the culture of their new home. For instance, ELI recently held a baby shower for expecting moms. And last year, they hosted a trick-or-treating event at the Boys & Girls Club.
The idea is to help them settle into a place far away from their homelands. Johnston said many were professionals in their countries, and the barrier keeping them from getting back to the work they had done is English.
"And if we can help them learn English, that's going to help them get jobs here, hopefully at some point in their profession, and they're going to contribute to our community," she said. "They came from really terrible situations, and they want to be contributing members of our community. They really do."
One of the students in the Welcome Family Program is Mohamud Isse Ahmed who came to the U.S. last December. He’s from Somalia, but he and his family, which includes six children ranging in age from four to 15, had been in Kenya for 13 years.
"We were (in) refugee camps," he said. "It was very bad."
He said it feels good to be here.
"I came to get a good life," he said, "my children to get a good life and also I get a good education."
Fellow student Abdul Alomar, from Syria where a civil war has devastated the country and left more than 306,000 dead, spent time as a refugee in Jordan before he, his wife and children arrived in the U.S. three months ago. There was fighting in Syria, he said, and he and his family spent 10 years as refugees .
Johnston sees the value in this program for refugees who come to southwest Missouri knowing little if any English, and she’d like to see it continue. But, right now, funding is set to run out in May. She hopes to be able to secure funding to keep the Welcome Family Program going and to expand it from two levels of English classes to at least three and offer evening hours for those who work.
“They learn enough to communicate basic needs for work," she said, "but they all want to communicate with people. They all want to be able to make phone calls and talk to doctors and to make friends, and they need more English than that.”
Iris Kidula said she would like the Welcome Family Program to be available for current and future refugees in the area.
"It's a program that builds you not just academically," she said, "but it builds you socially, culturally and emotionally, too."
