The offices of Ecumenical Refugee and Immigration Services reside on the fourth floor of an office building at 16th Avenue and Downing Street. The building is shared by an accountant, an insurance agent and a guy with a sound studio, among others. Like most office buildings, this one is its own hidden universe, glass windows revealing nothing of the life inside.
The elevators open on the fourth floor to reveal a narrow hallway. Depending on the time of day, you may find people lining the hall, sitting or squatting on the floor because the reception area is too crowded.
The staff has tried to give the office some warmth. Framed posters declare an attribute or emotion associated with refugees. Strength. Courage. Hope. Maps of Myanmar and Africa are displayed next to city bus guides. A small banner declares: "Welcome to the U.S.A."
Walk past reception, and you will find a yellow board emblazoned with red lettering: "2009 Refugee Arrivals." These are refugees coming into Denver through Ecumenical Refugee and Immigration Services. January: 44; February: 64; March: 49. September saw the largest number, 98.
Every time Genevieve Cruz leaves her office, she sees this board.
"This year, we've had the largest number of refugees we've seen since September 2001," she says. "We're overwhelmed."
Just before Thanksgiving, I wrote about a 26-year-old Bhutanese refugee named Deg Adhikari. He'd lived in a refugee camp in Nepal for 18 years. He's lived in Denver about two months now. ERIS is the agency helping him with resettlement. It's one of three such agencies doing larger-scale resettlement work here. The others are Lutheran Family Services, just two floors up from ERIS, and the African Community Center.
You could say I was led here by Adhikari's story, by the overwhelmingness of it. It is not just a matter of negotiating a city but the mastering of a thousand minute social cues. We do not shake a woman's hand in my culture, says Adhikari. Ah, but we do here, those aiding in his resettlement tell him. And by the time I met him, he did not hesitate to put his hand forward to grasp mine.
But Adhikari alone did not lead me here. It was also the response to his story. So many good people called or wrote and offered to host him for Thanksgiving, to donate household items, to help him pay off his travel loan, to simply show him the city. I printed the e-mails and gave him the phone numbers.
He read them all, and when he turned back to me, his eyes were full of tears. "I did not know anybody would care about a refugee," he said.
He had Thanksgiving dinner at the east Denver home of Susan Lane and her family. He'd never eaten turkey or cranberry relish or stuffing.
"Very delicious," he told me. "Especially the turkey."
Adhikari is one of many. From October 2008 to October 2009, ERIS resettled 600 families, a 30 percent increase over the previous year. Of those 600, 400 were individuals without family here. The rest were family reunifications.
On Monday morning, Cruz was working on two new cases, a Burmese family and an Iraqi family, both of whom could arrive in the next couple of months.
"My thing is that I fear for many of our refugees because they are so naive to our culture, and also I worry about depression," Cruz said. "So many, they've been in a camp, and they have this shield around them. They get here, and slowly that shield starts to come down, and they start thinking about what they left behind and what they experienced. They have too much alone time. They start thinking, 'What's worse, being here alone, or being there with my family?' You never want that."
My motive here is to steer some of the generosity directed toward Adhikari toward the resettlement agencies.
"We need coats, hats, gloves," Cruz said. "We need assistance with bus passes. We need mentors, volunteers willing to go into their homes, take them grocery shopping or to the park or the library. They just need a friend."
Of course, the biggest need is jobs, but that's tough in this climate. Refugees receive $335 a month from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement for eight months. Out of that stipend, they are expected to pay rent and bills. After that, individuals generally are on their own. Job or no job.
"It's like falling off a cliff," Paul Stein, Colorado Refugee Services director, told me recently. "Eight months is woefully inadequate for helping a family become self-sufficient."
When I leave the office, the reception area is packed. Two men in the hall are speaking to each other in rapid Oromo, an Ethiopian tribal language. They're here to help a friend, they tell me, a Kenyan woman and her three children. They arrived in Denver on Nov. 4.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
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