JFS resettles people from across the globe and serves over 80 young refugees a year. Many are enrolled in English Language Learner programs in Kent and Tukwila.
Tukwila’s Foster High School, one of the most language diverse schools in the nation, is home to the poetry workshop known as the Stories of Arrival: Youth Voices Poetry Project. Most of the students we work with migrated from their home countries due to war, violence, poverty, lack of education and health care and other issues that have affected their own and their family’s safety and survival.
Each year, the students create an inspiring poetry anthology with beautifully crafted poems that tell of loved ones, loved places, loss, dreams and hopes. The students are individually mentored, which supports them in improving their English language writing skills.
They also receive professional voice coaching and the opportunity to record one of their poems in a state of the art sound studio at Jack Straw Cultural Center. One of our goals is for the poems to reach the wider community and to increase understanding of the consequences of war and forced migrations on the lives of young people, so the poems are broadcast on KBCS 91.3 during National Poetry Month in April.
You can listen to a sampling from our poets here:
Istabraq Khar
Oscar Novarro Dominguez
Nirmala Adhikari
The words of our young writers are a tribute to the power of poetry and storytelling. Students learn to connect expressive language, transforming the heartbreaking conflicts they have endured into visions of peaceful solutions to war, poverty, discrimination and violence.
This fall we will bring together poetry and food in collaboration with Project Feast. Students will explore memories of food, their home countries, rituals, festivals and family. The poems will also touch on the very real hunger that is often part of the experience of forced migration.
There really are no words to translate the dignity and the resilience of these young refugees and immigrants. Yet our young poets have found the words for their struggles, their experiences of migration and their hopes. It is our honor and privilege to help them bring their stories of arrival to the community.
By Merna Hecht
Merna Hecht founded the Stories of Arrival Project in 2010 and is its Co-Director and Teaching Artist. Her Co-Director Carrie Stradley is an English Language Learner (ELL) teacher at Foster High School in the Tukwila School District, where 37 percent of students qualify for ELL services. The project is supported by Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Institute for Poetic Medicine in Palo Alto, CA and private donations.
Photos courtesy of Merna Hecht.
