Ian Hefele and Jack Rossiter-Munley

[00:07] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Hello. My name is Jack Rossiter Munley. I'm 32 years old. Today is July 14, 2024. I'm in Brattleboro, Vermont, and I am talking with my friend and colleague Ian Hefele

[00:17] IAN HEFELE: Hello, my name is Ian Hefley. I am 41 years old. Today's date is July 14, 2024. We are in Brattleboro, Vermont, and I am talking to my friend and colleague Jack Rossiter Munley.

[00:34] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: And we are friends and colleagues because of our shared work in refugee resettlement.

[00:38] IAN HEFELE: Exactly. I am based here in the Brattleboro office of the Ethiopian Community Development Council, running the multicultural community center as a community engagement manager.

[00:52] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: And I'm across the mountain over in Bennington, doing whatever needs to be done on a daily basis. But in theory, in a role very similar to yours.

[01:00] IAN HEFELE: In theory. In theory, it's all about theory, right? And the fun part is putting that theory into practice.

[01:08] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Indeed. So I guess to begin with, let's talk about why we're here physically in Brattleboro. What brought you to southern Vermont and what has kept you here?

[01:18] IAN HEFELE: I came to Brattleboro a week before Hurricane Irene came to Brattleboro in August of 2011. I went to go do a master's in intercultural service, leadership and management at the School for international training. And my initial thought was I'll come here for two years and do my coursework and then go straight back to Africa where I was before. I came here via Pennsylvania for a little while. But I remember the internship I had lined up was in Zimbabwe, and the head of the organization I was going to intern at died. So I could not really go because Robert Mugabe was still the president of Zimbabwe at that time. So I took a marketing and community outreach internship at sit and ended up kind of falling into place here because my husband also loved southern Vermont so much that we decided to stick around for a little while and see what happens.

[02:35] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: So this is important, though. You came here with your husband.

[02:38] IAN HEFELE: Yes.

[02:38] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: You were not looking for love in southern Vermont?

[02:40] IAN HEFELE: No, no, I was not. I brought my husband, who had only ever lived in western Pennsylvania, up to New England. And he had always wanted to live in New England before probably thinking Boston or a big city. And I bring them to the one and only Brattleboro.

[03:00] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Nice.

[03:01] IAN HEFELE: How about you?

[03:02] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Me? Well, that's a good question. So I was born over in Albany, even though I mostly grew up outside Chicago. So I grew up in Oak park, the first suburb west of Chicago known for Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway, who famously said it was the town of broad lawns and narrow mines, which is very much less the case nowadays. It was sort of the, like the gestational realm for Barack Obama when he was running for Senate in Illinois, when he was transitioning from being a state senator to being the us senator from Illinois. So it's now more of like a middle, upper middle class, fairly progressive neighborhood. Anyway, growing up there, when I was deciding where I wanted to go to college, I was looking at small liberal arts colleges, both in the northeast and the northwest. Mainly because of the nature, that aspect of it, and thinking maybe a little similar to what you're talking about. Where would I like to be for four years, aside from the academic part of it, knowing that it's a place. I would also be spending my free time and not wanting to be in a large city. Having my early years in Albany, I think I really enjoyed. We had a. You know, we lived a little bit out of town. There were woods in the backyard. That was something that I. Because we moved when I was about five. I really missed that, and I remembered it from when I was young and wanted something similar to that. We did a lot of camping and things. So came back to vaguely Albany area, you know, looking at Bennington College and Marlborough College, and I, University of Vermont. Looking at different options, but kind of geographical. My grades in high school were terrible because I spent all of my time learning how to play instruments instead of doing my math homework or reading books about the history that I wanted to learn about instead of what I was supposed to learn about.

[05:01] IAN HEFELE: That's why we're friends.

[05:02] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: This is why we're friends. Yeah, it was. High school was a bit of a dark time because I literally, I had an english teacher who was, like, incensed that I didn't want to read great expectations. I was like, I read it a long time ago. I don't remember the details to answer the questions on this test, but I don't want to spend my time on this right now. Didn't fly, nor should it have, but whatever. So anyway, I was looking for a self directed study, and I was looking for small liberal arts colleges. Came to Marlborough College near Brattleboro in the fall of 2009 and was here during Hurricane Irene. Participated in some of the rebuilding efforts over in Wilmington, and came back to this area because I was getting my master's degree in journalism at Columbia when the pandemic hit. And my parents had recently moved to Bennington, so all my classes were online. A lot of the writing, editing, and multimedia production work I was doing could be done remotely. So I figured get close to nature, have a lower cost of living. This is great. And a number of different community activities have kept me here, but all of it has been a little bit by happenstance, at least, my sort of return to this area.

[06:31] IAN HEFELE: Well, I mean, that seems to be the way. There's a saying here, all roads lead to Brattleboro. I think it should be amended to all roads lead to southern Vermont, because it really is a special place in my mind. And I remember when we first met, when I started at ECDC last fall, in order to get the social media contact stuff, I friended you on Facebook and was floored by all the different connections to someone I had just met a week ago. We had. But the funniest one was how your academic advisor at Marlborough College probably chased me around as a toddler back in Connecticut when I was barely out of diapers.

[07:19] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: I know she approved my IRB for my study that I did my senior year.

[07:24] IAN HEFELE: The circles that these tiny little towns make in southern Vermont are amazing that way. And, I mean, I, after graduating from sit, I worked for them for a little while and then got sent home for the pandemic as well, so worked for an international organization from my basement for two and a half years. No one's fault but the pandemics. And then I tried to branch out into western mass, but just the work climate down there for me felt totally different. So I was very happy to come back here. I'm curious for you, going from Marlborough College to journalism to refugee resettlement, that's not exactly a linear journey there.

[08:19] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: No. And there's a lot of other stops along the way. Yeah, I graduated Marlborough. There's a lot of connective tissue, but a lot of different things in between. I graduated with a degree in cultural history and international relations, so that makes sense. Reasonably related to the work that we now do. A little bit full circle in that sense. But, yeah, after I graduated, I went back to Chicago. I worked in local politics for a while. I also worked at a library. I was and remain interested in libraries. And possibly somewhere in my professional future will be a library degree or library work of some kind, or I'll incorporate it into whatever else I'm doing. Helping to run the multicultural center definitely has some opportunities in that area that are yet to be explored in Bennington, but which are on my mind. So did that for a couple of years. I was working for our state senator in Oak park for a couple of years, helped run his re election campaign, also worked in his political office, worked for the Democratic Party of Oak park. From there, with my, did freelance writing and editing along the side and also sometimes as a more full time thing, produced a feature length documentary film in Detroit with a friend from Marlborough about a sort of little known civil rights hero, Damon J. Keith, who was a federal judge in Detroit who had a bunch of landmark cases at the district and appellate court level. He's a fascinating guy. Whole other situation, but did that for a while. So journalism adjacent. I always was interested in researching and history, and that's the sort of thing that I was. No matter what my day job was, I was pursuing that on the side with my partner at the time, moved to New York to be closer to their family, and in doing that, worked for almost a year with a young man on the autism spectrum as sort of a general coach to help him become more independent in all aspects of his life. At the time, I thought I was going to go to law school. So both of his parents were also lawyers. Though neither of them was working in the law at the time. They still had a lot of connections in the legal field. So I worked for a couple of years after that in a public finance law firm.

[10:46] IAN HEFELE: And you did this all before you turned 32?

[10:50] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Yes, I did all of this before I turned 30.

[10:54] IAN HEFELE: I'm feeling how to quit.

[10:56] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: I mean, I don't know how impressive any of it is, but it was a lot of different stuff, at least. I started a chess club in Rolling Meadows, Illinois.

[11:05] IAN HEFELE: Now that should be at the top of your resume. Get it?

[11:07] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Come on. Right. I did also create some STEM programs for their summer that were the most successful summer programs in the library's history. I got to present to the board of directors in Rolling Meadows, Illinois.

[11:20] IAN HEFELE: That's fancy.

[11:21] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: I was very fancy.

[11:22] IAN HEFELE: Where's rolling Meadows?

[11:24] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: It is one of the northwestern suburbs of. Yeah. Chicago.

[11:28] IAN HEFELE: This New Englander has been to Chicago once.

[11:30] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Congratulations.

[11:31] IAN HEFELE: Yes, I made it to Chicago. I feel like that should be a gold star for me.

[11:36] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Yeah, it is. Yeah. I mean, having lived in New York, the places that New Yorkers have and haven't been is also an interesting conversation. Or when you say you're from Chicago and they. There's like a blank map in between New York and Chicago where you might drive on your way out there.

[11:51] IAN HEFELE: Those are interesting conversations, let me tell you. Basically, my family sends. They came from the old country, was New York. They went out to St. Louis, Missouri, for like, maybe two years or something, and then came. All of them came back and it was New York. So when my parents moved up, the train line to Connecticut. Stepford, Connecticut. Because the Stepford wives movies were filmed in my hometown. My grandparents thought my parents were moving to the ends of the earth, 40 miles outside of New York City. I mean, so it is a gold standard.

[12:28] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Another planet. Yeah, it's huge. It's 850 miles or something, right? That's. Yeah, that's nothing to sniff at.

[12:35] IAN HEFELE: But I guess I brought that up because I felt trapped isn't the right word. But just like the expectation was I would live in New York City, I would make my life in New York City. And then when I got tired of New York City, I'd move back out to the suburbs, because that's what everyone did. I grew up in a part of Connecticut, which was, if you weren't Catholic, you were Jewish. So it was. There was no in between. And I ended up marrying a Protestant, which would scandal. It would be. I think that would be more scandalous than the fact I married a man. So. But I had itchy feet, like, wandering feet from the beginning, because my mom was an ESL teacher for recently arrived Americans as well. So the cycles are coming back. And so I was exposed to French and Haitian Creole and Portuguese and Spanish really early on. And I remember looking at those conversations happening in front of me, and I'm like, why can't I understand that? I want to understand that. So that's where I ended up. Like, my common theme of all the jobs I've done is international.

[14:04] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Well, that's the. I mean, you've been to so many different countries.

[14:07] IAN HEFELE: Yeah. My life goal now is to keep my country count higher than my age. So I'm doing okay. Still. How are you relative to that 45 country count? 41. Age. So it's getting close. It's getting close. I have a little bit of work to do this year, I think, but, yeah. So what made you apply for a job at ECDC?

[14:40] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: I was asked. I was asked by Meegan, who was the previous person. So, over in Bennington, as you know, there wasn't really any EC DC presence for quite a while, even though families were starting to resettle there. Sometime in the summer of 2022 is when the first staff person was hired. And it was this really wonderful woman, Megan Winslow, the daughter of the volunteer who. One of the volunteers who helped pull together the volunteer effort over in Bennington. She was looking to transition out of being a high school teacher because she was going to have a baby. And this seemed to her like it was going to be a better work life balance than being a high school teacher at the time. I understand why she felt this way. That has been done. She has learned otherwise and now no longer works with ECDC, though she remains committed and wonderful. But I had started volunteering because the call had gone out for English language volunteers, basically, in Bennington. A number of the families, almost all of the first families who arrived at Bennington had very limited English and very limited formal education backgrounds, all Afghan. And so there was a lot of energy around providing volunteer supports to the official english classes that were happening. So that's how I sort of got involved around the summer of 2022, unlike, let's say, most, if not all of the other volunteers, I was fairly young, and because of a lot of the trauma informed journalism classes that I'd been a part of, and in part because of the work I had done with the young man in New York who's on the autism spectrum, I had a, what I think was identified as some sort of feel for this kind of work. So we'd be on meetings with other volunteers, and we'd be discussing something like, there were a couple of young men who were enrolled at the high school. They were both a little bit older than high school age, but they could still get enrolled. They had very limited English. This is a good way for them to get English. And attendance was an issue. And so many of the volunteers on the meeting would chime in about how we need to, you know, this is really inappropriate. This is terrible. They're not taking it seriously. They're blah, blah, blah. And I felt like a role that I played in some of those meetings, which Megan, who was then a case manager, was on, was sort of saying, well, have they been told how important this is? Do they have any background understanding that when you sign up to go to school, you actually go every day? And if you don't go, you have to let them know that you're not going to be there. And I think some of that ability to pause or reframe was identified. And so one of the days when we were doing the english classes, and Megan, who was the case manager, happened to come by. She was like, do you want a job? You want to work at easy DC? I don't know, because at the time I was freelancing, and so there's benefits and drawbacks to doing that kind of work. I had a reasonable income, but you have to figure out a lot of stuff when you freelance. And so I basically said, maybe, like, I don't know, send me a job description, like, we'll see. And I decided to go for it, then. That's pretty much.

[17:54] IAN HEFELE: And I've got you in the Storycorps airstream.

[17:58] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: That's how it happened.

[17:59] IAN HEFELE: Pretty much. Glad it is, because I do have to say, I do think very often, how would Jack attack this problem? And it's just so I can think about someone who's been here about a year longer than me, and someone who just always does have a smile on his face, even when you're super frustrated. And me, I lost that talent a long time ago.

[18:32] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: I try, I would say 95% of the time, I can have a smile on my face. As you are aware, there are certain well known world figures whom I at least pay a lot of attention to, one of whom is tennis legend Roger Federer. And there is a great clip of him and Nadal, and they are talking to another tennis player who sucks, but they're trying to coach him during there's this tournament, the Laver cup. It's like a bunch of famous tennis players get together, they play. It's a whole thing, but they're coaching him. And one of the things he says is not one negative face, basically, like whether you're winning or losing, like you can if you. The two things they say are, believe in the good thing and not one negative face. And I do try to remember both of those, because there have been a lot of incredibly difficult periods of time for me in this job. One was shortly after I was hired. Six weeks after I was hired, Meegan went on maternity leave. So I was the only staff member in Bennington with about 40 people who were there as refugees, relying on me in various ways, many of whom had very significant needs. There were volunteers with really significant needs and expectations and anger with easy dc at the time working on that. The point of this being during that time, there was an Iftar event at Bennington College during Ramadan, which was a really great event. And I was talking with one of the refugee guys, young guy, he really has a smile on his face all the time. Incredible guy. His story is really interesting. But while we were just talking about some other things, he just said, all life is enjoy. And I was like, yes. And so that joined not one negative face and believing the good thing in my head, I was just like, all life is enjoy. Yeah, whenever you're getting frustrated, just like this guy is able to have that attitude. And I've talked to other family members of his, and that is a complete 180 for him from how he was before he was forced to leave Afghanistan. When he was in Afghanistan, he was getting into fights all the time. He was ready to throw down when they were leaving. He wanted to fight a member of the Taliban who had a gun, and, like, they had to convince him not to go and fight this guy in the street. It sounds like I haven't heard this directly from him, but I've talked to some of his family members about it. And if you met him at any point during his time here in the United States, you would never know at all.

[21:21] IAN HEFELE: Have I met him?

[21:22] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: You have.

[21:22] IAN HEFELE: Okay.

[21:23] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: He is the sweetest, nicest, most helpful, most positive guy, and that is not who he used to be. And that was a conscious choice on his part. It sounds like, again, just from talking to his family, haven't talked to him about it, but it does sound like upon coming to the United States, not instantly, but over time, part of the way that he adjusted to being here was changing a lot of the ways that he thought and felt and interacted with the world, particularly around, like, outlook. Just how am I going to approach day to day life? Which is something else that I try to remember, because whatever my job stresses are, I feel like, again, 95% of the time, I can let it go ish.

[22:12] IAN HEFELE: Yeah, I'm still working on that. I'm probably about 90% of the time right now.

[22:16] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: That's pretty good.

[22:19] IAN HEFELE: I needed a change because I had been in higher education for a while and in admission, enrollment management of higher education, which, I mean, you're wearing a Marlboro College t shirt. You know what a slog enrollment management can be.

[22:35] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Oh, yes.

[22:36] IAN HEFELE: We haven't even hit the demographic cliff of 2026 yet. That'll be coming soon. That's interesting. I needed a change, but I didn't want to, like, commute down to the bigger schools from Brattleboro, which is a 45 minutes drive. I mean, I have young kids who still need me, pretty accessible. And this kind of opened up, and I thought, hey, why not? Let's try it. Because I actually went to grad school with our executive director here, and I worked with or was taught by or advised by very many of our english language teachers in the Brattleboro office. I mean, the woman that runs our entire english language program was my admissions counselor for my grad degree. So it's a small, happy family where we're trying to fulfill something that I think is intrinsic to what it means to be America. Like, we are a nation of immigrants. We just are. And whether it's forced immigration internally that the Native Americans were put under, or our immigration as European Americans coming here and immigrants, to me, just from the beginning, have always meant diversity, strength, unity, belonging. And I found my family here in southern Vermont, and it's such a special place that I want other people from as far away as eastern Congo or Kabul to see that, too. And so far, they seem to be absolutely no.

[24:28] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: So on the 4 July 1 of my new coworkers in Bennington, as you know, everyone we just hired there is Afghan. All arrived as refugees, invited us over to her house for lunch. And I have rarely felt as positively american and patriotic as I did sitting around with a bunch of afghan people on the 4 July, sharing Kabuli and other afghan dishes, talking about adjusting to life in the United States, and also having them tell me more details about certain regions of Afghanistan. And also just, like, joking around about movies that everybody watches, right? It's like, oh, Skull island is my favorite of the new monsterverse movies. Like, yeah, that's the best one.

[25:18] IAN HEFELE: I used to love that when I lived in rural Mozambique, and people would do movie nights in these, like, reed shacks in the woods that I didn't even know existed because I lived in the center of town. They wanted to put the foreign teacher in the center of town, but the most random movies would show up, and I'm like, how did this even get here?

[25:42] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: No, it was wonderful. During our conversation earlier in the. In the day, one of the people who was there had said, like, oh, you know, there are some. Some movies that have so much imagination. They're very good imagination movies. And then during this conversation, he was saying the same thing, and then we were talking about who's gone to the movie theater? And he's like, oh, I don't really go. I'm not one. I'm not a guy to sit for 2 hours and watch a movie. Yeah, I figured that when you called them imagination movies like that. Sounds like someone who's never seen a Marvel movie or anything. Yeah, I like to watch at home where I can just sort of fast forward through any part I'm not interested in.

[26:21] IAN HEFELE: That's a way to go about movies. Yeah, that's a way to go about.

[26:24] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: But it was great to be in that environment and to, you know, later that same 4 July, I went with my friends to the Bennington fireworks, which I have very strong feelings about fireworks. They are not positive. I will not travel for them. I will like. Walking to the local park is pretty much the limits for me. And it was nice to see my friends and catch up. They'd been away for a while, but, like, nowhere near as positively connected to my american ness as I was sharing lunch with my colleagues and new friends. You know, it's a. It's true, like, we're. The United States is a nation that from its beginning has had a, you know, I don't know, some sort of stated commitment to being more than it is at all times. And every now and then, it reaches a little bit closer to whatever that might be.

[27:17] IAN HEFELE: May it keep reaching closer. I know I said at the top of this, that the appeal of southern Vermont is the community, and it's that way. Even this morning, I went over to the supermarket, and I was looking, not wanting to go into self checkout, because I don't work at the supermarket. And then I saw one of our former clients in the checkout line, like, he was managing the checkout line. And he was one of the first clients that I met when I used to drag my kids up to sit to go sledding in the wintertime. The first winter that everyone started showing up. And I was told, oh, just bring your kids up with some sleds and people will show up. And yeah, that's what happened. People came out with, like, some old mattresses or rugs, and I brought all our sleds up. And I remember meeting this guy, I think he was 13 or so at the time, and almost fluent English with me. And I said how? And he said I had to learn. And I thought that was amazing. But just seeing him this morning, I always make a point to go and check in with him about his mom, about her business and everything. And he always asks about my kids because we were there. I mean, he's a high schooler, so I don't, like, search him out. I don't want to be.

[28:57] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: You don't want to be weird about.

[28:58] IAN HEFELE: It, but anytime I see him, he comes and says hi. And I love that. And my son even recognizes him in town and will go up and say hi. And I think I was just talking to your coworkers who were here earlier about how one of the things that keeps me grounded in this job is just seeing the impact that this work has on my kids. Because when they come to work, they're coming to the MCC, the multicultural center, and they go into the kids room with kids from all over the world, countries that I'm pretty certain they'd have difficulty pointing out on a map at nine and ten years old. But now they know these countries are there. They've met people from there, and they've learned words from Turkish or dari or Swahili. And their mind was blown when I explained all the Swahili words in the Lion King.

[30:07] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Oh, yes. Oh, that's perfect.

[30:10] IAN HEFELE: So it's all about the connections, and I feel that's what this community engagement work is really about. It's making the connections.

[30:18] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Absolutely. And I think part of what you were describing, like, doing it in these smaller communities, it's so different than the experience that a lot of people have when they resettle in larger cities. There are different kinds of challenges that present themselves in small communities, different challenges that present themselves in cities. But as someone who likes to walk and who walks regularly in Bennington, even if I'm not going to the store, I will see people out and about. I was at the store the other day. I was walking out. Mohtar and Fauzia are driving in, because Fauzia works at the Starbucks in there, and she's now gonna become a manager and start training people. And I'm walking downtown, and, oh, it's Sharif and his wife. Like, within a day, I'll see five or seven people who are members of the refugee community just out and about in town. And that's not looking for anybody. It's not trying to see who's around, what's going on. It's just people who are outd walking around town, and you run into each other at all these wonderful little local places. And it really does give a different texture to what the community is and what it can mean to be in a small community in southern Vermont. The impact that this kind of work can have is really noticeable. I know one of the statistics that gets quoted about Brattleboro is that at one point, I believe, one in every hundred people in Brattleboro was Afghan, not even from the refugee population, but specifically Afghan. When the first emerged, emergency evacuations were happening, and that becomes something really significant. Again, an afghan number, but like Vermont, now has the highest per capita population of Afghans in the country. That's not a huge. Numerically, it's still not huge. But as an impact on what it means to be a Vermonter and what the nature of your state is, that's a really positive change that can happen. It brings all of these new perspectives, new food, new clothing, new insights into what it means to live in a democracy. I've had some very interesting conversations with people who were a major part of the government efforts in Afghanistan to create and preserve democracy there. And those are really eye opening conversations that I don't know how else I would have if I was living in New York. City. I don't know that that would happen for me either.

[32:40] IAN HEFELE: Yeah, I feel like Vermont is set apart from the west, rest of the country a little bit. Meaning, like, there's just a different timeframe. Like, when I. Whenever I go. When we went down to DC earlier this year, I had to reinstall Uber and Lyft and everything onto my phone. And my siblings, who both live in New York City, find that hysterical that I just don't leave them on my phone. And I'm like, why would I? There's nothing up here. But I do have the micro moo.

[33:14] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: App on my phone.

[33:18] IAN HEFELE: So I can show people how to use it when they're in town. But, like, doordash or any of that stuff, those app things that are just commonplace in bigger cities, they don't enter into my mentality here, and I like that a little bit. My kids always joke that they'd rather go into town, into Brattleboro, because I live outside of town. They'd rather go into Brattleboro with their papa than me because he doesn't stop every 10ft to talk to people.

[33:55] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: That has been a side effect of this work for me as well. Definitely have a lot more impromptu. My friends and I went out to get ice cream at Stuart's and we ran into a volunteer and she was asking me about, there's this young woman and she just moved in because her husband's here in Bennington and she's pregnant, and what are her educational options? They were asking about starting high school and all this other stuff. And, like, we talked for about ten minutes about that.

[34:20] IAN HEFELE: While your ice cream's dripping down your hair.

[34:22] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Well, luckily, it was before we ordered. This was when we came to get in line, so that was good, at least.

[34:27] IAN HEFELE: Good priorities.

[34:28] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Good priorities, exactly. Exactly.

[34:29] IAN HEFELE: I found myself in the past time, since I've had this job, I have to, like, add an extra 20 to 30 minutes to anything I want to do in town, because if I don't, I will just always be out of time.

[34:43] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Yeah.

[34:44] IAN HEFELE: But I feel that our co workers and clients who have come through the refugee process and some that are working with us now, they just exhibit a state of grace, even when they're absolutely wicked busy. There's just a state of peace and grace that I don't think the average american Native born American has.

[35:15] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Yeah, it's hard to attain that, and I have seen some of that as well. It's been. Yeah, as I. As I said, it's been so positive to have number one more people working in Bennington. But particularly to have, at this point, everyone in the office except our UVM intern arrived as a refugee, having that amount of lived experience for when someone who's newly arrived has a challenge, the case manager they're working with can talk to them about their own experience resettling here in southern Vermont, sometimes in their own language and often in their own language. Yeah. So, you know, someone is really upset that they don't have a washer and dryer in their apartment. Their case manager can talk to them about how they have been here for a while, and they don't have a washer and dryer in their apartment either, because most apartments in the United States don't have washers and dryers. Maybe if you're very lucky, maybe they do. If you're in a larger city, maybe there's a laundromat close by, or maybe there are machines in the basement of your building. But that's a major cultural adjustment that you wouldn't learn from a movie you wouldn't necessarily know about in terms of how your daily life might be affected. But having somebody who can talk about their own experience, even if what they're saying is like, yeah, this is really difficult. I don't have a solution. But it isn't just you. It's not because you're a refugee that this is happening. It's not, you know, especially, like, your situation is challenging in the way that it is challenging for anyone who's entirely new to the. To the country. Yeah.

[36:48] IAN HEFELE: One. One thing I do love about this job is I feel like there's learning opportunities every single day, whether it's how to fill out the mountains of red tape, bureaucratic paperwork that the federal government requires, or just realizing, looking at my own community through a new lens, because I don't want my kids to want to pick up and pack out of here like I did in Connecticut when I was a kid. I wanted so desperately to get out of Connecticut, and I don't want to see, like, another generation of Vermonters say, I so desperately want to get out of Vermont. So I really feel like this is an opportunity to make southern Vermont the. The community that I want for my kids. And when I was talking to your co workers before, they said, keep bringing them to expose them. And one of your co workers was like, yeah, anytime you get an invite for something from me, bring your kids along. It's just.

[38:05] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that is, that's how we've approached it, and it's what we've also talked to everyone we work with about, like, any events that we're doing. We're encouraging people to bring their kids. Some of my new coworkers have children, one of whom gets out of their normal day classes in time to join at the office for the last hour of the day. And those are cool experiences for him to have, just being around people from different cultures in different countries. And he's a new vermonter, but it's kind of the same situation. Like, what Vermont or what experiences do you want for your kids? I think a lot of people who are arriving, many of them have international backgrounds and professional accomplishments, and there's a wide variety of refugee experiences. There are people who are really. They want to know that they haven't landed in a small town that doesn't offer opportunities for their children of all kinds, which is also similar to your perspective as someone who's here with kids. That's something that we've heard from the local schools quite a bit, is that having different perspectives present physically and in relationship with other children has been really valuable for people who are growing up in Bennington. And there was a middle school class that was able to hear from a refugee student just about their experiences, not even specifically about why they became a refugee, what politically happened in Afghanistan. But just like, the family trips that they would go on into. Like, to go swimming in a river and what birds are there over there? What's the fish like? Just hearing that from someone who's been there adds so much to what it means to grow up in Bennington.

[39:52] IAN HEFELE: Mm hmm. Yeah, I agree, too. And I think that's what's gonna keep me going on this job that we are trying to accomplish every single day, that we just are staying engaged, because it's so important to stay engaged with those in our southern Vermont community and make the southern Vermont community a cog in the global community that will hopefully one day just be much more accepting and welcoming than Bennington and Brattleboro have become.

[40:32] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Absolutely. Yeah. It's a chance for these very small communities that can sometimes feel kind of separate, where you don't have Uber, you don't have Lyft, you don't have doordash in the same ways. But it is an opportunity for these communities to take a stand against global injustices, and it is also a huge opportunity for the communities to grow, not only through becoming more multicultural, but with all the different talents and skills that people bring from around the world. It's really exciting to be a part of it.

[41:02] IAN HEFELE: Well, thank you, Jack, for being a part of it.

[41:05] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: And thank you.

[41:06] IAN HEFELE: Let's do this again sometime.

[41:08] JACK ROSSITER-MUNLEY: Yeah, anytime.