Afternoon Dance Parties that Changed My Life
Driving up to a weathered brown apartment building in South Salt Lake, Khinhla, Win Tae, and their brothers rolled down the windows excitedly as I turned up the music. Shattering the silence, we got out and started dancing to the radio. As if anticipating our arrival, the front doors of the apartments facing us swung open and Burmese refugee mothers smiled as their children darted past to join us.
Many of my experiences volunteering with refugees in high school were full of laughter and dancing, but some reflected the deeper trauma and challenges young refugees face as they integrate into their new homes. For example, one day a girl from Nepal arrived to our program crying and confided in me that other students at her school told her that her hair was ugly and that she smelled bad. The multi-faceted challenges my refugee friends faced opened my eyes to the inequality in society.
As a college student, I discovered a new way to describe the systems of inequality around me. This language was called sociology. Sociology taught me how to understand social issues and I immersed myself in studying immigration and the refugee crisis. After a while, I became overwhelmed with two things. The first was the burden of seeing so many problems, but not knowing how to solve them. The second was everyone, including me, wondering what in the world I would do with my life after studying sociology.
At the height of my distress, I was introduced to the Ballard Center.
The Ballard Center became my playground for learning how to solve social problems. I participated in a Social Innovation Project (SIP) -- an on-campus internship -- with SINGA, a French nonprofit that promotes refugee integration by focusing on the co-creation of culture between refugees and host countries. Since their inception in 2012, they have reached over 25,000 members in seven cities in France and have expanded to seven countries.
My internship team examined how media impacts people's perception of refugees and their resulting policy opinions, then created a toolkit for SINGA to communicate best practices for reporting on refugees to newsrooms and journalists in Europe. For example, the positive media attention surrounding the heartbreaking photo of Aylan Kurdi in 2015 led to the use of Aylan’s name over 50,000 times on Twitter with a storm of “Refugees Welcome” and “People Not Migrants” tags. Within one day, 150,000 people signed a U.K. petition to accept more asylum seekers and support refugees.
This internship applied what I felt working with Khinhla and her friends, what I learned in sociology, and what I was learning about solving social problems at the Ballard Center.
Between the days of my high school volunteering and my introduction to the Ballard Center, I lost touch with Khinhla and her friends. But years after our dance parties, Khinhla and I reconnected. I added her as a friend on Facebook, sent her a message, and she responded with, “Omg! Where have you been? I've been looking for you everywhere!!! I miss you so much. Finally I found you.” She’s since taught me how to make *very spicy* Thai Pho, invited me to her wedding, and introduced me to her baby.
My Ballard Center experience translated my love for refugees and my passion for sociology to application that gives me confidence as a changemaker. Through the Ballard Center I have discovered and deepened skills from critical thinking to human-centered design, from writing and editing to impact evaluation. Moving forward, I am committed to facilitating partnerships that address issues like refugee resettlement, immigration, and human rights.