MARQUETTE — Refugees who have fled from their own nations during a time of turmoil spoke at Northern Michigan University about their experiences and advocacy on Thursday.

This panel was a combined effort by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Interational Studies; the Student Finance Committee; the new student organization Refugee Outreach Collective; as well as the departments of English, Philosophy and Economics.

One of the featured speakers was assistant professor of philosophy Mlado Ivanovic, who fled from Bosnia as a refugee in the 1990s. He is the current director of ROC and a faculty advisor of its new chapter at NMU. Ivanovic is also a member of Michigan Immigrant and Refugee Council, an entity in the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s Office of Global Michigan.

“We want to highlight not only the vulnerability people experience and endure on a day-to-day basis, but to highlight resilience and the giving back to community through experiences, through skills and through knowledge that such hardships actually bring themselves after a long period of time,” Ivanovic said.

Fellow MIRAC board member and vice chair, Dilli Gautam, was also present to speak about his experiences as a refugee from Bhutan.

“Refugees are not just numbers, or they are not just to be saved. They are individuals with great intellect,” Gautam said.

He and thousands of others were forcibly displaced by their home country in 1992. Gautam lived in a Nepali refugee camp for 16 years before being resettled to the United States in 2008.

“If you really look into the most successful refugees in the U.S. in current time — obtaining higher education, studying business — that’s the Bhutanese refugees, but that’s because of the resiliency that was showed, the hardships we encountered at the refugee camp,” Gautam said. “Waiting for (the) ration that was distributed to us every two weeks, waiting for opportunities to show our skills, waiting for someone to save us, achieve what we wanted to do — those are all because of the resiliency.”

Another speaker, Shukurani Nsengiyumva, fellow member of ROC board of directors and program manager with the Alzheimer’s Association, told her story as well.

Nsengiyumva, who was born in a refugee camp to refugees from Rwanda and Burundi, lived in Malawi for 10 years before being resettled to the U.S.

“I was suddenly in a position of supporting my mother, who at the time was not fluent in English, so I became her advocate at 15 years old,” she said about her experiences in her new country. “I became her advocate at appointments, her assistant for job applications, something which I’d never done before, and so I was overwhelmed by the responsibility at home and struggling to adapt to high school in the United States.”

To add to matters, Nsengiyumva was a high school senior in Malawi preparing to go to college. When beginning her education in the U.S., she was re-enrolled as a freshman, forced to repeat the whole process over again. Despite this, Nsengiyumva flourished, became a David Projects for Peace Scholar, is currently a master of public health student at Western Michigan University and is a WMU Thurgood Marshall Fellow.

Anna Kovalenko, another speaker, wasn’t initially a refugee but works with them daily as the president and cofounder of the Ukranian Society of Michigan and a board member of MIRAC.

Kovalenko immigrated to the U.S. in 2013, but returned to Ukraine to move her mother out to the U.S. before the war with Russia began.

“The day before my mom was to have her interview with the U.S. Embassy at Kiev, we got the message that the embassy was closing down and every interview was canceled,” she recalled. “We were stuck and we didn’t know what to do. We decided to move out of the country as quickly as possible.”

Without a car, with limited money and a war ready to start at any moment, Kovalenko got her mom to Poland.

“I couldn’t even think that if I have to leave and my mom stays there and they deny her, she has to go back to Ukraine,” she said.

After interviews, setbacks, renting apartments by the day and other struggles, Kovalenko made it back to the U.S. with her mother and began organizing a group to support incoming Ukranian refugees coming to Michigan.

“We often think refugees are coming here, they’re a burden, they need our support, and they’re hanging on our necks, but they really actually want to live a normal life,” she said.

Kovalenko now has a myriad of success stories where Ukranian refugees have made it to the U.S. and integrated into society, gained employment and began giving back to their communities.

With all these stories in mind, Ivanovic stressed the importance of ROC’s current goal: continue to support their Global Classroom initiative, which allows refugees in the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi to take college courses. Ivanovic is striving to partner with an educational institution in Michigan so refugees are not only taking classes but receiving associate’s degrees so they have something to show for their efforts that will help them gain employment.

For more information on the Global Classroom, go to rocyourworld.org.