Project R.I.S.E. Offer Friendship to African Refugees

SALEM, Mass - Towards the start of the year, on January 16th, Project R.I.S.E., a Canton Community Problem Solvers Team, traveled from their hometown to Salem, Massachusetts to meet refugee families from South Sudan, Iraq and Eritrea. Their motive is to integrate and refugees into society and education through their hard work. They donated eight big boxes of supplies which contained clothes, books and school supplies, which they have collected during a donation drive in the Canton High School for this purpose. During these meetings, the team tried their best to make the families feel comfortable and offered to help in anyway possible. Overall, they tried to solve their problems and fulfill their needs by carefully listening to them. With care and generosity, Project R.I.S.E. treated them as friends and were more than happy to hear each and every family member’s story. They worked with Pamela Robbins, a volunteer from an organization called Catholic Charities to make the families feel welcomed and familiar with our society.

Project R.I.S.E. were able to see through the eyes of refugees and got a sense of what it’s like to live under such circumstances. From meeting the refugees, they came up with more ideas on how they could make the transition to American society easier and how to encourage the Canton community to be more open towards accepting refugees. The Canton Community Problem Solvers Team took the family’s suggestions and needs into consideration to help complete their mission of integrating refugees into society and education.

For more information on Project R.I.S.E., please visit projectRISE1617.weebly.com. Like them on Facebook @projectrise2016 and follow them on Twitter @project_RISE_!

This meeting was organized by the Project R.I.S.E. team that includes: Anvitha Addanki, Eli Julier-Albert, Leianna Brune, Srimayi Chaturvedula, Michael Mazzola, Ashna Patel, Sinead Qiu, Elizabeth Seto and James Vo.