About ten miles east of Atlanta is a little town of about 8000 people called Clarkston, Georgia. The town motto is “Small Town, Big Heart” and when you consider what’s going on there, it really fits.
A Vietnamese crocheter
In the 1990s, refugee resettlement groups deemed Clarkston to be an ideal area because it was near Atlanta, at the end of the transit line, and had lots of rental units available. Hundreds of refugees from Somalia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Vietnam, Bhutan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Russia, Afghanistan and Iraq flooded in. By 2000, almost half the population of the town was from outside the U.S. and Clarkston had become the most diverse square mile in the U.S.
The Clarkston Community Center, formerly the town high school
In response, the Small Town with a Big Heart built a $2.4 million, 10,000-square foot Community Center with room enough for everyone: Contra dancers, senior refugees, Girl Scouts, the Burundi drum team, table tennis players, break dancers, literacy students, country music pickers, 40 community gardeners, 100 summer campers, and or course, the Refugee Women’s Sewing Society.
A Bhutanese sewing beauty
Led by the perennially perky Catherine Palmer, a Southern Baptist missionary, the Sewing Society serves over 40 women of numerous nationalities with 23 sewing machines, 6 classes and enthusiasm galore. The women gather for fellowship, laughter and work – crocheting, beading, hand sewing in a microfinance model that creates products the women can sell.
A shy Somalian
If there were a rainbow of hope for how diversity can work in a community, it would be arching over the Clarkston Community Center. My $100 today goes to the CCC, and the lovely ladies of the Sewing Society.
What Gives 
Ok, so I’m a day ahead (busy day with Boy Scouts tomorrow!) but what a perfect day for reading this one! Sometimes I just feel like you’re telling me I’m on the right track! (The high school knitting club is meeting at my house today . . . )
These woman are awe inspiring and amazing seamstresses too! I think Betty’s comment that “sewing is a universal language” is true – and it made me think of another – HOPE is also a universal language!
We are having a Festival Sept 25 & 26 (ClarkstonFestival.com) in Clarkston and hope these ladies will join us. We will also have a dozen or so other international groups sharing who they are, Most of our community groups are comprised of women. They have an amazing capacity to build communities and share strengths.
Hope is alive and growing here in Clarkston Ga.
Betty, your stories are highlights in my day! Love this and thank you so much for being YOU!
Betty – they’ve all been awesome – this one particularly speaks to me –
they also have a blog and Etsy shop if anyone’s interested:
http://refugeesewing.blogspot.com/
http://www.etsy.com/shop/RefugeeSewingSociety
I think it’s such an incredible thing to bring all those women, of all those nationalities together, and give them a way to produce products to sell.
And they get to be with each other — so Sewing is clearly a common language!