SALT LAKE CITY — Teen refugees associated with the Hser Ner Moo Welcome Center in Salt Lake City set up an assembly line to stock backpacks with donated school supplies for other teen refugees in Salt Lake City at the Columbus Center April 20. Youthlinc’s Real Life in Salt Lake City’s service project sponsored the event and Catholic Community Services refugees were among the beneficiaries. "The teen refugees we work with have been in Utah for about a year, and they vividly remember coming to Utah and starting school not knowing English or having the necessary school supplies," said Lisa Moynihan, Youthlinc Real Life in SLC intern and 2008 graduate of Juan Diego Catholic High School. "Real Life, in its third year, has partnered with the Hser Ner Moo Welcome Center to also provide valuable lessons in handling finances, health and hygiene, handling emotions and also a low-stress environment in which to practice English. The Real Life mentoring program is designed to help refugee youth become acculturated to life in Salt Lake City by forming friendships with youth of the same age." Peter Dusenge, a refugee from the Congo, came to Utah from a refugee camp in Uganda. "Youthlinc helped me make friends, learn English and how to behave," he said. Moynihan said the Real Life mentoring project means a lot to her because seeing the teens grow as individuals and develop friendships with each other and the volunteers is very powerful. "I see them transition from being a new person in this country, some of them not even literate in their own language, to becoming an American teenager." Youthlinc was founded in 1999 by Judy Zone, executive director, after she took her daughter Sara on a high school graduation trip to Kenya. Sara and her friends had volunteered to feed the homeless under the viaduct in Salt Lake City every Sunday morning the last two years of high school. "In Kenya, we got to know a lot of very impoverished people," Zone said. "And because my daughter had such a background in local service and I’m a school teacher, raised with Catholic social justice values and I knew how valuable it would be if I got young people to do service internationally. But I know it’s important for them to take ownership, so I require them to do 200 service hours locally, attend monthly meetings to plan tasks for their international service site and earn their sponsorship. In return for their service, the students earn between $600 and $1,000 in sponsorship toward a service mission." Moynihan will travel to Peru with Youthlinc this summer after her graduation from the University of Utah in history. In Peru she will be a mentor for the vocational committee. "We will teach women in the community how to make soap to use and possibly to sell in the market," she said. "We hope to find the products in Iquitos, near Yanamono, where we will be in the Amazon Rain Forest. "Our team will also do small business loans especially for fish hatcheries, which we will also help construct while we are there," said Moynihan. "Every student on the Youthlinc trip is also required to teach a lesson in the elementary schools while we are there, so we will be teaching health lessons to the community." Moynihan went with Youthlinc to Kenya in 2010. "There is such a wonderful cultural exchange on these trips that occurs between the teens and the local people," she said "We go there with our projects, but it’s always us who gets more out of trip; we learn so much about the culture and interact with them and that is so powerful. It helps us mature into well-rounded adults."
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