Thomas
is
the Director of Minority Affairs and is a leader of a news program called
the weekly Hmong News in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.
First of all, what does your job mean and what does the Director of Minority
Affairs do?
My job here is to work with the local community, including governmental
agencies like city hall, the county, and some of the departments to address of
the issues related to the minority population.
I read about something that you’ve done called
the weekly Hmong News, what is that exactly?
Well basically the Hmong News is a new program, we’ve had it about two
years now, is being broadcasted through NBC networking in Rhinelander. The Hmong
news is broadcasted in Hmong language. We have three segments in the program and
this is geared toward the Hmong population.
The first part of the program is more like news: we have local news,
state news, and national news and we might have some inter-national news like
news from Laos and from Thailand that could be broadcasted in the show. The
second component of the news program is what we call the Yearly Trend.
So we will broadcast some of the events taking place in this area, for
example you have the Hmong New Years, or a graduation party, or some other thing
taking place not only related to the Hmong community, but if there is something
that we thought would be beneficial to the community.
The third segment is more like an educational component.
We have different speakers come to the show and talk about different
topics, lets say technical college; talk about how people have access to the
college, what kind of services they offer through the college. We have speakers
come to the show from the Wausau Police Department, talk about what is a
policeman, what is the officer, what is some of the jobs that they do.
So this is some of the things we do for the TV program, but mainly the TV
program is to help many Hmong refugees and Hmong families to understand what is
going on in the community. We’ve had a pretty good response.
This type of Hmong News and Hmong TV show, I think what we have is the
first of its kind because what we have had before for TV programs has been
Public Access and in order for the families to see that kind of show, they have
to subscribe for cable. For our
program here, we know that many families don’t have cable so we were able to
get connected with one of the network TV stations.
Also I heard of something called the Hmong
Leadership Initiative.
That’s right, through the Wausau- Marathon County Leadership Program.
It’s a program that they’ve had for about 16 years, and after going
through that, I have learned a lot from that program and I think that in order
for me to really get the Hmong community involved in the community, I will need
to promote that kind of a program to help grow the leadership in the Hmong
community. So I started to promote that program, and last year we had 20
Hmong professionals go through that program.
It was really successful. We
have topics in the program like American culture and .., state and federal
government, local government, Western cultures, Education, Business and Economy
development, community partnership and services. Those are some of the topics we have. This is a one-year program.
The participant meets one day a month, for eleven months months.
Do you think we need more opportunities like that
for minorities in our area?
I think that it’s good that we do a program like this in the community so
that they learn what they can get involved.
But without helping them to know what the community is doing, it’s
harder for them to get involved. So once we can start helping them and teaching
them what the system is like in this country, the more likely they are to be
involved.
Do you have any future plans for what you’re
doing here?
Yes, right now I am going to host another Hmong Leadership Initiative class,
which will be starting this May. It will go from May to next April, and that second program
coming up. Beside that, my office
host some . which will allow the minority populations opportunity to meet with
…, talk about some issues that they have.
Particularly more like a listening session. WE have some leaders attend the session and will announce
it… So I find that that will really be something interesting to be in the
minority community. The minority
community includes anything Hmong, Hispanic, Laotian, the Native American
community, and …
In our school, we’ve got a lot of minorities and
I think that as a school we need to know what we can do to help out, because we
can see the racism occurring.
It is part of the human nature, and some of the things that are
happening are normal. What we need to do is to encourage and to have more
educational workshops and educational type settings so that we can let people
learn about other cultures. The new
minorities will need to learn more about the mainstream culture, but the
mainstream also needs to know more about the minority culture.
Because each different group comes from a different background: different
human race, but also different culture, and those all need to be shared.
I think that it’s good that you have a Diversity Club, and that will be
a starting point to bring more people into it, that will be significant to the
school.
Is there anything else you would like to add or talk
about?
Well, another thing that we have done is last year we worked with the Wausau
city and we have proclaimed April to be Hmong History Month because people
don’t know and should learn about Hmong history.
The first Hmong family had arrived here back in April of 1976, and
because of that I think April is significant.
After that there were more people moving into this area and now it has
led to remembering April. It is the
month when we started our new lives. We can work with people and the community
so we can know about the Hmong culture and history, and just diversity.
I wish that all the groups of people people start sharing their
backgrounds too. We’re not only
German, but we have more than that: Irish, Taliban, we have French.
I hope we can start opening our backgrounds and be able to talk about the
rich culture that we have. We live
together and share our culture with each other.
So we started the Hmong History Month to learn of the history of the
Hmong and their culture, but we still want to learn more; maybe if we open up an
avenue that we all can share. Sometimes
when you run into an Asian person like myself you probably wonder, is he a Hmong, or Laotian, Japanese, Chinese. If
we don’t share, if we don’t talk, we won’t know one another.
If we start talking to one another about our backgrounds and culture,
that will really bring us together.
Oral
History Project 
