Helping develop a vibrant gathering place for Akron’s Bhutanese refugee community has personal meaning for the project designer.
Sai Sinbondit is a veteran of refugee camps himself.
Sinbondit, 38, is married with two kids and lives in Cleveland, but his family’s journey to a small Ohio Mennonite town started in Laos and took them to Vietnam and refugee camps in Thailand.
Sinbondit’s Thai father and Vietnamese mother were living in Laos, where his father was an English teacher. During the Vietnam War, his father was taken to a concentration camp for teaching English and Sinbondit’s mother — eight months pregnant with him — was forced back to Vietnam with her three daughters.
The family was separated for three years.
“Still to this day, I don’t know how my parents got reconnected,” said Sinbondit. “They found each other again as soon as he got out ... We snuck across the Mekong River [from Laos to Thailand].”
The family had lost their documents as they were fleeing, so when they arrived in Thailand, they were put into the refugee camp system.
After about three years, Sinbondit’s father became a translator for the United Nations. The family was then sponsored by a man in a church in Pettisville in northwest Ohio.
“I was 6 years old and grew up in Pettisville,” said Sinbondit. “It was a very small Mennonite town. It was really weird, but it was great growing up. I always had a sense of not belonging there, even though they were wonderful.”
Eventually, he went to the University of Toledo, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and print making. He did a series of volunteering through Greenpeace and the United Nations and went to Syracuse University to study architecture.
He and his wife returned to Cleveland about seven years ago for his wife’s job with the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Sinbondit, a designer for Cleveland-based architectural firm Bialosky Cleveland, is working as the project designer for the Exchange House in Akron’s North Hill neighborhood.
Having the opportunity to work on the Exchange House project is a wonderful way to continue to work with refugee communities, he said.
“When I see their faces, it reminds me of my parents … It really makes all the late nighters, all the effort, worth it,” Sinbondit said.
“Growing up, I had no sense of ancestry,” he said. “I had no sense of history. I thought the first floor [of the Exchange House] would be wonderful to create a space where they can store their heritage, their tradition. If teens would be interested in their heritage, they can go there and find resources — something that was never available to me.”
Betty Lin-Fisher can be reached at 330-996-3724 or blinfisher@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her @blinfisherABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/BettyLinFisherABJ and see all her stories at www.ohio.com/betty