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Refugees’ stories always inspired retiring director

By Jean Denton
Special to The Catholic Virginian

We’ll see how long Roanoke’s Barbara Smith can maintain quiet in retirement.

In February, after 19 years as director of Roanoke’s Office of Immigration and Refugee Services, she decided it was time for change and new energy at the top of the agency.

The new director, Beth Lutjen, has been in the job for a month, inheriting an organization that coordinates services for what has become the largest resettlement site in Virginia.

Prior to taking the position Ms. Lutjen coordinated donor resources in the Roanoke Red Cross office for 13 years and also served in corporate relations for Blue Ridge Public Broadcasting.

Ms. Smith has helped her successor navigate her new digs in the early going.

“She did a remarkable job and has been an incredible resource. It’s made the transition easier because she loves it — it’s her baby,” Ms. Lutjen laughed.

“I still want to be involved in some way,” Ms. Smith admitted, “but I’ll give the new staff time to adjust.”

Resettling people may be a hard habit to break as the sizable immigrant community has been an inherent part of Ms. Smith’s daily life for the two decades she has lived in Roanoke.

“Once you hear the refugees’ stories and really come to know them, it’s like falling in love,” she told The Roanoke Times. “You’re forever changed.”

Indeed, Ms. Smith herself helped change life for thousands of people who left — or fled — refugee camps and diverse homelands to resettle in the small city in southwest Virginia, a place unusually well-suited to their needs.

During her tenure she managed the resettlement of more than 3,200 refugees from 31 different countries.

She increased the agency staff to four times the size it was when she took over, and has overseen the establishment of a broad network of community resources that has provided continuing housing, employment and legal assistance to families moving in.

Added to these, of course, were the most basic and sometimes dire needs of food, clothing and medical care.

Marilyn Breslow, who supervises all three Immigration and Refugee Services offices for the diocese in Hampton Roads, Richmond and Roanoke, gives much credit to Ms. Smith’s initiative and ability to coordinate services in the community. But Ms. Smith pointed out that Roanoke’s size and particular resources have been key.

“Refugee integration is easier in small cities,” she said. “They are more open and welcoming and the immigrant population ends up being spread over the entire community rather than in specific neighborhoods.”

She added that Roanoke’s having relatively low unemployment and jobs available through employers who are willing and experienced in hiring refugees is a help as well.

Roanoke also has a lot of affordable housing throughout the community.

“We have incredibly wonderful managers and landlords who have been working with us, some for 30 years,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s been an ongoing process of building trust among them and the refugee community.”

For this reason, she noted, Roanoke has settled more large families (with a dozen or more members each) than any other location in the country.

The Roanoke office also established a pair of enterprises — a certified legal service, and an interpreter service — that serve the immigrant community and the community at large while helping to generate a little income.

The interpreter service contracts with businesses and courts providing interpreters for nearly every language imaginable.

“My theory is that it’s easier to find foreign speakers in a smaller town because there are only about four degrees of separation between people,” Ms. Smith suggested. The service coincidentally provides part time work for interpreters, many of whom are themselves refugees.

From the beginning, Ms. Smith rolled up her sleeves and was directly involved with refugee families’ needs.

“I do take it very personally,” she emphasized, noting that her deeply held Catholic faith is fundamental to her efforts.

A graduate of the University of Dayton, she pointed out, “the Marianist brothers were very good at infusing in you that you have to see Jesus in everyone. You look at that holy person and understand ‘you have the right to be here.’”

Working with refugees “has been a privilege and a gift,” she said. “Hearing how critical their faith is for some who come in,” she added, “has been part of my own faith growth.”

Ms. Smith came to the director position soon after moving to Roanoke from Pennsylvania for her husband David’s engineering job. She brought to the job experience through her previous post as director of a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. Before that she served for years in various volunteer capacities while rearing their three children.

“From the beginning, I felt people didn’t have the right to mistreat others,” she said of her Catholic background.

Ms. Smith’s mother died when she was seven and she noted, “Losing a parent when you are very young makes you want to help people.”

That, combined with a sense of confidence and resourcefulness, made her a natural for the work of resettling families.

She also believes her formal studies in political science, philosophy and law “were the best training ground for the jobs I’ve had — consensus building and empowering of the human spirit.”

“For me it’s seeing the big picture and how things fit together. I used that, but I also had a need inside to reach out to people,” she said, adding that David, over 43 years of marriage, helped make it happen.

“He has always supported me so I can do the work I love, and that is a major gift to me,” said Ms. Smith.

She has collected hundreds of rich, colorful stories through her experience at the agency. She recalled tale after tale with an intimate affection for the families she had come to know and care for.

She ticked off a partial list of the countries they came from: southeast Asia, Poland, Romania, Cuba, Haiti, Iraq, Bosnia. There were Croats, Serbs, Afghans, Kosovars.

“Then there were the Africans — Sudanese, north and south, Liberians, Tago, Somalis and Somali Bantu. Now it is the Burmese and we are expecting ethnic Nepalese from Bhutan,” she added.

“It’s hard for people to visualize the swirl of people coming through,” Ms. Smith said, explaining that they covered a range of economic classes as well as language groups and religions.

“We had former bank presidents and professionals to undocumented workers and everything in between,” she said.

When Ms. Smith first came to the agency in Roanoke there were questions about its future — quickly dissipated by the sudden need to resettle an influx of hundreds of Amerasians. Now questions loom again, and Smith finds it hard to ignore them.

Funding, as always, is a critical issue.

“My concern is that we take a look at what our services are and who we are as a church,” Ms. Smith contended. “Reaching out and serving the stranger is part of who we are, and as the federal government pulls out more and more of the funding I’m hoping that the diocese makes a commitment to this part of the world that we serve.”

Rather than looking inward, she said she hopes “for people of the diocese to continue to welcome the stranger.”

“There are people among us in great need, and as representatives of Christ I hope that we will insist that the church continue to help those people.”

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