It has been a busy few years for Marissa Marinello at the Refugee Development Center.
Marinello, an anthropology and Arabic senior, began her tenure at the Refugee Development Center, or RDC, during the spring of her sophomore year.
Starting out as a fresh-eyed volunteer, Marinello quickly applied to intern the following year at the RDC. It was during the second half of that year that she began working with the English as a Secondary Language, or ESL, course programs hosted at the Hill Vocational Center and North Elementary School in Lansing.
“I was lucky because while I was an intern it was in an ESL class, so I got to see how it was taught by the teacher at the time and he really told us a lot about what’s going on and let us help with the lesson plan,” Marinello said. "(He) let us take a lesson and teach it one day so we had experience.”
This hands-on approach helped Marinello easily transition into running her own courses and drawing up her own lesson plans for children and adults. Despite the added responsibility, Marinello said she is more than thrilled to be devoting her time with these programs.
ESL programs are split up into three different tracks — one is for adult refugees, another for young children and, more recently, Marinello and another staff member at the RDC conduct a program for children with higher English proficiency that focuses more on teaching them cultural norms and values in the U.S.
Although the make-up of the Refugee Development Center is a hodgepodge of Iraqi, Burmese, Somalian, Congolese, Nepalese and other ethnic groups, the bonds the children form in spite of their differences is a treasured experience for Marinello.
Not only is Marinello a positive influence on the children, but her impact at the RDC has rubbed off on the other volunteers there.
Caroline Hron Weigle, a comparative cultures and politics, Arabic and women’s and gender studies senior, only recently began volunteering at the RDC. Nevertheless, she spoke highly of Marinello’s work ethic.
“Seeing how she’s gone from intern to staff member and the amount of dedication she has to the work has been pretty inspiring,” Hron Weigle said.
Her passion for refugee work spills over into her future plans. While describing her career goals, Marinello began reflecting on her recent study abroad trip to Morocco this summer.
“There are refugees in Morocco everywhere, everywhere, everywhere and there are no refugee services like there are in Lansing,” she said. “In Meknes, Morocco, where I was living, which is a city of one million so it’s pretty big, but there literally refugees all over the place trying to make ends meet and I would really love to be able to work with refugees abroad in a country like Morocco or maybe in Europe.”
Above all else, Marinello hopes to work in cultural adjustment and language acquisition for refugees before they reach the U.S.
Doing so, she hopes, would alleviate much of the anxiety that comes with uprooting oneself and moving to a totally new country and accompanying cultural differences.
