‘Where We Belong’: New Wichita State University exhibit features stories of refugee families

WICHITA — Nataliia Trafimovych thought it was perfect that an art exhibit showcasing her family’s story about fleeing their home country Ukraine was unveiled on Aug. 24 — Ukrainian Independence Day.

“It’s a very special day,” Trafimovych said.

Trafimovych, along with her 3-year-old son, Zakhar, and her husband, Artem, are featured in a new storytelling exhibit at the Wichita State University Ulrich Museum of Art, titled “Where We Belong: Refugee Stories from Wichita.” More than 400 people attended the museum’s fall exhibition opening on campus.

The Trafimovych family, who arrived in Kansas in March, are one of five featured in the new exhibit. Refugee families from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela and Syria also are included.

Zahra, a Syrian mother of 11 children who communicated with help from her interpreter, Sirana Jamkartanian, said she lost her husband to ongoing fighting in Syria. The country has been ravaged by a decade-long war that has claimed more than 350,000 lives. Zahra did not give her last name, citing security concerns.

“My kids were deprived from school, from health care,” Zahra said through Jamkartanian’s translation. “They went through a lot.”

Jamkartanian said Zahra needs more support, especially with transportation and child care assistance.

“We need everything,” Zahra said. “Clothes, food … rent.”

The local chapter of the International Rescue Committee is the lead organization assisting the five featured families. More than 2,500 refugee families currently call Wichita home, and more than 90 languages are actively spoken in the Wichita school district, according to Mythili Menon, Wichita State University director of linguistics. Menon is also the director of the Center for Educational Technologies to Assist Refugee Learners, or CETARL. She said it was important to her, and the featured families, to have their stories shared in their native tongues first.

“Linguistic diversity is something I think we don’t appreciate as much in Kansas,” Menon said. “We don’t celebrate languages enough.”

The families’ stories were collected through a series of interviews with Menon, museum officials and translators. The text stories appear in both the families’ native languages and English. Additionally, Wichita State photography instructor Kendra Cremin took photos and video of the families, which are included in the exhibit. Cremin said it was important to illustrate their new lives in Kansas and the emotions that come with fleeing one’s home.

“It’s a community story,” Cremin said. “Yes, it is an asylee or refugee story, and what they did to get here was beyond hard, and really amazing, but once they got here, everything was still very difficult. But with everything they told us about that, they also told us about all the help they got when they got here, and how much they love it here.”

Wissa Malikzai’s family is originally from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. When his country fell to the Taliban in August 2021, Malikzai said he and his family fled to the Kabul airport.

“We came from Afghanistan to Qatar, from Qatar to Germany, spent about 40 days over there,” Malikzai said, “then Virginia, where we were living on an American military base. Then from there to Wichita.”

Malikzai said nobody in his family, including himself, spoke English when they arrived in the U.S. Through immersion in the language and culture, Malikzai learned English fluently. He also knows seven other languages, including Pashto and Dari — two of the most common languages in Afghanistan — as well as Farsi, Urdu and Hindi.

The exhibit runs through Dec. 7, and Menon’s goal is to use it as an educational opportunity through a storytelling format. School tours and community conversations are being planned around the exhibit in the coming months. Ulrich Museum director Vivian Zavataro said she’s proud of the conversations already spawning from the exhibit opening.

“What’s amazing about university museums, is that we’re this repository for dialogue, or for experimentation, or for education,” Zavataro said, “and we have this freedom to do things differently than other museums.”

Trafimovych said it was amazing to see so many people attend the opening night of the exhibit.

“They all said, ‘Hi, hello, we support you,’ ” Trafimovych said, “and I’m happy.”

Corrections: Mythili Menon is the Wichita State University director of linguistics. Her name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story. Zahra is a Syrian mother of 11 children. An earlier version of this story had an inaccurate number of children.