Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
If you follow this blog you might remember reading about the experience a volunteer helping refugees from Myanmar had with the Bowling Green International Center. Cindy Florez, who I spoke to and corresponded with in 2009 and 2010, met the refugees in a refugee camp when she was in Thailand and later drove to Bowling Green to welcome them when they arrived for resettlement. There, she found her friends living in filthy, rundown apartments, overrun with massive cockroach infestations – and commented about the problems on a website. Later, bringing the refugees a carload of donated items she was greeted by a hostile landlord (apparently a Burmese individual, and friend of the Institute?) who ordered her off the property, using the police to illegally remove her from the property (tenants may chose who their guests are, not landowners or police). A mystery person in the building also threw M-80 firecrackers at Florez and her female Karenni interpreter.
Now, two years after we placed a request with the State Department’s FOIA office for that public agency’s monitoring inspections reports of the private resettlement agencies for late 2008 and early 2009, the office has finally responded with a few reports. One of those reports is a March 31-April 1, 2009 inspection of the Bowling Green International Center. It turns out that the State Department monitors were able to conduct the rare once-in-5-or-10-year-inspection without discovering any of the problems that Florez documented in writing and on video (monitors did not find any infestation, even though two of the refugee cases they visited reported these). So, what went wrong?
That remains for the State Department monitors to explain, although their office has frequently repeated that they act only as a “partner” to their resettlement contractors. Even with that lack of authority in the oversight relationship I think it still remains for them to explain why they will not investigate any of the individual cases reported by members of the public and the community (instead, they selected only the usual small random sample, four refugee cases in this case, for home visits).
Part of what probably went wrong was an extensive clean-up before the monitors’ arrival, after the community member caught this resettlement contractor providing substandard services. No doubt other problems include the rarity of the monitorings and the great weight given to resettlement contractors’ own written records as “proof” of services they provided.
Finally, I notice that the report states that this refugee resettlement agency “reports a collaborative relationship with the state refugee coordinator” without mentioning that the “state” refugee coordinator is just another private refugee resettlement contractor – Catholic Charities of Louisville.
