FOUR UNCG STUDENTS NAMED
CENTURA SCHOLARS
 

Left to right UNCG Chancellor Patricia Sullivan, Vandy Chhum, Centura Scholar; Le Khang, Centura Scholar; Patricia Stewart, Vice Chancellor for University Advancement; David Ho-Le, Centura Scholar; Rosemarie Munyaneza, husband Amminabad is a Centura Scholar; Aida Semunegus, Centura Leader; H. Kel Landis, president of Centura Bank, and Xochitl Escarecega, Centura Leader (photo by Bert VanderVeen).

GREENSBORO - They came from Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Rwanda. Some were children of political prisoners. Others were fighting to escape war-torn counties.

On Thursday, Dec. 9, the new North Carolinians stood as members of the first class of Centura Scholars at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Centura, working in partnership with UNCG, has developed a scholarship program for immigrant and refugee students. Over the next four years, 16 students will benefit from Centura’s $110,000 gift to UNCG.

“This is really about a dream,” UNCG Chancellor Patricia Sullivan said as she announced the development of the program and the four scholarship winners.

Added Centura’s President H. Kel Landis III: “This just shows what business and education can accomplish together. The landscape of the state is changing and we have to look to the future.”

The Centura Scholars, all now living in Greensboro, are: La Khang from Laos, Daniel Ho-Le from Vietnam, Vandy Chhum from Cambodia and Amminadab Munyaneza from Rwanda.

“We can guarantee Centura this is a good investment,” said Centura Scholar Khang, a senior Social Work major at UNCG.

The students, all presently enrolled at UNCG, will each receive a $3,750 scholarship. The students will also complete a community service project. In fact, all of the winners are already working in various capacities within the community as part of UNCG’s AmeriCorps Cross-Cultural Education Service Systems (ACCESS) program. ACCESS helps immigrants gain better access to services, get adjusted to life in North Carolina and become self-sufficient.

“UNCG’s motto is service,” Sullivan said after reading the long list of volunteer opportunities the Centura Scholars are involved in. “You are already wonderful examples of fulfilling our motto.”

In addition to the scholarship winners, the money will be used to place a Centura Leader in two immigrant/refugee service organizations to assist in various ways - helping find jobs, preparing them for citizenship, helping them learn English, helping develop computer skills. Centura Leaders and the organizations they represent are: Aida Semunegus with African Services Coalition in the Triangle area and Xochitl Escarecega with Family Resource Center Latino Program in Siler City.

Immigrants face obstacles daily, but having a place to go where help and information is readily available helps ease the transition, said Semunegus.

“We still have so many challenges to meet,” she said, “but because of this support from Centura we believe we will meet our objectives.”

Centura’s gift to UNCG contains two other components. The Rocky Mount-based bank will provide an internship to a member of a refugee or immigrant community and UNCG will work with Centura to develop culturally diverse employee training materials.

The entire Centura program is part of UNCG’s New North Carolinians efforts. Three years ago, the University named a task force designed to find ways and methods of reaching out to the state’s news citizens and helping them adapt to and succeed in North Carolina.

“North Carolina must acknowledge and develop the talents and strengths of this new and young population, which comprises an ever-increasing proportion of the workforce,” Sullivan said. ####

Biographies of each of the Centura Scholars and Leaders are listed below.

Centura Scholar La Khang was born to a Hmong family in the highlands of Laos in 1972.  Her family was fleeing Laos at that time because the war had just been lost and her father had been fighting in support of the Americans.  She spent her earliest years in a refugee camp in Thailand and came with her family to America as refugees when she was six. Khang, her seven sisters, three brothers, parents, and grandmother, were initially resettled in Philadelphia.

When Khang was 17, her father moved the family to Hickory. She was the first Asian to attend her high school, and she found it to be a very difficult isolated experience and never felt accepted. When she graduated from high school, her family expected her to go to college and she did not know where to go. Khang had one American friend in Hickory. That friend decided to go to UNCG, so Khang decided to attend UNCG too.

After Khang had taken various university courses, she finally decided that social work should be her major. Through social work she began doing volunteer work in the community.  She also worked in various jobs and continued her course work on a part-time basis.  In 1995, Khang began as a part-time AmeriCorps member as well as administrative assistant for the ACCESS Program.  As an AmeriCorps member for two years, Khang initiated various service projects with the Hmong and other Southeast Asian communities in North Carolina. Activities included translation, transportation, citizenship education and English-as-a-Second-Language classes as well as youth leadership development activities. After finishing AmeriCorps service, she continued volunteering in various community service projects. Khang is in her fourth year as the administrative assistant for the ACCESS Program.

Centura Scholar Vandy Chhum was born in Cambodia.  When she was 20 days old her parents fled the war in Cambodia with Chhum and her four older siblings to Thailand where they lived in a refugee camp until she was 5 years old. They were approved to come to the United States as refugees in 1985 and were resettled in New York City.

The family moved to North Carolina seeking employment, better housing and a better life when Chhum was 7 years old. They lived in several other states, before Chhum was sent to Greensboro to live with a married sister.

In Greensboro, Chhum got involved with the Greensboro Buddhist Center and joined the children’s dance group. The program had been established to preserve the Cambodian culture and provide healthy activities for the young people. She was a strong academic student at Smith and played girl’s volleyball for the school. During her senior year she became an AmeriCorps ACCESS member, serving through the Greensboro Buddhist Center.

As an AmeriCorps member, Chuum taught children’s dance, provided translation for elders in the community, and helped organize the children’s after-school tutoring and summer multicultural programs. After graduation from Smith, Chuum entered UNCG and enrolled for a second year of service with AmeriCorps.  Chuum is now in her second year at UNCG and hopes to major in social work

Centura Scholar Daniel Ho-Le was born in the Montagnard community of Dalat, in the highlands of Vietnam in 1973. The Vietnamese government believed that his father had connections with the United States and imprisoned him. Ho-Le’s father escaped from prison and fled the country and eventually made his way to the United States.

Ho-Le, his mother, and his two brothers and sister, lived with his grandfather. His grandfather taught them that education was very important. “They can steal anything from you except your education,” his grandfather often said.

In 1992 Ho-Le and his family were accepted to come to the United States and join his father. The whole family settled in Greensboro. Ho-Le’s education had been interrupted in Vietnam. He went back to school, learned English, and graduated from Smith High School in 1994.

In 1994, Ho-Le started at UNCG as a freshman. Even though he made good grades, he found university life challenging because of all the social and cultural issues associated with adjustment to life in the United States. As he became more familiar with life here, he found it easier to adjust and plan his future. Ho-Le hopes to graduate in May of 2000 with a degree in accounting and continue in graduate school.

In 1997 he began to volunteer with the Montagnard Dega Association to help other incoming refugees who needed help in resettlement.  In 1998 He-Le enrolled in the  ACCESS Program and began to formally assist others by providing translation, taking people to the health department, tutoring, and enrolling people in English-as-a-Second-Language classes.  AmeriCorps, he said, has provided him skills to better serve the community. Ho-Le has enrolled to serve another year with the ACCESS and wants to work with youth in the community.

Centura Scholar Amminadab Munyaneza was born in Rwanda of East Central Africa in 1963. He was born into a mixed Hutu-Tutsi family, where his father was a minister. Munyaneza completed school and went on to a Baptist seminary, planning to go into the ministry. Influenced by the Quakers peace testimony, Munyaneza became one of the first Quaker pastors in Rwanda. He married his wife, Rose, in 1988 and they have two children, Jonathan and Dianne.

When the war broke out in Rwanda in 1994, Munyaneza was away from his family, and he did not know what had happened to them. He escaped from Rwanda to the Congo (Zaire).  There, he met a missionary who told him that his family was alive in a refugee camp in Kenya.  His family was accepted as refugees into the United States and settled in Greensboro in late 1994, and Munyaneza was able to join them in 1995.

Munyaneza worked in various jobs when he first resettled in Greensboro. Then he enrolled in a graduate program at Antioch University in Ohio. In 1997 he became an AmeriCorps ACCESS member at Lutheran Family Services, serving for two years. He assisted African refugees who were resettled in North Carolina. He helped other incoming refugees with translation and linking them up with basic human services. However, his bigger concern was to bring Africans together here to work on peace and reconciliation. The African Services Coalition was formed as part of Munyaneza’s service project.

In the summer of 1998, Munyaneza was accepted in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations Department in the School of Education at UNCG.  He views education as “a tool for social change,” and upon finishing his Ph.D. program, he will continue his work for peace and reconciliation amongst people divided because of racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Centura Leaders

The African Services Coalition is a new nonprofit organization started in Greensboro in 1997 with help from the Greensboro Community Foundation.  It works closely with its affiliate partner in the Triangle area, the Ethiopian Community of North Carolina. The African Services and affiliate partners assist incoming Africans from various countries with resettlement assistance including translation services and information and referral. A major purpose of the organization is to promote cooperation and cultural appreciation amongst the various African communities in the Piedmont and to help facilitate acculturation with the larger community of North Carolina.

Centura Leader Aida Semunegus was born in Ethiopia in 1966. She has two younger brothers and two younger sisters and went to school in Ethiopia through the tenth grade.  At that time her family had to flee Ethiopia as refugees because of the war. They came to the United States and resettled in Raleigh, living initially with a family from Tanzania. She enrolled in the eleventh grade at Broughton High School in Raleigh and graduated in 1985. The whole family was working at various jobs during this time.

Semunegus went to North Carolina State University and majored in textile design. She became president of the Ethiopian Students Association and organized many activities with the International Students Association. After she graduated from State, she moved to Los Angeles seeking work. In 1995, she returned to Raleigh and joined the family commercial cleaning business. In 1998 she started Sunflower Commercial Cleaning, Inc.

Semunegus learned about the ACCESS Program from a friend. As an ACCESS member, Semunegus hopes to help other international people coming here the same way that others helped her family when they arrived. She also hopes to help the African community in North Carolina with economic development. After AmeriCorps, Semunegus plans to continue her business development and study computers.

The Family Resource Center of Chatham County is a new community collaborative nonprofit organization which began five years ago as an outreach program for the Chatham County Health Department.  Siler City is now 35% Hispanic, and the Family Resource Center serves as a bilingual service site to assist this growing population in the county with a variety of health-related and information and referral services.

Centura Leader Xochitl Escarega, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1978.  Her family moved to the United States when she was 16 to join some family members in Arizona.  Escarega went to Winslow High School through the eleventh grade.  When she was a senior, the family moved to Siler City. Escarega started her senior year at Jordan Matthews High School and then switched to the Central Carolina Community College.

After graduation she worked at several local industries. Escarega heard about the AmeriCorps ACCESS Program through a staff member at the Family Resource Center in Siler City.

As an AmeriCorps member she serves as a translator at the Family Resource Center.  Sometimes she goes on family home visits with Health Department staff to translate or take people to appointments with service agencies. Escarega works with AmeriCorp ACCESS because she knows how difficult it is to make the transition to the local community.

After her AmeriCorps service she hopes to go to college. She will be the first member of her family to go to college.

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