Growing up, Kara Schreiber had a speech defect that made it difficult for others to understand her. Every year her school paired her with a neighbor in her class who understood her well enough to translate when she tried to pronounce her name or communicate with others.
“I had an empathy for people who were trying to say something and nobody knew what the heck they were saying,” Schreiber said.
She later became a volunteer for Literacy Volunteers of Bangor, beginning in 1977, as a tutor for people learning English as a second language, and then later trained those tutors.
She and Nancy Connor, another volunteer, have tutored dozens of people, from Vietnamese immigrants fleeing the war in the 1970s to new residents from countries like Pakistan, Burma, Laos and Cambodia who wanted to learn enough English to navigate bureaucratic processes like applying for a driver’s license or speaking with their doctors during medical appointments.
Connor began tutoring students in 1992, and later became a tutor trainer, working with dozens of people from countries like Brazil, Ukraine and China.
Both she and Schreiber have volunteered for Literacy Volunteers of Bangor for a collective 75 years, as the organization grew from its roots as a 12-person volunteer agency to its current legacy as one that helps New Mainers integrate into the Bangor community.
Some 15 refugees from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are expected to begin moving to the Bangor area in September after Catholic Charities Maine’s parent organization received federal permission last year to establish Bangor as a refugee resettlement city.
Catholic Charities is hiring staff to set up an office in Brewer and expects to resettle those 15 refugees in Bangor by late September, spokesperson Kathy Mockler said earlier this month.
Most refugees in Maine have settled in southern Maine cities, like Portland, but a burgeoning housing crisis has forced city staff to rethink that strategy.
The Maine Multicultural Center, a Bangor-area coalition of community organizations that is helping the resettlement process, identified Literacy Volunteers as one of the agencies to refer refugees to for help with services like literacy and language training, according to Literacy Volunteers’ executive director, Mary Marin Taylor.
Literacy Volunteers also helps people prepare for citizenship tests and other goals that people learning English may set for themselves.
That includes other cultural education that isn’t easily taught, like how to enroll a child in school or about American customs like dinner party etiquette.
One woman from Macau whom Schreiber taught went from learning English via wordless picture books to getting her driver’s license, earning a general education diploma and opening her own business.
“You can easily become an advocate for them,” Connor said. “In a sense, you’re saying, ‘Here are some resources I can give you,’ or, ‘Here’s where you can contact somebody in social services, who would be able to steer you in the right direction.’”
