NEWS FROM THE NEEDHAM COMMUNITY COUNCIL

Part English class, part coffee klatch

Reprinted with permission from the Needham Times
October 19, 2006
By Amy Wyeth/ Staff Writer

When you don’t speak English, or are just learning it in a firmly English-only country, it can be lonely and hard to know where to go for help.

If you’re not enrolled in school or looking for books, an Internet search yields you few options in the Boston area. If you’re just here temporarily, don’t live in a major city or work during the day, they fall further.

In Needham, that’s where the Community Council steps in.

On Wednesday nights, about a dozen women from China, Israel, Mexico, France and Latvia, to name a few, meet in a cozy back room at the council’s Needham center building, just behind the Unitarian Church. They’re just there to talk with each other, share joys and commiserate, with help and advice from group leader Jane Swett.

"We talk about culture, because I think it will include everybody. I didn’t plan it that way," Swett says, but it drew students in. "People are a little reluctant to begin with, but then they might start saying they want to go home, or talk about how it’s hard to go home."

Most of the current group happens to be working here as au pairs, though the class makeup is different every time, said Swett, who’s taught it since 2002.

In this town of nearly 30,000, where one in 10 residents is foreign-born and at least 130 have "limited English skills," according to a 2005 U.S. census-based study by public policy think tank MassINC, the Community Council offers three groups similar to Swett’s, and keeps a waiting list for individual tutoring sessions that are always full.

"We have a steady stream" of people applying to be tutored, said NCC board member Pat Drake, who has run the tutoring program since it was resurrected seven years ago by former Executive Director Tia Hawkes. Community Council Director Sandra Robinson estimates some 150 people have taken advantage during that time.

In recent years, the numbers has been rising. The reason, Robinson believes, is "our world is getting smaller.

"It’s not at all easy to find ESL," she said, while considering the options available to a Needham resident. They could take classes at MassBay Community College or Framingham State College, she said, but funding is a problem.

The 76-year-old, privately funded Community Council offers a range of programs to Needham residents, including a food pantry, medical equipment "loan closet," and the ESL tutoring and groups. Hawkes, Drake said, noticed the need for it when talking with people coming in to the food pantry.

Residents from all walks of life take advantage. A psychologist from Germany met for six years with a Needham tutor to hone her higher-end speaking skills. An elderly local man got his citizenship after he was also tutored for several years. Workers at Briarwood nursing home attend their own on-site conversation group, and the new wife of a Needham resident, who didn’t speak any English, got private assistance.

Swett’s Wednesday night group has increased from about six members, when she started it in 2002, to a dozen regular visitors now.

"Jane just happens to be awesome at it, which is one of the reasons her group keeps growing," Robinson said.

There is the sense of community people get from the group, said Swett, who retired this spring after a career in education that included stops as a Needham High School teacher and Newton librarian. "But they also want to learn. They come in with questions about idioms and phrases. And, they want to share their experiences."

At a recent Wednesday group, seven or eight women munched on cranberries and tasted spoonfuls of a chick-pea, cumin and hot-pepper concoction created by Kalpana Shah, who emigrated from India seven years ago, got her citizenship two years ago and now works at Needham Cooperative Bank. The group, which included several 20-something au pairs working in Needham and Wellesley, and three long-term members, talked about the traditional U.S. Thanksgiving meal (Swett brought in the dried cranberries to start that conversation), and what makes them feel at home.

"My host mother is Latvian, so we talked in my language. In the beginning, it helped a lot," said Inga Striznova, an au pair from that country who works in Wellesley. She found out about Swett’s group while volunteering at the Needham YMCA, which she does in her spare time (it’s a good trade-off, since she gets to use the pool in exchange).

Vania Vicezar, who made the "expensive" trip from Paraguay here at the invitation of Americans she met there who were friends with the family she now works for, watches two boys and a girl in Needham and volunteers teaching Spanish at a local school.

She said she’s in the United States deliberately to learn English, because she eventually hopes to work for an international organization, helping children who live in the streets.

"I don’t want to work for the government of my country because it’s corrupt," Vicezar said. "Now, I have other opportunities, too."

The au pairs are a new, dynamic feature in Swett’s group. But she is also pleased to have maintained a "core" of long-term members: Tatyana Davidov of Israel; Huan "May" Lin of South China, who moved to Needham after 13 years in Maine because of her husband’s job; Anna Tarabarina from Moldova (next to Romania); and Shah.

Lin works in the Needham High School cafeteria. She has an 11-year-old son at Pollard. They have parallel problems: She’s sending him to Chinese school, so he remembers his culture, and the work is so hard it sometimes makes him cry. Lin, by contrast, struggles with the difficulty of learning the language her son has grown up with. But she’s helping herself: Like the other longer-term members, she also has a private, NCC-sponsored English tutor.

Tarabarina, who works as a database developer for a Quincy telecommunications firm, said what she’s liked about Swett’s group is Swett herself - "she’s a very excellent teacher!" - and the other women she’s encountered.

"It’s very interesting to communicate with them," she said. "Everyone is from different families, we have different ages and different interests. It’s not just studying English, but studying life."

Amy Wyeth can be reached at awyeth@cnc.com.