ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Natasha Soolkin, the director of the New American Center in Lynn, talks about the work they do.
It’s almost hidden away on an upper floor in the JB Blood Building near the Lynn YMCA, but the New American Center is a busy hive of offices and classrooms that resembles the United Nations on some days.
People born in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bhutan and other nations scattered around the globe find the Center and its director, Natasha Soolkin, at the end of transworld journeys that are much more than the distance measured by an airplane flight.
Most of the people who come to the Center looking for help finding the path to an education and employment left everything familiar in their lives — homes, villages, loved ones — behind them. Many of them left political terror, unending poverty and natural disasters. They spent months, sometimes years, in refugee camps before being accepted into the multi-layered process that involves coming to the United States as a refugee.
For many of the people seeking help at the Center, their meetings with Soolkin and program teachers are the most humbling and most hopeful experiences they have had in many years. Most of them don’t speak English or must master the language before embarking on an education or starting a job. More than a few have never driven or walked through a supermarket. Their lives, by a broad range of definition, begin again when they climb the four flights of concrete steps to the Center’s offices.
Although they are beginning a new chapter in their lives, the New American Center’s clients are trodding a well-worn path other American newcomers followed from their nations of origin to Lynn. The city’s former factories and the citizenship classes hosted in local classrooms gave these new arrivals a crash course in American values and American opportunity.
More recent arrivals have followed the French, Italian, Irish, Poles and other immigrants into the city. Cambodians, Laotians and Dominicans have staked out lives within Lynn’s borders to be followed by Guatemalans and all the refugees who make up the melting pot bubbling every day in the New American Center.
The people who defined Lynn 200 and 100 years ago are the ancestors of the people taking the first steps in the New American Center on the road to redefining it again.