Grant to help Laotians ‘tell their story’
With an eye to the city’s diversity, Heritage Harbor Foundation offers up $10,000 grant to Laotian center
WOONSOCKET — The local Museum of Work & Culture tells the story of immigrants who came to the city to start new lives and build a community.
That story is the same for many different ethnic groups coming to Woonsocket, and it can also be found in the story of the local Laotian community, with some notable challenges those coming from Laos had to overcome in reaching Rhode Island and Woonsocket.
Now, thanks to Heritage Harbor Foundation and its grant program for Rhode Island history, local Laotians and their extended family in the state will be recording their stories with the help of a $10,000 grant.
Albert R. Beauparlant and City Councilwoman Denise Sierra turned over a check for the funding award to members of Laotian Community Center of Rhode Island during a gathering outside the Museum of Work & Culture on Friday.
The fund will be used to help preserve
the stories of the first Laotians fleeing their war-torn nation in the 1970s and ’80s and making their way to refugee camps in nearby Thailand before eventually arriving in Rhode Island.
“Your stories will tell of your flight and plight to make to the land of freedom and come here to Woonsocket, the most diverse city of its kind, and broaden its diversity even more,” Beauparlant said.
The $10,000 in grant funding was awarded after members of the Laotian Community Center filed a grant application listing their goal of preserving Laotian traditions and culture through education, youth development, leadership and community service, according to Beauparlant.
“The grant is really to help get them going in telling the story of how people came to Rhode Island in late 1970s while fleeing the war in Southeast Asia,” he said. The Harbor Foundation gives out about $400,000 annually for cultural events and preserving the history of the different ethnic and cultural groups in Rhode Island, Beauparlant noted.
After learning about the grant award to the Laotian community, Sierra said she took the time to familiarize herself with the journey Laotians made to arrive in Rhode Island and Woonsocket and found it had been a very difficult one.
“I want to thank you because through your pain and suffering our lives have become richer, our communities more diversified, our views of the world broadened, and of course our eyes opened. More important than all of it, is that our hearts became open and empathetic to the suffering of others,” she said.
“Our faith tells us we are all one. Therefore when we help our brothers and sisters, we help ourselves,” Sierra said. “This check being presented to you today symbolizes that. So it is with great honor that I present this to you today through the kindness and courtesy of your brothers and sisters at the Heritage Harbor Foundation,” Sierra said.
Dee Ratsapho of Woonsocket, one of the community members accepting the Heritage Harbor Foundation grant on Friday, said the funding will help retell the many difficulties Laotians faced in coming to Rhode Island.
For her own family, the first step was fleeing Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand. Her mother, Laky, made the journey with the four youngest of her seven children while her father Nhong, a former lieutenant colonel, remained held in a re-education camp in Laos. An aunt had taken one of her older siblings out and two others had made their way to new lives in France.
For the rest of her family, the conditions were unbearable. “There was little food and water, and no medicine,” Ratsapho said of her arrival in the refugee camp at the age of 5 or 6. “They gave you a bowl of rice but it was for the whole family,” she said.
After spending six months in the camp, her family was sponsored by a Nazarene Church in Oregon and brought to the United States. After living in Oregon for six years, Ratsapho’s father was able to escape and joined his family there as well. “Everyone who left Laos had to escape,” she said.
Her own mother had to swim in the Mekong River between the two countries with her children to make it to the refugee camp, she said.
After their time in Oregon, Ratsapho, 44, said her family finally arrived in Woonsocket in 1989 and she started going to school at the middle school as a teenager. She would go on to graduate from Woonsocket High School and then Johnson & Wales University. Today she does tax preparation with her husband Phetpaseuth in their small business.
“So I am living proof that you can beat the odds,” Ratsapho said.
Ratsapho believes not a lot of Rhode Islanders know the real story about the difficulties Laotians faced in coming to the state and also believes the grant will help change that.
“It is important to tell our stories and I encourage everyone to tell our stories,” she said.
Another of the community members, Somphone Sayasit, said she too started out in a refugee camp after her family was kept in Thailand just before her birth even though they were to have made the journey to the U.S. before that.
“I was born in there in 1982,” she said.
Her family, her parents and three siblings, were eventually brought by missionaries to North Carolina and then moved to San Diego and other cities in California for a time.
“We came to Rhode Island in 1995 and we had family in Woonsocket,” Sayasit said. “We were just supposed to visit but my parents said, ‘Why visit, we’ll just move here,’” she said. It was the right move, she said. “I love this city.”
Even today, Sayasit says she loves Woonsocket’s diversity and the way it offers a path to a better life.
After high school, Sayasit went to Rhode Island College, where she earned her degree in social work. Today she works for Esperanza Counseling in Providence and is continuing her education. “I’m taking a trauma training class at Boston University right now and people have asked my why I would do that. I tell them it is because of my history,” Sayasit said.