THE GAZETTE
Wednesday, November 6, 2013 s
Page A-15
Helping Africans adjust to life in U.S. n
‘We try to be the middle person’ BY
SARAH SCULLY STAFF WRITER
On a recent evening, children clustered in the basement of the Park Montgomery Apartments in Silver Spring. Second-graders sat at one table, coloring with crayons and filling in connect-thedot drawings. Next to them a table of older kids worked on their homework. As each of them finished an assignment, they ran up to Asmara Sium to let her know and she assured them she would be right there to check it over. Sium is the executive director of the African Immigrant and Refugee Foundation and one of several women who run the Homework Club, where children age 4 to 14 who live in the apartment building come after school to hang out, play games and get academic help. All these children are immigrants or children of immigrants from Africa. The foundation helps the children and their parents navigate and adjust to life in the U.S., focusing on academic support and reconciling the two cultures they’re growing up in. The foundation was started in 2000 by Wanjiru Kamau, a Kenyan immigrant and mental health professional who began working with Rwandese refugees. Everyone at the foundation calls her Mama Kamau. She created the Catching Up Program, now the foundation’s flagship program, which provides resources for adults such as health screenings and legal advice on renewing their visas, and provides kids with academic support and help adjusting to American culture. The foundation also works in Argyle Middle School, and Montgomery Blair and Springbrook high schools, where students are older and often more recent immigrants. Part of the Catching Up Program,
the Homework Club, meets in the apartment building Monday through Thursday afternoons. Sium, an Eritrean-American, grew up in Washington and spent her summers in Eritrea. She started volunteering with the organization while writing her dissertation and returned to run it two years ago when Kamau moved back to Kenya. Sium faced many of the same challenges that the children do. “The kids are trying to figure out how to be American,” she said.
Tanzanian or American? Children, who at Homework Club have spent little or no time in their parents’ country of origin, tend to assimilate quickly, finding themselves between the American culture at school and their African culture at home. “As a kid, first and foremost, you want to fit in. I also remember the dual existence,” said program coordinator Asteria Hyera. Hyera was born in the U.S. but moved to Tanzania at age 3 and back to the U.S. at 10 with her parents. “Their perception of their life here is different” from their parents’, Sium said. “We try to be the middle person.” Parents of middle schoolers and high schoolers are wary of things such as dating and hanging out at the mall after school — a big part of being an American teenager. Sium tries to mediate when she sees tension between parents and their children. Kids sometimes are embarrassed by their parents showing up to school events in traditional clothes or speaking a different language. Part of this disconnect, Sium said, is that children often don’t understand what their parents went through to get to the U.S. or the alternative life they might have had, and sometimes just having a conversation about that story helps. One manifestation of the divide is
names. “They get teased relentlessly for their names,” Sium said. Many kids find it easier to choose a nickname — Sium herself had many — and Sium tells them that’s OK, but she also wants them to be proud of where their name comes from. “Their names aren’t meaningless,” she said. Parents in most African cultures put a lot of thought into naming their children. “It took me some time to say, ‘No, I’m Asmara,’ and say it correctly,” she said, with a full roll through the “r.” Emigration from Africa to the U.S. has risen steadily over the past several decades. The number doubled from 42,456 in 1995 to 85,102 in 2005, the most recent available census data. African immigrants now make up 15 percent of Montgomery County’s foreign-born population: 58,000 in 2010. The foundation receives funding from a combination of government grants, individual contributions and support from other foundations, with most coming from Montgomery County. It is seeking support from a community development block grant from Takoma Park, where some of its beneficiaries live. It also has received funding from the city for its Youth ArtBeat Summer Camp. The foundation has been running the Homework Club at the Park Montgomery Apartments for two years and wants to soon expand to the Essex Apartments. Sium said she has seen transformations in many of the children and a big part of it is showing them the promise she sees in them. With some extra support, she said, “these kids excel beyond any, of even our, expectations.” Many have behavioral issues when they start out. “I think as people we fail to understand the story behind the behavior,” Sium said of dismissing them as bad children rather than understanding
GREG DOHLER/THE GAZETTE
Asmara Sium (left), executive director of the African Immigrant and Refugee Foundation, helps children with their homework as part of the foundation’s Catching Up academic assistance program Oct. 28 at the Park Montgomery Apartments in Silver Spring. what they’re struggling with. As 13-year-old Simon Hailon said, it can all be summed up in three words: “Life is complicated.” Simon’s father left him, his mother and two younger siblings when Simon was 8, and Simon said he struggled with the feeling of abandonment growing up, with just feeling different and with being bullied at school. “I had a really bumpy road,” he said. Now, he doesn’t care what people think of him, because he understands that everything is a matter of how you look at it and every action and situation have complex layers. “It’s how you see it, how you perceive it that matters,” he said. That’s something he wants to express in the blog he’s working to start — that everyone has a story, success has many meanings, and failure is not absolute or straightforward, but layered. Simon has always loved reading — something he attributes to his mother. “Let’s just say, she was my start,” he said. Now he wants to be an author. Toward the end of the evening, the
older kids led cheers and dance routines — they were practicing for their Halloween performance. Steve Nikkema, 10, stood in front of a group of boys half his height — “Y-E-L-L, Everybody yell!” they shouted. He said he likes teaching the younger kids. So does Kiana Lassiter, 14, who’s lead volunteer teacher this year. When Kiana started in the program, Sium said, she was difficult and getting in trouble. Sium told Kiana she was going to love her into submission. Two years later, it worked, Sium said, and the teenager has stepped fully into her leadership role. She loves teaching the alphabet to the youngest ones. Sium asked the children, “How do you want to move through the world?” Giving them leadership opportunities is a great way for them to begin to answer that question for themselves. “We see in these kids so much more than I think they do at times and it’s our job to say, ‘Here are the tools,’” Sium said, “and they rise to the occasion.” sscully@gazette.net
County businesses are leading Maryland’s charge in electric vehicles Area strives to accommodate growing number of plug-ins n
BY
SARAH TINCHER
SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE
DAN GROSS/THE GAZETTE
An electric car is plugged into a charging station in a King Farm shopping center parking lot in Rockville.
1,700 residents have taken advantage of it so far, according to Eric Coffman, the senior energy specialist for the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection. Since it was implemented, 545 county residents have taken
to 240-volt plug, and tend to be more popular in the commercial market. The higher the level, the faster it will charge a car. According to the Department of Energy, a light-duty electric vehicle, such as a Nissan Leaf or a Honda Fit EV, would typically get a range of 2 to 5 miles after a one-hour level 1 charge, and 10 to 20 miles after an hour on a level 2 charger. SemaConnect of Bowie, a charging station developer and vendor that deploys stations across the U.S., has sold more chargers to entities in Montgomery County than any other county in Maryland, according Joe Inglisa, a company spokesman for the mid-Atlantic region. Inglisa attributed this to the county’s “overall education level.” “Early adapters are highly educated and wealthier, so they’re the ones buying the electric vehicle,” he said. “In other parts of Maryland where the socio-economic level isn’t so high, we’re not doing so well.” Some places, including
MOM’s Organic Market in Rockville and the Potomac Place Shopping Center, offer charging stations to the public as a free amenity. But others will either charge customers the rate that it costs to cover the electricity or increase the price to make a profit. Companies that charge consumers to use their stations commonly charge per hour, as the Firstfield Shopping Center in Gaithersburg does, but they also have the option to charge for the actual amount of electricity that is used. Once a vendor sells the a charger to a company, it is up to that company to pay for the electricity. What, if anything, the consumer pays to use a charger is set by the station owner, Inglisa said. “We offer it free of charge because it doesn’t cost that much and we want to incentivize people and reward them for driving an electric car,” said Scott Nash, owner of MOM’s Organic Market in Rockville. The store initially installed the chargers to meet an increasing
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Businesses across the county have been working to make it more convenient for the growing number of electric vehicle drivers to find a place to plug in and charge up, with about 15 percent of Maryland’s electric car charging stations now in Montgomery County. Only one electric vehicle was registered in Maryland in fiscal 2010, but that rose to 657 by fiscal 2012, according to the most recent data from the Motor Vehicle Administration. This dramatic increase was likely not mere coincidence. In October 2010, the state kicked off its campaign to promote electric vehicles by offering an excise tax credit for Maryland owners, currently ranging from $600 to $1,000, depending on the vehicle’s battery capacity. Nearly
the tax credit, which is more than any other county, Coffman said. And this prominent interest hasn’t gone unnoticed. Montgomery County has been a target for charging station vendors in recent years. Second only to Baltimore city, Montgomery County has one of the highest number of charging stations in the state, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. There are 38 electric charging stations, which are owned and operated by various organizations, in Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Gaithersburg, Germantown, Potomac, Rockville and Silver Spring. Of these, 29 offer the stations to the public, while the rest are company-owned for employees only. Some locations also feature more than one charger — or outlet — at each station; and among those in the county that are public, there are a total of 12 level 1 and 44 level 2 chargers available. A level 1 charger uses a 120volt plug and can be installed on a standard residential outlet. Level 2 chargers work with a 208-
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demand for them as well as advertise for electric car companies, and they have seen a continuous increase in users since the chargers were installed in May 2012, Nash said. “They’re an operating billboard or advertisement for the electric car industry,” he said. “It sort of reminds people every day that here are the chargers for an electric car that you might want to buy one day.” This growing demand for charging stations is set to continue in the near future. On Oct. 24, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), along with governors from seven other states, announced an initiative to put 3.3 million zero-emission vehicles — which includes battery-electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, and hydrogen fuel-cellelectric vehicles – on the road in their states within a dozen years. “This is a critical part of our efforts to achieve Maryland’s long-term 2050 goal to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions 90 percent from 2006 levels,” O’Malley said in a news release.