Doing the work for Pocatello’s World Refugee Day event creates ties that bind our community together

Pocatello. It’s not flashy like Boise, and it’s not touristy like towns up in North Idaho. No, it’s a medium-sized, working-class community full of people who have come from all over the world to make this corner of southeast Idaho their home. 

But, how does one make a place, a home? This is something to ponder as we think of World Refugee Day. As I spoke with members of the planning committee for our World Refugee Day celebration on June 20, I was struck by all the hard work that goes into making community. Hard work and a lot of fun. 

Our World Refugee Day celebration was a great success this year, despite the gale force winds that occasionally blew through the area. It was bigger than last year, and there was so much free food — purchased and made by many individuals who are recent arrivals to our town. This was their gift to their chosen home: Pocatello. 

There were games from different countries for the kids to play and fabulous ethnic dancing and music. Not bad for a free community event. 

The bigger picture is that it took months to create all of this. Any community event starts long before the dancing and celebrating and it lasts long afterwards, too. Doing the work to create an event also creates ties that bind our community together. 

The four women I interviewed for this piece are part of the larger event organizing committee that has been meeting regularly since early January. Three of the women are originally from Mexico, and Lena Contor came from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, in 2005. 

Hundreds of conversations went into planning Pocatello’s World Refugee Day

Lena started organizing the celebration of World Refugee Day in Pocatello in 2024 as an outgrowth of her work with the Ukrainian refugee community in Idaho and her work with the refugee advocacy group, Bridges Idaho, that also helped to sponsor this event.

For the first couple years the celebration was focused on all of Pocatello’s many refugee and immigrant communities. This year, the committee chose to focus on the Latino community that has played such a big role in Idaho for so many decades. 

“Our committee meetings would always take at least three hours and when we finished the meeting, we’d all dance. You gotta dance,” Lena told me. “I feel so refreshed and energized after those meetings; it was like going to a retreat instead of going to work. It does feel a little bit closer to my culture in the Ukraine. We eat a lot, we like to party, and we like to get together.” I’ve been missing these things for all these years, and I didn’t even realize it. Now that I experienced this group of women, it all comes back, like, “wow, this is how I grew up.” 

Beyond the logistics, the hundreds of phone calls and personal visits to community businesses to get sponsorships for the booths and the food, and the tables and chairs and a sound system and everything else, the group really formed strong bonds with one another over those months of meeting and organizing. 

“Even when we gather to have our meetings, I’m excited to see the girls. We’re a group of friends, and it’s exciting just to get together and start planning on this event,” said Yolanda Martinez, who came to Blackfoot from Mexico over 40 years ago. “ And I’m thinking we will continue to work on different projects in the future. For me personally, it’s giving me the opportunity to meet other people, to learn about other events that help out not just the Latino community, but the Pocatello community as a whole.”

Some, like Dora Isaksen, have also participated in the entertainment — she was a member of a Latina Folk Dance group who performed at the event in 2024. Then her daughter replaced her in the dance group so that she could focus full time on her new business as a home mortgage loan officer.  

“The dance group, I loved it. It was a very good experience, I saw the community really coming together,” Dora told me. “I didn’t know there were so many people in Pocatello from so many different countries. It’s a good reminder, I guess, for me to see where we are from and where our roots are and to just incorporate all that into where we live now and be part of this community.”

Evelyn Kistler, one of the group leaders and a champion at the jump rope game station on Saturday said the group organizing the event has formed a special bond.

“They all say, yes, we’ll volunteer, and yes, we will collaborate and whatever it is, they do it,” she said. “The world is not easy right now. That’s the part that just kills me. Like, I want everyone to feel happy and worth it, to be loving towards each other. I mean, what else do we have? We forget what’s really important sometimes.” 

From the looks on people’s faces as they ate through mounds of food and danced together at the end of the evening, the people of Pocatello really enjoyed being present in the moment of what really matters.