Enlarge Students play the "Hello Game," where they learn to say "hello" in as many as 35 languages.

Posted: November 4th, 2009 Greg Lacour

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Damaru Baral emigrated from Bhutan to the United States on Nov. 2, 2008, leaving three sons and their children in a Nepalese refugee camp. He spoke no English. He had no real job skills.

A year later to the day, the 52-year-old farmer danced on a stage in the fellowship hall at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Charlotte, singing songs in English with other immigrants like him.

The occasion was the Fall Festival for Central Piedmont Community College’s Family Literacy Program, which teaches basic English-language, GED and job skills to recent immigrants, many of them refugees from countries ravaged by oppression, war or both.

Baral was referred to the class not long after settling in Charlotte, where the International Organization for Migration placed him. He lives here with his wife and two of his children. He said he hopes his three sons in the United Nations refugee camp – ages 20, 22 and 24 – can join him next year. Until then, the CPCC classes are helping him and the family he has in Charlotte adjust.

“It’s good,” he said on Nov. 2. “We don’t know how to speak English, and now we are learning.”

The Family Literacy program is about 10 years old. But in the past two years, it’s expanded its course offerings to concentrate more on language and education skills instead of specific job skills, said Marianne Lyall-Knusel, the program’s coordinator. It used to teach woodworking, for example; that’s useless in this economy.

“A lot of the employment we were preparing them for,” said program English As a Second Language coordinator Jennifer Girard, “has dried up.”

The national makeup of the 120 or so students in the program is changing, too. They’re from all over – Liberia, Poland, Myanmar. But the Bhutanese refugees – Lhotsampa, a group of ethnic Nepalese who claim to have been forcibly expelled from southern Bhutan since the late 1980s – are quickly becoming the largest individual group in the CPCC program, constituting about a third of the student body.

“In Bhutan, there are no human rights,” Baral said. The United States has offered to resettle 60,000 Lhotsampa living in seven refugee camps in Nepal.

The Fall Festival is a get-together to recognize the students and the program’s 22 volunteers. It was scheduled for last week, but bad weather postponed it. So turnout Monday was a little disappointing: about 30 students and four volunteers.

One volunteer is who did show was Sasha Dabney, 26, a Richmond, Va., native and Army Reserve sergeant. Dabney said she had always wanted to volunteer during her college years at Virginia Commonwealth University but never found the time. Now she teaches basic English skills in the literacy program.

“You really see how eager they are to learn,” she said. “I see where I’m really inspiring and helping out, where my tutoring really makes a difference.”

Click here for more info on CPCC’s Family Literacy program.

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