At one Vermont elementary school, Somali children, Saint
Michael’s students, faculty and teachers are discovering more about each other than they expected.
By Mark Tarnacki
Photographs by Andy Duback
A 6-foot-9-inch Saint Michael’s College varsity basketball player from Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and a tiny first-grade Somali Bantu boy sit side by side on kid-sized chairs in the Champlain Elementary School library in Burlington’s South End. It’s lunchtime, and they’re playing a matching game with animal-picture cards between bites of the food they have just picked up together in the cafeteria.
“The first time we played, Ahmed was winning but felt bad that I wasn’t winning enough, so every time I got a pair, he would stand up and clap and give me a big hug, even though we’d just met,” remembers Sebastian Brandstetter ’11, whose regular visits here fulfill the service-learning component of his anthropology studies. The experience does more than complete a class requirement, though; it has touched his heart and changed his life.
“I’ve learned more coming here than I ever could by just sitting in a college lecture hall, even though I love my on-campus classes too,” said Brandstetter, a popular presence known to the Champlain kids as just “Mr. B” or sometimes “Michael Phelps” because of his passing resemblance to the Olympic gold medalist. As he walks the halls with little Ahmed, children call out, giggle and swarm him seeking high-fives, which he gladly delivers.
Champlain staff said Brandstetter, son of a German father and Quebec-born mother, has been a perfect match at a school with an ethnically diverse population including newly resettled immigrants from Africa, Europe, Asia and Latin America. (For their productive partnership, the college and elementary school were presented the Engaged Community Partner Award at the 2009 Vermont Campus Compact Conference in Burlington April 1.)
As Brandstetter began applying observation skills learned in Delaney’s Introduction to Anthropology class, small things started to make big impressions on him. The Bantu children’s unselfconscious tactile warmth was an endearing if unfamiliar cultural norm, but other observations were more unsettling. “You look at fingernails, and some have stains from nutrient deficiency which clearly means they were hungry at some point in their lives. I remember seeing that and it was very real,” said Brandstetter.
Chaska Richardson M’01, the most involved member of the partnership as Champlain’s teacher of English language learners (ELL), described the severe conditions Bantu refugees experienced before coming to Vermont.
“These Bantu students’ parents spent, in some cases, 14 to 15 years in refugee camps in Kenya, so the children were all born and grew up in those camps. They didn’t have any education when they came, hadn’t lived with any amenities like running water or electricity and didn’t have enough food. All they knew was this stagnant life of just waiting,” she said. They also speak a Somali dialect that has no written language, and so had never read or written anything before coming to school.
Given their background, the children’s rapid assimilation, evident in their easy interactions with Nimo Girreh, Champlain’s family liasion for the Somali families, and with Brandstetter and other visiting Saint Michael’s students, has been remarkable. “Just watching as they change emotionally, socially and academically is pretty exciting,” Richardson said.
When they first arrived at the school several years ago, Champlain’s Bantu children were “over-stimulated and overemotional about everything,” exhibiting mostly “survival behavior” from the refugee camps, but now they are observably calm and happy as they mix more easily with American-born students. Richardson said they understand the importance of school and literacy and successfully navigate what amounts to “dual lives,” since Bantu families are very tight-knit and adhere to old traditions at home, though the children embrace American customs at school.
Brandstetter said he enjoys engaging the children on a simple human level with the luxury of not being their disciplinarian, but he scrupulously defers to the school’s professionals on formal education matters. “I see myself as a mentor. I’m learning who these kids are, listening to what they have to say and having fun with them,” he said.
What began as just a class requirement fast became the highlight of his weekly routine, Brandstetter said, broadening his world view and focusing his life direction. Before his initial semester at Champlain, he was unsure of a major much less his post-college plans, but recently he made the decision to major in sociology/anthropology.
“I’ve realized that in any future job I have, I want to be meeting people in new cultures. I don’t think I’m going to spend hours in an office all day,” he said. “Now I know this is what I want to learn while I’m at college, so I’m taking it a step further.”
After their lunchtime matching game, Brandstetter and Ahmed read a picture-book about trucks and heavy equipment before a group of older fifth grade boys, also Somali Bantu, pull up chairs at the low table to resume a running color-coded card game they always play with Mr. B. As they play and chat, Brandstetter asks them about their day, steering conversations toward teachable moments about good behavior. Whenever the boys ask, he takes time to patiently explain new words and phrases that arise in conversation.
Brandstetter later relates a story of a playground incident he witnessed between a Somali boy and a local kid: “The Somali boy was just standing there not saying a word while the other kid is yelling and screaming, and it’s obvious, this is nothing to him. That’s what really hit me: that he’s seen a lot worse so this kid is no threat to him besides maybe just physically hurting him a little bit. Any other kid would have taken a swing or been scared.”
Another time he was reading a book about birds to a boy who started telling Brandstetter about how he used to trap birds. “Eventually I realized that he wasn’t talking about doing that just for sport, like my buddies and I might have done with bird-hunting back home. He was doing it for food to survive.”
Delaney said life-altering experiences like Brandstetter’s are common for her students who partner for community service either at Champlain or one of two other Burlington sites that serve refugee and low-income families: King Street Youth Center and the Visiting Nurse Association Family Room. Service is a requirement for every member of her introductory course, which usually has about 25 students, mostly first-years and sophomores.
She requires everybody to keep journals about their field work, and their entries affirm her belief in service-learning. Some samples: “I didn’t know that stories I read in books could actually be happening to families in Burlington” wrote one student last semester. “The students of Champlain Elementary taught me more about community and diversity in one semester than I had learned in my entire life,” shared another. Despite being extremely busy with basketball practice all year, Brandstetter said his Champlain visits became important enough that he continued volunteering there for a second semester even after Delaney’s course ended, arranging for academic credit through a more-advanced class within the sociology and anthropology department, which collaborates on and shares a commitment to service learning.
Serving to Learn, Learning to Serve
Richardson said Champlain’s anthropology partnership with Saint Michael’s was born at a farmer’s market in Richmond about four years ago when she ran into Kusserow, who was there selling Ugandan dolls to benefit a school that she’d helped launch for girls in Sudan.
“I was so glad to see those dolls and buy some for our students,” Richardson said, “because when the Somali kids first came they had made it clear that they saw few representations of people who look like them, this being such a white homogenous state. It was an eye-opener for me when a little girl said, ‘you don’t have any dolls that look like me.’ I hadn’t even considered that.”
Kusserow and Richardson talked about the Somali Bantu children at Champlain, and then Kusserow spoke to Delaney, knowing her department was actively exploring sociology and anthropology service-learning possibilities. Richardson and Delaney talked and liked the possibilities theycould envision, so they moved forward with planning to make the
partnership happen.
Both Delaney and Richardson attribute the success of their four semesters partnering to the relationship’s balanced reciprocal nature since students from both schools clearly learn and profit greatly from their encounters. Richardson also praised Delaney’s skillful organization and accountability protocols. She likes that no more than 10 students work at Champlain (or the other two sites) each semester, making it more manageable and meaningful and offering ample opportunity to process and reflect.
Richardson majored in anthropology as an undergraduate and, as a result, greatly enjoys helping students process their thought-provoking journaling topics. She also graduated from the Saint Michael’s Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) master’s program.
Delaney has traveled the world as an anthropologist, teaching in East Timor on a Fulbright Scholarship and consulting in many other nations in her specialty area of gender and international development. Her anthropology degrees are from Georgetown University and UCLA, and she has done service learning “in virtually every class I’ve ever taught. I’m a real advocate for the approach,” she said. “I think there’s a real synergy that develops between learning objectives and service objectives.”
Delaney said it feels natural for so-called “applied anthropologists” like herself and Kusserow to send students into field situations like at Champlain, since most of their own projects as professional anthropologists are not simply academic exercises, but instead also have integral practical applications designed to help the populations being studied.
“It makes sense at a small liberal arts college like Saint Michael’s that the anthropologists would do exactly the sorts of things that reinforce and support our mission of social justice, hospitality, and engagement in the world as a Catholic college,” said Delaney.
Since arriving in Vermont in the fall of 2006, Delaney has devoted considerable time reaching out to community agencies while actively mining service-learning ideas from colleagues and collaborating with Joan Wagner, coordinator of academic programming, service-learning, peer-tutoring and writing proficiency.
“I approached it as an anthropologist heading out to a village in the jungle somewhere; what we anthropologists call participant observation,” Delaney said of her foundational work for the Champlain Elementary partnership and others. She said her initial mission was to “find a community partner or partners who had an unmet need that our students could fill, and that wasn’t just busy work.”
Each semester she has tried different mixes of agencies, at first more than three, in which to place students for performing service, always tweaking the program based on what worked best until it evolved into the present three solidly reciprocating partners.
She requires each student to visit his or her partner agency for 24 hours per semester, which breaks down to about two hours a week, and she stringently evaluates attendance and emphasizes the responsibility each student has to the partner agency. “It’s not expected to be anything terribly technical. They serve as a buddy, help with homework, read a book, or discuss family life,” she said. Then in class later everybody makes sense of it all by utilizing more formal anthropological approaches.
“This teaches you that you can be useful in a real-world setting and make a difference in social services, or through a club or a synagogue or a diocese,” said Delaney, who speaks of a desirable maturation process she calls “de-exotification.” That can refer to the way personal interactions can make an exotically different foreign culture seem more approachable and human to a middle-class American student, or conversely, the way that same interaction can make a previously exotic college culture seem more accessible to refugees.
Richardson said Delaney’s students who come to Champlain are at first “unsure how coming to an American elementary school could help them gain information about other cultures,” but soon they realize what a diverse city Burlington is and see how directly it applies to their studies. Delaney said her students experience all the anxieties that she might encounter in a professional visit to a remote village on an overseas continent, wondering if the people being observed will like them, afraid they might give offense.
“At Champlain, most of them can’t get over how diverse the school is – brown and black and Asian and white, poor and rich, Bantu girls wearing head scarves or Asian refugees wearing hand-woven traditional clothing, and so many languages spoken, close to 20. They have flags up of every country of origin at the school and poster displays of customs, and they play music from all over.”
Delaney said the most powerful outcome she observes from service learning is “simply an awareness of and respect for cultural diversity, but they also realize at the end of the day that we’re all human and a lot more alike than we are different.” Specifically, she is gratified when witnessing “first-ever consciousness about class differences, structural poverty, racism or structural barriers for advancement.”
Richardson said an important outcome from her perspective is that refugee children can see and consider that college might be an option for them in their own lives once they get to know college students personally, which might not happen without the program.
It has been a real kick for Brandstetter to see some of his Champlain Elementary buddies at his Saint Michael’s home basketball games in the stands cheering for him a few times. And during the time they spend together at school, the children are refreshingly unafraid to express their feelings.
“You’ll be sitting there, and from behind they’ll give you a big hug and it’s the best feeling ever,” he said. “You don’t get that in our society too much today. I know I never really did that when I was little. You realize they are real kids who just have a rough story.”
Brandstetter said he is looking forward to taking a more advanced Saint Michael’s anthropology class in which students visit local refugee families in their home to give them even deeper insights into the culture while forging stronger bonds between the college and the local refugee community.
“I feel like a junior anthropologist when I do these visits,” he said. “You can read an anthropology book or a book about another culture as many times as you want, but until you experience it with the people or you go see for yourself, it’s just another page in a book.”
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Who are the Somali Bantu?
The Bantu are descendants of people taken in the Indian Ocean Slave Trade from Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique in previous centuries, and they are a persecuted minority in Somalia. The Bantu have little formal education and low literacy with almost no exposure to modern Western life or any of its most basic amenities, as they come from a rural farming region along a river in Somalia.
Many were in refugee camps in Kenya for 10 years or more after they fled persecution that escalated during civil war that followed a 1991 Somalian regime collapse.
In 1992, the Bantu began to flee to the horrendously crowded refugee camps in Kenya where life was still dangerous and hard, with Bantus forced into the hardest labor jobs in the camps, reflecting their generally subservient imposed place in Somalian society.
At the initiative of international organizations, notably the United Nations, the quota for refugees to be resettled in the U.S. as agreed to by the government is about 70,000 annually.
The Somali Bantu resettlement in Chittenden County began with the arrival of the first six in 2003, with many more starting to arrive by 2004. There are about 125 Somali Bantu students in the Burlington School district
Vermont is not unusual in its role in resettling refugees. Other communities in the region doing so include Manchester, New Hampshire; Portland, Maine; Utica and Syracuse, New York, and Springfield, Massachusetts.
