Hmong Heritage Month kickoff event aims to preserve culture

Wausau West High School senior Victor Chang, right, and Wausau East High School senior Vang Lee act out a scene from a traditional Hmong play Saturday at the Marathon County Public Library in Wausau during the kickoff event for Hmong Heritage Month. / (Dan Young/Wausau Daily Herald)

Members of Wausau's Hmong community said they hope lessons at home and cultural celebrations such as one held Saturday will help younger generations remember and preserve their culture.

About 50 people celebrated the kickoff of Hmong Heritage Month on Saturday at the Marathon County Public Library in Wausau with music, dance and food. The event featured the Hmong tapestry youth dance group performing to modern and traditional Hmong songs, and speeches by community leaders.

 This year's theme, "We are one," reflects the Hmong community's efforts to share its culture with younger generations and with non-Hmong residents. Events later this month include a resource fair, family fitness day, a book reading and a banquet.

 "We live here in America and our kids are forgetting who the Hmong people are," Wausau Area Hmong Mutual Association Board President Chawa Xiong said. "It is important for us to celebrate the Hmong heritage and teach our kids and the community."

Coincidentally, several Hmong youths joined a protest earlier Saturday that was critical of Xiong and his leadership.

Mee Yang, 56, of Wausau, takes her family's culture seriously. Yang's daughter is interested in fashion design and the two often sew clothing that infuses modern fashion with traditional colors and style of the Hmong culture.

 "The clothing is where my aunt (Yang) and her daughter remember their culture," said Noah Her, Heritage Month organizer, who translated for Yang.

Retired teachers Alvie, 60, and Don Lutz, 61, both of the town of Cassel, said they attended because they taught many Hmong students and respect their culture. They also have visited China and Hong Kong and have four adopted Korean nieces and nephews.

 "We just try to get more information on other cultures because there is always something new to learn," Don Lutz said.

 Marathon County Administrator Brad Karger spoke at the event and told the audience that the vast majority of families who settled in the county immigrated from other countries at some point in the last 160 years.

 "Too many of us don't know our own heritage," Karger said.

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Building on trust

By Lee Egerstrom, Minnesota 2020
March 28, 2012

Back in his native Afghanistan, Ghafar Lakanwal had a front row seat to how heavy-handed authority undermined trust in institutions and held people back from entrepreneurship and progress.

Back before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Lakanwal was the Afghan minister of Agriculture and was building local cooperatives in the countryside. The Soviets put Lakanwal under house arrest in Kabul and turned the co-ops into “cells” for taking over the economy and for keeping track of people.

So much for his “ground up” economic development plans. Lakanwal was using models he had studied while earning a Ph.D. at the University of Hohenheim at Stuttgart and later working with the German International Development Agency.

There are lessons for Minnesotans from Lakanwal's experiences because refugees and immigrants are pumping new life into communities and starting hundreds of new businesses around the state. How fast and how far this burst of economic activity will go will partly depend on how well new Minnesotans can access programs and work with public and private organizations.

It is really a matter of trust, Lakanwal said.

What’s more, this isn’t a new problem, said Al Paulson, a St. Paul business executive and a business consultant to Native American tribes throughout the country.

Paulson is also an enrolled member of an Ojibwe tribe in northern Minnesota. Historical experiences have left many Indian leaders doubtful of government intentions. This distrust extends to nonprofit organizations and private foundations as well, he said. “For many people, they are all the same,” he said.

In a recent conversation, Hmong business leader Chia Xa Vagh said the Hmong came to Minnesota because of established ties with American military and intelligence officers who were from here. From those relationships, the Hmong did have some trust in working with Minnesota groups and agencies that may not apply to other refugees, Vagh said.

That experience is different from what Somali refugees experienced, although some Americans and Minnesotans were helpful to the 40,000 people who left their war-torn country and resettled here.

Hispanic and Latino immigrants who have come to Minnesota seeking economic opportunities have entirely different histories and experiences shaping how they interact with public and private programs.

For those reasons, Lakanwal sees issues of trust especially troublesome for refugees. After being released from house arrest, he was assigned to the foreign ministry for the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. He defected to America while at the United Nations in New York, moved to Minnesota, and later smuggled his wife and children out of Afghanistan to join him in Bloomington.

Over the years, Lakanwal established the Multi Cultural Development Center that has helped Minnesota and other American companies and groups with diversity issues and training. He continues that consulting work today with his Sharing Diversity/Bridging Cultures organization.

A lot of that work involves creating understanding from which people and groups can build trust, Lakanwal said. “From there you can start to see mutual interests and mutual benefits.”

That doesn’t come easy, he said.

The American Refugee Committee (ARC), the international humanitarian relief and assistance group founded in Minneapolis in 1979, currently counts 67 million people in need of international protection and assistance. Of them, 16 million are refugees while the other 51 million are “internally displaced people” whose needs may be just as great but who are difficult to reach for international aid groups.

ARC works with refugees in Thailand, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, South Sudan, Darfur and Rwanda. Given recent Minnesota history, it is safe to assume that some of these areas house refugees who will eventually find their way to Minnesota to start new lives. Minnesota institutions and organizations should be ready to lend a welcoming hand, starting with building trust.

On a separate matter, Somalis in Minnesota are experiencing problems with banks and with the U.S. government in sending money to relatives back home in Africa. In the simplest terms, the official concern is that the money may be intercepted and used by terrorist organizations.

The ARC international relief group is a leader in trying to overcome the problems of transferring money to relatives in Somali. The Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota (CSCM) also works with nonprofit organizations, ethnic and religious groups in trying to keep communications and money flowing between relatives and groups here and there.

It is imperative that Minnesota’s political and social leadership support these groups and work with federal authorities and international agencies to resolve problems with money transfers.

These problems for the Somali community here are reminders of the recently revealed spying and monitoring of Muslim students by law enforcement officers at New York universities, said Lakanwal. Separating people by religion or ethnicity for different treatment by government doesn’t create “homeland security,” he said.

As Lakanwal also knows from personal experience, building trust in institutions is nearly impossible where mistrust is official policy.

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Challenge of teaching border area students

Use of mother tongue in early years is a success with Hmong kids in North, helps them learn Thai in later years

Have you ever considered how teachers and their students in remote areas interact while they are in class, especially those in mountainous areas where the mother-tongue is not Thai?

If you imagine a teacher talking before a blackboard and the students remaining silent, please forget it. You will no longer see such a typical style of teaching and learning - at least at Ban Rakpaendin School in Therng district in the northern province of Chiang Rai where 98 per

cent of more than 200 students are Hmong.

Clamorous voices of 19 kindergarten 2 students - scrambling to answer their teacher's questions and volunteering to read sentences written on the whiteboard in a Hmong dialect with Thai texts - could undoubtedly reflect the change in interaction in class between teachers and

students.

It was even more surprising that some students were brave enough to volunteer to read the sentences although they could not read them fluently, but had fun when they were trying to read.

Of course, doing nothing did not bring about this wonderful change to the Hmong students who face a tough barrier in the Thai language use in class with their Thai teachers.

Having been chosen to join the Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education project among 11 schools in different parts of the country, these schools where most of the students speak their own mother-tongues have adjusted their teaching.

Local teaching assistants, who speak Thai and the dialects spoken by the students, have been hired to help teachers conduct classes mainly in their dialects instead of in Thai, for Kindergarten 1 and 2 and Prathom 1 (Grade 1) students.

Hmong teacher Patcharaporn Saeyang, 20, speaks to them mainly in their dialect, but the students start to study Thai through its alphabet.

She has them use Thai characters to spell words in the dialect they speak. "Using Thai characters helps me link them to learn Thai language more easily."

Wirat Chatchawanpreecha, 48, the Thai teacher in this class, said: "They are confident answering questions, respond to Patcharaporn, and have the courage to volunteer to join activities in class because Hmong is used as the communication language. They are not forced to speak Thai but I would use gestures and sing in Thai to teach some easy Thai words."

Sakol Intawong, director of the school, said to use gestures with explanations in Hmong and in Thai when teaching them the Thai language was a "total physical response" technique.

"Before doing this project only 60 per cent of Prathom 3 students could read Thai, but now 70-80 per cent can do so, while kindergarten students' development has obviously improved. The use of Hmong in class is reduced gradually when they reach higher levels.

It is replaced by Thai language. We will use a hundred per cent Thai language in class when they reach Prathom 4," he added.

Starting this teaching adjustment for Kindergarten 1 students in 2009, the school has so far provided the same teaching to Kindergarten 2 and Prathom 1. It will extend the teaching to Prathom 2 from next academic year.

In this project, students from the border provinces speak different dialects. At four pilot schools in Chiang Rai they speak a Hmong dialect, at a school in Chiang Mai a Karen dialect, at Kanchanaburi a Mon dialect, at a school in Surin they speak a Khmer dialect and at four other

schools in Yala, Pattani, Narathiwat and Satun speak a local Malay dialect.

"This project could help us prepare children living near the border of the country for the ASEAN Economic Community," Office of Basic Education Commission Deputy Secretary General Benjalug Namfa said.

She cited research that children who had already known two languages would be able to learn the third language more easily. She believed that to learn English as their third language would not be very difficult for them. They were born in multi-cultures - their own, and Thai culture at schools, so they were prepared to live among two cultures, which would help them when they had to adjust themselves to the outside world.

Also, their dialects were similar to Thailand's neighbouring countries' languages so they would understand Thai language clearly and could communicate with citizens from those countries, said Bussaba Prapasapong, senior educator at Bureau of Academic Affairs and Educational

Standards, who oversees this project in the North.

To sustain this helpful project, Bussaba said he would propose Obec adjust regulations to appoint more local teaching assistants who could communicate in both Thai and local dialects. They were really in need. Also, she wanted Obec to allocate more budget to pay them more.

Around Bt4,000 per month was too little.The Foundation for Applied Linguistics has provided them knowledge and training on how to teach using the mother-tongue based multilingual techniques and financial support to hire many of the assistants.

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In hospitals, safety begins with communicatio

Lia Lee, the child of Hmong-speaking parents, died as much from miscommunication as from illness. When Lia was a few months old, she started experiencing seizures. Twice, she was misdiagnosed with pneumonia because her parents couldn't describe her symptoms to her doctors. When she was finally diagnosed, she was prescribed a complex regime of medications that her parents couldn't understand how to administer. With doctors and parents unable to communicate, Lia experienced a grand mal seizure.

Unfortunately, the Lees' experience is not uncommon. According to the 2000 Census, over 21 million Americans speak English less than "very well," and 22.5 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander speakers either don't speak English well or can't speak it at all.

Some people have family members to help them, but that can lead to other problems. If a husband acts as an interpreter for his wife, the doctor will have difficulty asking her about spousal abuse. Even when family members mean well, they are not medical experts and may mistranslate or fail to report every symptom that the patient describes.

In a 2003 study, researchers analyzed 13 patient-doctor encounters that involved an ad hoc translator, such as a nurse, social worker or siblings. On average, these translators made 31 mistakes per encounter. Seventy-seven percent of these errors could have had clinical consequences.

Hospitals can help avoid mistakes by using medical interpreters, or trained professionals who facilitate communication between patients and doctors. Hospitals are required to offer interpreters, but it's an unfunded mandate: only 13 states offer Medicaid reimbursement for interpreters.

"In addition to improving quality of care and patient safety, language services reimbursement would alleviate the financial burden faced by hospitals with a large population of Limited English Proficient patients." said Mursal Khaliif, senior director of multilingual services at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard University Medical School Teaching Hospital in Cambridge, Mass.

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Preserving Hmong Rituals

reserving Hmong Rituals

Bride and groom Crystal Vang and Tom Yang, married in a traditional Hmong
ceremony May, 2011 in Vadnais Heights. Photo: Yeng Lor Photography.

For thousands of years, Hmong marriage and funeral traditions and songs have been passed down from generation to generation.

Txong Pao Lee, who came to St. Paul 26 years ago from a refugee camp in Thailand, wants to make sure those traditions never get lost.

“Hmong kids born in this country can’t always understand Hmong,” said Lee, the executive director of the Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul. “We want to make these traditions accessible for everyone.”

$6,500 from the Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grant Program is making it possible for the Hmong Cultural Center to produce new editions of two books about Hmong marriage and funeral traditions and to translate those books into English. The books will be available in print and for free on the Cultural Center’s website.

“By making these important cultural traditions available to everyone, we are preserving them for many years to come.”
~ Txong Pao Lee, executive director of the Hmong Cultural Center

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