Welcoming Families from Around the World

I actually do not have to make up a family for this exercise. I am currently experiencing a family for a “new” country. Last June (2014) I was made aware that starting in July I would be having a little girl from Haiti in my class. The only thing I really knew about Haiti was that it is a tropical island and there was a hurricane there are few years back. I could picture in my head what a “typical” Haitian looked like as well. At the initial meeting with the family I asked about their native language. I learned that this family spoke Haitian Creole. My first thought was “oh no, how am I going to communicate with this family.” There was a family friend along at the meeting that spoke English and he said that he would be my “contact” person (after a month his phone was out of service and I never heard back from him). After the initial meeting I did some research on Haitian Creole, just to see what more familiar language was closest to it and that is French. I was thinking if worse comes to worse, I can always try to write a note home in French (thank you google translator!)

 Once the little girl started in my classroom, in July, I realized she was speaking some Haitian Creole, so I looked up simple phrases like "hello", "goodbye," and "thank you", just so the little girl would not feel completely out of place. I also started the search for a Haitian Creole interpreter in the event one was needed (as previously mentioned that took forever to get approval for). Since I was not immediately successful with obtaining an interpreter I had to think outside the box. I had a friend in high school that moved to Haiti with his family for a few years and I got in contact with him to see if his parents would be willing to help me if needed. I learned that they are no longer living in the area, so that resource was not going to work.

I was pretty much stuck at this point (September) and very frustrated because I knew nothing about this little girl or her family, and not because I didn’t want to learn about them. This feeling went on for months and in December things finally started to click. For the last few months I have learned so much about this girl and her family and their "story." This little girl was just diagnosed with Autism through my preschool program and the social worker for our program and I (and the interpreter) are going to be sitting down with mom in two weeks to talk about what is next for this family. It is very apparent through our conversations that she needs help with this little girl and in life. It is my goal to get this family as much help as they need and provide them with resources so that when this child goes to kindergarten in the fall everything will be set up as best as possible.