Yaounde, Cameroon Africa. January 2011 (Cameroon News) – Casa de Maryland has evolved an innovative idea wherein they have started a ‘Winter Semester’ aiming to equip immigrants with technical and language skills that will help to make their lives better.

Jesus Echeverria has been finding that in spite of long waits for innumerable lower level laborer jobs, for some reason unknown to him he has been overlooked.

He states that prospective employers always pass him up after evaluating him even in a gang of laborers.

Later on he was able to find out that he was being ignored because he did not have the skills that they were on the lookout for which is hands on experience in areas like electrical work, drywalling or masonry.

“I want to know how to do the work,” said Echeverria, 54 and states that he would be really benefitted on the job front if he were to acquire such skills.

There are many immigrants who could tell you similar stories or relate experiences of the same genre.

But looks like the hard times that these laborers are going through may be seeing an end sooner than expected.

Casa de Maryland has inaugurated a new and unique program which they have baptized as the “Winter Semester” and it sure looks like their luck might be changing for the better altogether.

This season when the biting cold will not let you step out of door , the Latin advocacy outfit is arranging a program which spans across three months in six places to equip immigrants to market themselves better on the job front by training them on core skills which the jobs they are on the look out for are likely to demand from them like plumbing, tailoring, child care, English and computer literacy.

The program is being finances by both private and public organizations and the people who enroll into these programs will not need to pay any fee for the same.

There are 60 students enrolled into these classes so far and the classes will be taken in such a way as to support the night and morning classes if Casa de Mayland.

The classes will be conducted during day time when the workers most of who hold construction site jobs would be working.

“We definitely have some skills issues for the workers,” said Kim Propeack, Casa’s political director, “and we do have employers who come who are not able to hire people because we don’t have the folks who have the skills.”

The language English in which most immigrants can barely manage to speak less than a few words is also crucial to them. It is important that workers learn to communicate in basic English not just for the purpose of holding a job but also for their safety.”

English is important not only to do jobs correctly but for the workers’ safety.

Immigrant and Latino workers get injured on the job more frequently than others,” Propeack said.

“There are a lot of workplace accidents because of inadequate English communication,” she said.

“Even experienced workers will benefit from adding skills in an economy in which there is expected to be less new construction and more opportunities in renovation and interior work”, Propeack added.

On Tuesday, the power tools class in Silver Spring could see a huge rush and the jam packed audience who had collected there in their work clothes and boots were seen to be ardently listening to the instructor who was instructing in Spanish about how to safely use power saws.

As the number of Franchophone who are mostly immigrants from French speaking African countries like Cameroon and Haiti there is also a translator who is translating whatever the instructor says in French.

Ahmadou Ibrahim, 33,who is a national of Cameroon migrated into to the United States half a year ago.

He had come with very high hopes of leading a better life by finding some contract jobs and also with the hopes of learning some more skills additional to what he had been taught in his homeland Cameroon where he had been an instructor with a technical high school.

Ibrahim is confident that he would be able to learn more about American style of construction and hopes to use his new found knowledge to get himself a job after winter is over.

“What we are doing in Africa is quite different,” he said.

“Here, the skill is more advanced. Like the drywall is a skill that we’ve never seen. And here they use screws, while in Africa we mostly use nails in construction.”

In yet another class where the subject being taught was English students were seen to be coming up with a lot of seemingly humorous yet serious doubts and in the process having oodles of fun.

It was interesting to note that most of these vocabulary lessons were job related.
The teacher Henry Argueta was aiding his students to find out the difference between “leaf” and “lift.”

Making use of their hands they made a heaving movement so as to make each understand how the two words were different from each other.

“But there is also a ‘lifting machine,’ ” said one student, looking confused.

“Yes,” Argueta replied. “That’s a forklift. You know, when you have the pallets?
“You also have the scissor lift,” he added, drawing a rough sketch of a truck carrying an accordion style forklift mounted in top on the board.

Students nodded their heads indicating that they knew what it meant.

The class typically includes students who have various levels of fluency as far as the language English is concerned and many time the words that they discuss move over to much detailed political , social and cultural discussions and so it would be wrong to say that the English classes limit their discussions just to the work related topics.

In one such incident there was a discussion about vehicles when one student casually mentioned about people in the country who he has seen does not drive cars.

This in turn led to a discussion about the Amish community and their habits. This was one among the various cultural discussions which just jump out of the blue in these classes resulting in a cultural exchange.

“They want to adapt to the culture,” Argueta said. “Sometimes they ask me about politics.

When it was Thanksgiving they asked, ‘Teacher, why is it Thanksgiving? Where does it come from?’ “

Paul Yembe, 61, yet another immigrant from Cameroon, holds a job with Target.
He has been in the job for quite some time now but is finding it increasingly difficult to move up the hierarchy because of his poor command over the language English.
He has joined these classes with the hope that he will able to improve his proficiency in the language.

“I need to get a better job,” he said.

Argueta, who has been a teacher of English to immigrants for over a decade now is confident of the fact that the classes do help them hold better command over the language “A lot of students come back and say, ‘Teacher, because of what I’ve learned, I got a job.’ “

These classes which are being directed towards providing a wholesome development to the students would be essentially aiming at providing the immigrants a better life by equipping them to hold better skills by fine tuning whatever skills they presently have.