With its far north location and famously frigid winters, North Dakota might not appear to be a likely destination for foreign refugees.
Yet Family HealthCare of Fargo receives so many refugees that it has a full-time nurse dedicated to working with the many refugee families who come to the health center.
“We’ve been a refugee settlement location for years,” said Margaret Asheim, the health center’s chief executive officer.
Asheim said a local non-profit, Lutheran Social Services, had helped to spearhead the work of welcoming refugees over a period of decades, and Family HealthCare worked closely with them. “They had a passion for refugees,” she said.
Indeed, local efforts to receive and welcome refugees now spans generations. Asheim noted that the health center needed more interpretation services for Kurdish speakers in the past, but demand is declining now because the second-generation Kurds are fluent English speakers.
Family HealthCare has eight full-time interpreters, with the greatest demand being for Spanish speakers as well as services for Somali, Nepali and Haitian patients. Overall, about 20 percent of the center’s patients speak languages other than English.
The mix of people continually changes over time. Last year brought an influx of Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, Asheim said.
Often a whole family will come in together, and they will need vaccinations of various kinds. The center also helps to coordinate contacts with social service agencies.
Family HealthCare has grown to become the largest health center in North Dakota and employs about 160 people–including some who came to the community as refugees. About 200,000 people live in the area, including some across the state line in Moorehead, Minn., where the center plans to open a school-based facility in late 2024.
As for the future, the state agency that coordinates refugee services currently expects to receive more than 300 refugees annually. Fargo is the state’s largest city, and historically has been a center of refugee activity, so the health center’s staff expects to see more migrant patients in the future.