Week 1 of Kovler

The Marjorie Kovler Center is a small division of Heartland Alliance, a refugee assistance program. The Kovler Center is located in a residential neighborhood, and the building itself is a old convent (which means I both live and work in convents). Many nonprofit programs have bought old convents due to the decline in the number of religious men and women.

The Kovler Center is composed of 19 full-time staff and countless volunteers. Funding largely comes from both the Federal Government as well as several donors. Whenever a client is admitted to the center, the services are available for life. Therefore our center technically serves almost 1,500 people but we typically see about 300 clients in a year. I was shocked by these numbers but even more shocked to learn that torture occurs in over 100 countries (out of 195). The geographical diversity of our clients is staggering.

Now that the technical stuff is out of the way, the Kovler Center seems to center around contradictions. We serve among the most traumatized people in the world yet the work place is very warm and lively. I absolutely love the staff. I work under a Guatemalan immigrant who is among the warmest people I've ever met, and my immediate coworkers are 4 other case managers that are all trilingual. It makes my mediocre French seem pretty pathetic, but the staff and clients appreciate any language skills you possess.

The case managers provide 15 basic services on a rotational basis with each case manager assigned to 3 tasks. For the next three months, I will work with primary care, medicaid and billing. Most of my time is spent scheduling patients with our volunteer doctors and nurse practitioners or calling the local clinic to schedule blood work and EKGs for our clients. The clinic recently passed a rule stating that free services would only be provided to the homeless in the area, and initially, we thought this restriction threatened to deny services to many of our clients. In reality, however, it turned out that most asylum seekers are forced to live with relatives or friends of friends which is technically considered homeless by the federal definition. Asylum seekers strictly do not have the funds to afford housing.

Side note: in case you were curious, I learned the difference between refugees and asylum seekers. Refugees are taken care of by the UN. Normally, large numbers of people will flee a war zone and the UN will place them in other countries. These people will obtain all necessary paperwork through the UN and will be eligible to work once they reach the United States. Asylum seekers, on the other hand, technically enter the country illegally. They tend to be persecuted individuals that had to be smuggled out of the country into another. If they are arrested by immigration services, an immigrant can ask for asylum status. Unlike the illegal immigrants who come for employment, asylum seekers are not immediately deported and are allowed to demonstrate why returning to their country is out of the question. Asylum seekers that we see are 97% successful in their efforts to obtain asylum status because evidence of torture almost always convinces an immigrant judge that asylum is needed. However, the process is long and complicated. Asylum seekers normally wait anywhere from 2 to 10 years before becoming legal and occasionally are not allowed to work until becoming legal.

The work itself is engaging because it is almost non-stop problem solving. Case managers are always trying to find services until the asylum seekers become legal and make it on their own. Most of the services involve housing and, most importantly, psychiatric counseling. Torture is used to empower the government by weakening the individuals that challenge it. The Kovler Center's primary goal is to empower all those that seek services. People who are tortured often completely lose their trust in people as well as their own identity. Both need to be restored if any healing is to take place. I should admit that my work does not directly involve psychiatric work so most of my information comes from The Blindfold's Eyes. Once again, if you are interested in the psychological effects of torture I cannot stress this book enough. It has been a great resource during my first week as I get to know some of my clients.