Susie - Friends of Refugees - Bog 2

This morning at Mommy and Me I decided to volunteer with infants. I was rather nervous about this decision because to be honest I’m not exactly the biggest fan of children, especially those with no verbal communication skills. I had also heard from the KU students in the infant room yesterday that there was a lot of babies and a lot of crying the whole entire time, which is not exactly an ideal way to spend three hours. However, when another KU student and I walked in the room was practically silent. Three refugee women, who were all working or volunteering there, had the five babies happy and silent. After all the mothers had gone to classes, we had a couple other babies, but they were all relatively quiet. It was not what I had expected at all. One of the babies was especially impressive as she was energetic, crawling everywhere, and keeping herself entertained. I think I was just so worried about uncontrollable crying that I was worried. It also definitely helped that the refugee women there had superhuman abilities in keeping the babies happy. I would barely be able to manage one baby at a time while they actively monitored three. I was also amazed at the attitude Friends of Refugees set with the program. While separating the mothers from their children, they encouraged for them to spend a couple minutes in the room with their infants or toddlers to acclimate them to the room before leaving for class, eve if that meant they were a couple minutes late. They didn’t want the mothers to feel pressured to separate from their children until the mothers felt they were ready. Also, the organization encouraged the mothers to breastfeed, so if an infant was hungry, we would take the baby to the mother’s classroom, and the mother would come out of class and back to the infant room to breastfeed her baby. We would also pull the mothers out if their children were sick or we felt really needed to be consoled by their mothers. While others might eschew this approach as disruptive to the education of the mothers, I think it was actually the best way to do things. When the mothers were in their classrooms they could focus on studying instead of worrying about their children since they knew that if their children really needed something, we wouldn't hesitate to seek them out. Even if we did have to pull them out, they could return to the classrooms as soon as they breastfed or consoled their child without feeling guilty for taking care of their children or pressured to choose between education and the welfare of their child(ren). Afterwards, I went to volunteer at Cafe Clarkston again.