Refugees of Fort Wayne

Home to a large refugee population, and the largest Burmese community in the US, Fort Wayne, Indiana has experience teaching new arrivals about local culture, as NPR tells us.

Nearly all refugees in Fort Wayne frequent the Refugee Resource Center. It offers services and classes in everything from how to clean a home, to proper indoor plumbing etiquette. These are sometimes new concepts for people who have only lived in rural villages or refugee camps.

While the Refugee Resource Center has focused on the basic building blocks of etiquette and protocol, where are the lessons that provide a deeper level of understanding? How can immigrants and refugees begin to understand the reasons behind typical behaviors in the US without some orientation to its history and values? And, how can those helping refugees from places like Burma, Darfur and Bosnia better understand the culture in which they’ve been socialized? We often receive questions from businesspeople working across cultures like “what should I do and not do?”, and the answer is generally a list of actions or expressions that exist outside of a cultural context. As a result, individuals have to memorize the do’s and don’ts, versus gathering a certain sense of the key values and beliefs of a culture, which informs etiquette, protocol, behavior and more.

The image below was taken inside a laundromat in Fort Wayne, where ethnic Burmese frequent. Betel nut, or the areca nut, is the seed of a palm tree native to many parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. It is chewed, much like tobacco, for it’s effects as a stimulant, much like the effects of drinking coffee. However, the nut is chewed and disposed of, not swallowed. If a coffee-drinking individual were to walk into a laundromat with a sign displaying “No Drinking! No Coffee!”, I believe the person would be compelled to question why the sign existed.

Erika Celeste/NPR

Fort Wayne has won the All-America City title thrice, and the work of the Center is an important resource to refugees. Do you have experience with a similar center? Have you worked with refugees? If so, what are some of their dilemmas in relation to cultural adjustment? Please let us know!

Click here to listen to the NPR story online. Click here to learn more about the tradition of chewing betel nut.

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