MANCHESTER, NH – When Tram Fultz’s family came over to America as political refugees from Vietnam, she felt isolated, unable to communicate with those around her as she didn’t know English.
“One of my earliest core memories actually is of sitting in a classroom and not understanding what was happening at all [or] what was even going on because school in America was much different than school in Vietnam,” she said.
“I actually remember being outside during recess and I was basically by myself because I didn’t know anyone, and I actually remember looking at the window and seeing my reflection and realizing that I didn’t look like anyone else and not being able to speak the language,” Fultz said.
“I think that that’s one of the things that motivates me in my work for language services,” she added. “Just how isolating that experience was to not understand the language [or] how to navigate. But that experience really shaped who I am and who I became, and how I navigate my life. That core memory helped me to want to do the work that I’m doing.”
Fultz runs the language services department at the International Institute of New England (IINE), a resettlement organization that supports immigrants and refugees. With locations in Massachusetts and Manchester, IINE provides humanitarian relief, English language learning, skills training, employment, and legal services.
The language services department offers interpretation and translation services to hundreds of clientele, including IINE staff, external clients and nonprofit partners.
“My team especially, they really go the extra mile when it comes to providing services because for most of my team, English is not their mother tongue. They have a different language they were born with,” Fultz said. “Their experience with interpretation is very much like my own experience with not being able to communicate and wanting to make sure that the people that they work with are able to [have] a voice.”
This is true for interpreter and translator Colette Ramazani, who came to New Hampshire in 2000.
After the death of her parents when she was a toddler, Ramazani was raised by her siblings in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
With hundreds of languages spoken in DRC, Ramazani spoke five: French – the national language – Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Lega – her tribe language – and Lingala.
In school she took an English class which taught British English.
“I hated English class,” she said. “I was saying I will never use this language because I will never leave my country at all. So why do I have to bother myself to learn this language? But you never know where life will take you in this world.”
In 1994, genocide started in Rwanda, causing refugees to relocate to DRC. Upon arriving in Ramazani’s hometown of Bukavu and Goma, the new Rwandan regime followed them, inciting war in DRC.
Ramazani left Congo to escape the war, first going to Uganda, Ethiopia, then Newark, before arriving in New Hampshire to live with her sister who had moved here before the war for school and was working as a professor in Manchester.
“The experience was harder than I expected,” she said. “I thought there would maybe be people to help translate and interpret things. Unfortunately, [that’s] not what I got and I was struggling in the beginning.”
After being fired from her first job due to not knowing English, Ramzani became frustrated and depressed.
“I was sometimes afraid to go to the doctor’s appointment because I was just feeling like, I’m gonna be traumatized again, not knowing if the doctor [will] understand what I’m saying,” she said. “I needed to push myself so hard to learn English and try to adapt myself to the new country. And I never received interpretation services anywhere I went.”
Over time, Ramazani learned English through conversation with friends, TV shows, and as a student at IINE herself in 2002. In 2019, she returned to IINE to offer translation and interpretation services.
“It’s not a job that pays my bills, but I understand the pain my people are going through being in a new country,” she said. “I see each one of them like myself. I see each woman like my mother. I see each man as my father.”
Fultz says that having an organization like IINE when she moved to America would have been a complete gamechanger, and would have allowed her to retain her Vietnamese culture.
“When my family first came here, it was all about trying to integrate as quickly as we could,” she said. “We were trying desperately to immerse ourselves in American culture.”
Being the oldest of four children, Fultz says she is able to understand the Vietnamese language, but her siblings aren’t able to use it at all.
“We don’t really have that aspect of our culture, and I think that we really regret that,” she said. “With an organization like IINE, where you have this help with job placement, and with trying to get an apartment, and help with trying to learn language skills, it allows you to integrate and be part of a community while still maintaining your core cultural heritage, which is the gift that you bring to a society. And I think that that’s so important when we’re trying to build the world that we want to live in.”
Like Fultz, it is Ramazani’s experience as a refugee that inspires her to help others.
“The pain I went through makes me just want to help them more because I believe there’s no reason for people to go through that,” she said. “I love my people and I don’t want to see them struggling.”