RESPECT International Blog

by Luba Salam

Donna Graham is a sixth grade teacher in Detroit, Michigan, USA, who, over the past 18 years, has taught in diverse communities. She is teaching world history this year and feels refugee-related subjects would be a good fit to the curriculum.

She found RESPECT International as part of a link from her school website and identified well with the mission of the organization. Donna believes that collaborating with RESPECT and through its letter exchange program she, along with her students, can better learn about refugees, their lives and their issues as well as how local and international policies affect refugees.

Donna’s class is participating in a letter exchange program with some Liberian refugee students. According to her, building bridges among young people is very important and she looks forward to having a great relationship with their new pen friends in Liberia.

She and her students are very excited about making new friends and Donna feels the letters will make her lessons about global matters less abstract for the students. She wants them to understand that there are real people who are affected positively and negatively by the decisions of their governments and private businesses.

Her students have already received letters from the Liberian students. The letters were short; most stated their names, ages and tribes and a few told what their hobbies were.

But the Detroit students have responded with longer letters. At the same time they were sensible enough to make sure they didn’t end up bragging while talking about themselves.

As one of the students mentioned: “I did not want them to think I was bragging ’cause I had a new Xbox and bunch of new games.”

Donna had a discussion with them on the importance of ideas and not just material stuff.

In collaboration with RESPECT, Donna would like to support not only the letter writing effort, but also the efforts to raise awareness by introducing the organization to others in her school and encouraging them to write letters. She also has plans for arranging fundraiser activities. Her goals also include reminding other teachers to address the refugee issues when they teach, as it could be incorporated into any subject.

Donna thinks RESPECT can be more far reaching and effective with a major effort to increase awareness of the issue. She feels it is so easy to get caught up in life’s day-to-day demands, that issues like this get pushed to the side until they affect us directly.

When she began discussing this organization with other teachers she found that they were interested in knowing more. She is hopeful that her class will continue writing when they leave her for seventh grade.