Women of the World Staff September 2021 Update

Women of the World Refugee Podcast

WoW Midsummer 2021 Podcast Outline

Topics:

1. Women of the World today
   1. New Faces
2. Pandemic, Vaccine, and The New Normal
3. Afghanistan
   1. Support
4. What it means to be forcibly displaced…

Women of the World Today

I want to open up the conversation today by introducing the people on today’s podcast. Why don’t you let people know your first name, how long you’ve been with WoW, and how you come to human rights advocacy work…

As you can tell, Women of the World is made of some diverse voices working to overcome the critical needs of the women we serve. Maybe each of you could talk briefly about a case that you are handling that goes to the heart of what forcibly displaced women are facing today.

Pandemic, Vaccine, and the New Normal

Let’s talk about the impact of the pandemic and the economic recession of 2020 on our community. What lasting impacts do you think it has had on the forcibly displaced community?

There is a lot of bad information out there in our community on the vaccine. Here are the facts:

• The controlled, scientific clinical trials of both Moderna and Pfizer had over 70,000 participants—none of whom died from the vaccine or side effects of the vaccine. All other vaccines released to use by the general public have been completely tested and show very few harmful side effects.
• Since the vaccine has been made available to emergency use, there have been few if any confirmed deaths from these vaccines. The Pfizer vaccine has full FDA approval, many other vaccines have emergency approval and are moving toward full approval.
• The vaccine is extremely successful in reducing the impact of the virus. Most of the vaccines have greater than 90% likelihood of eliminating symptoms from contracting the virus. The vaccine currently has this high efficiency with the new delta variant strains.
• Not getting the vaccine puts others at risk now, including children; but also puts the whole population at risk of introducing a vaccine-resistant strain and starting the pandemic all over again.

Afghanistan

As America left Afghanistan and the Taliban claimed control of the country by force, many of the people of Afghanistan began fleeing. Furthermore, we have heard horrible stories of revenge and mistreatment of the family members of our clients. Like in any crisis of forcibly displaced people, we have a moral obligation to support some of those in harm’s way. Let’s discuss a bit about what we have heard about the situation from those that have families there.

Our community in Utah is so heartfelt and giving. As the situation escalated, WoW had many calls wondering how to help. At this point, we have more need to fund case management to fill out resettlement paperwork for the family members of those already clients of WoW. While in-kind support like gift cards or offers of volunteering are always helpful, the biggest impact remains monetary donations at womenofworld.org/donate

What it means to be forcibly displaced

I want to end today to open up the discussion on what it means to be forcibly displaced and the impact that WoW and its partners have on our new neighbors finding refuge here. There is so much misinformation to overcome, so in the next few minutes, give me your first hand experience with forcibly displaced people, their work ethic, community development, efforts to learn English and anything else you can think to tell someone who maybe hasn’t spent as many hours as you with refugees and asylum seekers and other immigrants fleeing violence.