Refugee Dreams Revisited – Youth Performances
Refugee Dreams Revisited
Produced by MediaRites Productions.
Starting with the fall of Saigon in April 1975, refugees from Vietnam awaited approval to move to the US and other countries. By 1979, there were almost 62,000 Vietnamese in refugee camps, with more than 140,000 people displaced from Cambodia and Laos. Portland, Oregon, was one of the medium-sized US cities that dealt with the relatively sudden influx of every major ethnic group (Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong, Mien and Cambodian) from Southeast Asia.
Fifteen former refugees were interviewed for the Refugee Dreams Revisited project, which was created for the Peabody award-winning series Crossing East that ran on 230 public radio stations.
MediaRites presented arts outreach in partnership with SAFES, Survivors for An Effective System and Act For Action, to 40 survivors of crime and violence. We spent nearly six months planning the workshops and the outreach to SAFES members with Arwen Bird of SAFES and Jeannie LaFrance of Act for Action.We offered these workshops to survivors: people whose lives have been drastically affected by violence and/or crime. Some survive individual violence (such as surviving incest, assault, burglary or rape), others institutional violence (such as police brutality, internment or slavery). 
