Helping others get a new start on life
This Holiday Heroes profile is from 2009; nominate your hero for 2010.
Great generosity often requires great sacrifice, and that’s evident to anybody who drops by Lorraine Copeland’s modest home in East Lake.
Her house could use a fresh coat of paint, and her car is rusted, dented and 23 years old.
For the past 27 years, Copeland has devoted her life and resources to helping Cambodian refugees who fled Pol Pot’s murderous regime and came to Atlanta to restart their lives.
Often, says Copeland, they landed in America “with nothing more than the clothes on their back.”
Most of the refugees arrived through Catholic Social Services. Copeland, 68, first got involved as a volunteer English teacher for the refugees, but she quickly realized they needed a lot more than that. “Even the clothes they wore weren’t enough,” she says. “It was winter, and they were wearing socks and sandals. They had no warm clothing.”
So Copeland began to work her friends and family in Atlanta, a network that she’s worked every since. One of the first things she did was persuade her sister-in-law, who worked at a Georgia Tech bookstore, to get the store to donate jackets to the immigrants.
At an apartment complex where about 100 Cambodians settled, she turned her daily English classes into veritable town hall meetings, where the refugees figured out ways around other barriers they faced.
For transportation, for instance, they decided to combine resources to buy a single automobile and share it to find jobs and get to work.
Wanna Sim was 8 years old when he arrived here with his family in 1982. He recalls how Copeland arranged for a Grady Memorial Hospital surgeon to repair his deformed feet so shoes would fit and he could go to school.
“We called her ‘teacher,’ which in Cambodian is ‘khrou,’ ” says Sim. “But she was more than that. She was family, to us and hundreds of Cambodians who came here.’’
Over the years, Copeland learned to speak a couple of words and phrases of Cambodian. “She helped my mom get her first job by going to the interview and translating,” says Sim. “That was really big.”
Copeland has slowed down over the years as she’s battled health problems. She doesn’t deal with new refugees as much as she used to, but she stays plenty busy with the family of hundreds of immigrants and their children who have, in a way, adopted her.
When Copeland met Narin Man 19 years ago, Man was a pregnant 24-year-old who didn’t speak English, had no job and no prospects.
Two years ago, Man, with the help of Copeland, earned her American citizenship. This year, Sopheak, the daughter she was pregnant with when she met Copeland, started college.
Sopheak calls Copeland for help with her school work and for words of wisdom. But there’s only so much advice even a khrou can give her daughter, says Man, laughing.
“Sopheak says she wants to be a lawyer — or a doctor,” says Man. “She can’t decide.”
