Same Song, Second Verse

How one Wichita company built peace among cultures, one lamp at a time.

Renaissance man, Lawrence resident, and erstwhile Wichitan John Harrison wrote an Op-Ed for the Wichita Eagle with Vanessa Whalen waaaay back in 2018. Sadly, the story is even more relevant today.

Harrison and Whalen owned Technology for Humankind (TFH), which made nifty wi-fi lamps that you could give your Aunt Jane in California or your friend Kate in Boston. Pretty on their own, the lamps’ superpower was their connectivity. Touch the lamp in Wichita, it lights up on one or both coasts. A little long-distance “hi” on your way to the kitchen for a snack. (This is only one of many creative and expansive ways in which violinist Harrison has brightened our world, but it’s what’s relevant here.)

In their September 22, 2018, Op-Ed, John and Vanessa wrote:

We could not have imagined that we ourselves would connect with people from other countries in the meaningful way that we do. Thanks, however, to U.S. resettlement agencies such as Wichita’s International Rescue Committee, that is just what we have been able to do.

Technology for Humankind worked with the Wichita Women’s Initiative network, a fabulous organization helping women transition after escaping domestic violence or other hardships. Before John and Vanessa set up the lamp assembly project in their warehouse, these women had worked on fabric craft projects as part of their employment skills training. I always appreciated what the Initiative did for these women, but moving to proficiencies more relevant in today’s world — building products requiring electrical and wi-fi skills and learning how to market them — was in my opinion a huge step up.

Among the employees, the Op-Ed noted, “are individuals who are relatively new to Wichita, and who come from oceans away. They are people brave enough to take perhaps the biggest risk of their lives. They are refugees who have fled violence and unrest in their respective countries.”

The things that make our refugee employees among the best are the same things that make good employees anywhere: they are reliable, dedicated, accurate, and fast. If we were only to consider the bottom line, it has worked well for us to have these employees on our staff.

However, if we were to consider the other benefits of employing our refugee workers, we are certain those benefits would outweigh the numbers. Our employees are able to contribute meaningfully to our community. They teach us about their culture, and we teach them about ours.

The Op-Ed continued: “Such exchanges range from the serious to the silly, with break times spent learning new words, celebrating special events, or learning to sing in a round.”

The TFH workers bought their first cars, learned to drive and to speak English, and went to church. One member planned to build a home with Habitat for Humanity. The authors noted that “Our work family is all the richer for having our refugee employees as part of it.”

During a recent trip to Wichita, John confessed to me that there had been dustups, perhaps inevitable between native-born Kansans and people from other cultures. But even this had a bright side: one optimistic refugee insisted on finding ways to work together, turning the squabbles into the silliness John described in his Op-Ed.

He explained this on his Facebook page:

Initially the refugees kept to themselves, and the rest of our employees had nothing to do with them. There was tension. Many of our U.S. cultural norms, even simple things like how to appropriately use the bathroom, were not obvious to everybody. Imagine what stories must have been circulating in both groups about “the others.”

That all changed when one of the more extraverted refugees unreservedly started conversations that actually included everybody. As a company, we ran with it. Soon the refugees were teaching us Swahili while our native speakers shared with them English colloquialisms. On work breaks and Friday afternoons we often laughed together, sometimes playing games and sharing silly anecdotes about our cultural differences and misunderstandings.

There were serious moments too. I remember vividly when one of the refugees showed me her cell phone video footage of a bloody battle in her home country. I have never experienced that sort of horror first-hand, and I will never take that for granted.

The Op-Ed was published after Trump 1.0 lowered admission caps on (some) refugees. Quaint, huh? Its authors doubtless could never in their wildest of dreams imagined that one day we’d be talking about South African whites as “refugees” and reality game shows a la Hunger Games for those “other people” having the audacity to immigrate. Another factor that’s probably changed since 2018? The horror show John witnessed on that cell phone has only increased.

Find the whole piece here.