Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Autumn 2013 | Page 44

alumni news

profile

“My family fled in the middle of the night. We
left everything, and that was the last sight of
my old life. . . . For many years, I didn’t know
where I belonged, but now I have a new family
at my Re:new.” —Hari, a Bhutani refugee woman
One day in 2001, while living

Melding Cultures,
Fashioning New Lives
by Dawn Kotapish ’92

in Nairobi, Rebecca Seneff Sandberg ’99
wandered down a path lined with papaya
and avocado trees. Her baby son in tow,
she followed the beat of women’s voices
singing hymns in Swahili.
This music feels like home, she thought
before stumbling upon a gathering of about
50 women—all refugees from Sudan,
Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, and
Rwanda. Members of a thriving microenterprise called Amani Ya Juu, the women
gathered every day to learn to sew and to
create saleable products.
For five years, while her husband, Roger
Sandberg, Jr. ’00, did humanitarian aid
work throughout East Africa, Rebecca
came alongside this refugee community.
She helped them design products and
listened to their stories of bottomless pain
and uncommon resilience.
When the Sandbergs returned to the
Wheaton area in 2007, Rebecca found
herself aching for Kenya and her community
of women. Then, one snowy night while
making a run to Target, she spied a woman
walking alongside the road dressed in loose
African Kitenge cloth. She followed the
woman home and knocked on her door.

Noticing the rising refugee population in DuPage County,
Rebecca Seneff Sandberg ’99 (center) began Re:new, a
non-profit that provides training and employment to refugee
women. Holly Owen Setran ’92, M.A. ’94 (right) and Martha
Schlamann Bunch ’80 (not pictured) serve as founding board
members, and Kari Rietveld Vandervelde ’00 (not pictured)
is a volunteer staff member. For more about Re:new, go to
renewproject.org.

46     A U T U M N   2 0 1 3

“I was greeted with a burst of heat [and]
the reminiscent smell of spices,” Rebecca
recalls. Surrounded by children once inside,
Rebecca learned that the family members
were refugees from Somalia. “You can give
me a job?” the woman asked.
Two years later, the woman (named
Majush) became the first student artisan
at Re:new—the volunteer-led nonprofit
Rebecca founded in 2009 that provides
community-based training and employment

to refugee women living in DuPage County,
Illinois.
Since its inception, Re:new has trained more
than 70 refugee women, providing flexible
schedules and viable income. Re:new
artisans create housewares, baby gifts,
bags, and accessories from recycled cloth.
With 22 sewing machines on location,
Rebecca has not yet had to turn away
any potential students. But as more of
Illinois’ 136,000 refugees migrate from
the city to the suburbs, the need may grow.
According to the Illinois Bureau of Refugee
and Immigrant Services, five years ago
85 percent of the state’s refugees lived in
Chicago. Today that number has decreased
to 60 percent, with 54,000 refugees
making their homes in the suburbs.
Re:new operates with a fleet of about 45
volunteers—80 percent of whom are
Wheaton alumni. For Rebecca, this kind
of investment in time and resources is a
no-brainer. “There is nothing in me that can
turn my back on someone whose entire life
has been taken away,” she says, reflecting
on some of the stories she’s encountered
over the years. One woman’s arms had
been hacked with machetes and her skin
burned. Another had to drink urine to
stay alive while fleeing rebel forces. Most
recently, a woman escaped Syria with her
daughter but was forced to leave her two
sons behind.
“As the artisans find their stories, we find
our own stories,” Rebecca says. “For more
than a decade, these stories of enormous
challenge and incredible courage have
stitched themselves into the fabric of my
own story, giving me a hunger to act. When
we look poverty of body or mind in the eye,
life cannot ever be the same.”