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Visit Raleigh Bailey’s office at UNCG or his home nearby, and you’ll see the world.

His office holds maps, souvenirs and gifts from around the globe, including a Montagnard blanket with these words woven into it: “You’re a good friend to us.”

His home is filled with masks from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Alaska; African musical instruments; and Asian art and furniture.

Then there’s his family.

His children include two biological daughters and four adopted children: two Cambodian daughters, an Eskimo daughter and a biracial son. Several of his children have interracial relationships.

Theirs is a blended family that values multiculturalism.

Bailey’s work and personal interests always have intersected.

He’s considered a leader and authority in refugee resettlement. He created the Center for New North Carolinians and the AmeriCorps ACCESS project — UNCG programs serving immigrants and refugees throughout the state.

Though he plans to retire his post as CNNC director on Friday , he will still work with the AmeriCorps ACCESS program, which connects refugees and immigrants with human services.

He also will teach a diversity class at UNCG and is involved with planning a national refugee conference there this spring.
Bailey’s work will continue, even in retirement.

Kroma Man

He’s a 66-year-old Irish American with a doctorate.

His son, Nate Bailey, 31, describes him as “the older gentleman with the glasses, the ponytail and a beard, kind of like Jerry Garcia. ... He’s kind of quiet and real nice.”

Raleigh Bailey wears a brass Montagnard friendship bracelet on his right wrist, a gift made by a Montagnard refugee. It was bent to fit Bailey’s wrist, where it has remained since 1987.

His granddaughter Annah Bruno Bailey, 11, calls him “Kroma Man.” She pronounces it “crew-mah.” In Cambodia, a kroma is a multipurpose cloth. Bailey wears it at night as a sarong.

Adia Roberts, 29, thinks her dad may find retirement boring.
“He’s on the go all the time,” she says.

Except once. While on a family vacation, she took his picture as he slept on a rock.

“It’s hard to catch him relaxing,” she says.

The advocate

Bailey learned about diversity and tolerance while growing up.

His father’s side of the family was mostly poor, rural farmers with little education. His mother’s family was urban, highly educated and wealthier. One set of cousins talked about who was getting into trouble; the others discussed who was going to graduate school.

“It was my first clue that there were different sides of the world,” Bailey says. “I think that really shaped me a lot.”

He was raised on the outskirts of Miami. It was then an undeveloped area near many farms, which drew migrant laborers. Bailey was greatly moved by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, a time he describes as “tumultuous.” He couldn’t understand why black and Latino students were treated differently from himself.

“I just didn’t get it. No one could explain it to me that made any sense,” he says.

He joined a Methodist youth fellowship in high school and saw the church as a vehicle for advocacy. Its influence led him to Florida Southern, a Methodist college, where he majored in humanities with a minor in sociology and social work.

One summer, he worked on a California plum and pear farm. He lived in a bunk house with mostly Latino workers and faced the same discrimination they did when visiting town.

After college, he studied at Boston University School of Theology — Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater — with plans to become a Methodist minister. But he was increasingly aware that the church’s position did not match his own staunch advocacy of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. At a Quaker meeting in Boston, he discovered a belief system more closely mirroring his own philosophies of peace and justice.

The road to resettlement

The path to refugee resettlement wasn’t a direct one.

Bailey’s first job was teaching at a Quaker alternative school in New Hampshire, where students and staff lived and worked on a farm.

He developed YMCA programs for troubled teens.

He became a father and earned a doctorate at Hartford Seminary Foundation.

After divorcing his first wife, Bailey came to Greensboro in 1973 to teach at Guilford College.

He met Judy Harvey about a year later at a Friendship Quaker Meeting. From the start, she loved Bailey’s toddler daughters, Kristie and Angie, and they married after a yearlong courtship.

N.C. A&T hired Bailey as a training coordinator and education specialist for Head Start, a national, government-funded program that aims to prepare low-income preschoolers for school. He monitored its programs statewide, wrote grants and trained and managed people. He also emphasized the importance of parents and teachers learning to advocate for themselves. It groomed him for the work he would eventually do.

About the same time, Harvey and Bailey started a family. Harvey’s one-time dream of starting an orphanage had evolved into the desire to adopt children.

They first adopted Nate, who is biracial. White families in the 1970s were rarely matched with biracial or nonwhite children, but Bailey’s job convinced caseworkers the couple would understand Nate’s needs. Next, they adopted Adia, who is Eskimo. They celebrated birthdays and adoption days.

Harvey’s desire to improve her Spanish took them to Lutheran Family Services, where they offered to host a Spanish-speaking refugee in their home. There weren’t any. But Greensboro started receiving a wave of Southeast Asian refugees in the early 1980s, and they hosted a young Vietnamese man.

Then they fostered and later adopted sisters Sokhana, then 17, and Monida, then 14. The siblings, who joined the family in 1983, were among the first group of unaccompanied minors to arrive in Greensboro. Sokhana Eubanks recalls that it was a difficult adjustment for them and for the Bailey family. The girls suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome, had never lived with electricity and didn’t speak English.

Bailey became director of refugee programs for Lutheran Family Services after his Cambodian daughters’ arrival, but he and Harvey wanted to do more.

When the girls grew up and left home, Bailey and Harvey moved to Southeast Asia with Nate and Adia.

XYZ and ABC

There’s a black-and-white photograph of a gaunt, badly scarred, blind man in Bailey’s office.

He was Bailey’s guard in Cambodia. The U.S. Agency for International Development provided a budget for support staff, and Bailey had no restrictions for whom he could hire to do specific jobs. Thus, many disabled land mine victims were hired.

Bailey and Harvey first went to Phanat Nikhom, Thailand, to work in a camp for Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese refugees approved for resettlement. Bailey was a school principal; Harvey coordinated special programs.

“It was probably the most poignant experience I ever had,” Bailey recalls. “People would reach out for you, begging, 'Please help me. Please help me.’ And there was nothing I could do. It was probably the most helpless I ever felt.”

Harvey worked two years at the Thai refugee camp and one at an international school in Cambodia. Nate, who was a teenager, recalls wanting to come home.

“Back then, I just wanted to be with my friends,” he says. Now, he says, he’s glad he lived overseas.

“Seeing how our life was here, compared to seeing other people’s conditions in other countries made me appreciate my life,” he says.

After three years in Southeast Asia, Harvey returned to Greensboro with Nate and Adia. Bailey went to Cambodia for a year, where he worked for a prosthetics program for mine victims, mostly former soldiers. Cambodia was at the end of a long war and genocide. Its people were traumatized, starving and terrorized by bandits. The land, which smelled of sewage and garbage, still contained dangerous mine fields.

But Bailey has no regrets.

“I felt a sense of identity with U.S. military who were caught up in the situation two decades earlier,” he says. “There was some sense of payback for a tragedy that we helped perpetrate.”

He also learned to be even more resourceful, an invaluable skill in his future work with immigrants and refugees.

“I like addressing a need, and the creative process of 'Here’s a pot of money for XYZ, and the needs are ABC. Now, how can I match XYZ and ABC?’”

The family man

Bailey is most proud of his family and considers parenthood his avocation.

All of his children like being part of a multicultural family. Nate Bailey says his father taught him to respect all people.

Bailey and Harvey have encouraged their children to explore their native cultures. Their bookshelves include texts about Alaska, alongside classics such as “Jane Eyre.” When Adia graduated from high school, they took her to Alaska. They picked up the tab for all of the children to visit them during their time in Southeast Asia.

Monida Chhay likes that her parents wear traditional Cambodian attire when they attend the Buddhist temple.

“My friends say, 'Your parents are like Cambodian,’ ” she says proudly.

The sisters also say most of their Cambodian friends who were adopted or sponsored by American families don’t share the same experience.

“They treat us the same (as their kids),” Eubanks says. “Whatever they give Angie and Kristie, Nate and Adia, they give us, too. Our kids, too. Our husbands, too.”

Kristie Bailey also pursues refugee work and advocacy. She lives in Jordan with her daughters, Annah and Leah. Kristie Bailey helps Iraqi refugees prepare for possible resettlement elsewhere and counsels those headed to the U.S. Her daughters are biracial — Annah’s father was Costa Rican, and Leah’s father is Ghanian — and she encourages their interest in those cultures.

In addition to their children, Bailey and Harvey also rent rooms to international students and others needing a place to live. Harvey says they recently calculated more than 100 people have lived in their house through the years, many of them from other countries.

Recently, Angie Bailey adopted an African American son, Jacob. It is an open adoption, which means Jacob’s birth parents were involved in the process.

“I know Jacob’s birth parents chose us partly because of my family, because of the descriptions and photos of my family,” Angie Bailey says.

Bailey wrote a letter to his daughter Angie when she was just 6 weeks old. He wrote: “We want very much to be good parents to you and to your sister. It is not always clear what the right way to do this is, but I am sure that love is very important. ... I am still puzzled by many of the metaphysical questions associated with religious beliefs, but I do believe that loving acceptance of other persons and of oneself is basic to truth and happiness.”

Retirement awaits

This is the third time that Bailey has tried to retire.

He created the Center for New North Carolinians, but UNCG administrators couldn’t find the right successor. Janet Johnson, the center’s assistant director, says his position requires a unique combination of research and academic skills, as well as experience working with immigrants.

“Finding a person who has experience in both of those areas has been a challenge,” she says.

CNNC provides outreach and educational programming, research and evaluation, information services and immigrant and refugee leadership development. Bailey’s boss, Laura Sims, UNCG’s dean of the school of human environmental sciences, calls it a resource for the state.

Pat Priest, a consultant at the state refugee office, worked with Bailey at Head Start and Lutheran Family Services. She considers him an expert in refugee and immigrant matters. CNNC makes a significant statewide impact because of his vision and development, she says.

Bailey enjoys witnessing emerging professionals, such as Khouan Rodriguez, become accomplished leaders. Rodriguez, who is from Laos, came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1982. While in AmeriCorps, she taught English as a Second Language and citizenship classes at the Greensboro Buddhist Center. She also was a CNNC lay health adviser and office manager. Now, she directs the AmeriCorps ACCESS program.

She doubts she could have succeeded without his direction.

“He’s like a father figure for me, personally. ... He gives you the opportunity to shine if you really want it,” she says. “Even if he’s not sure it’s going to work out, he makes me feel like I can do it.”

One of Bailey’s proudest accomplishments is African Services Coalition, which was established in 1997 and serves Africans statewide.

An African refugee and AmeriCorps volunteer from Rwanda saw numerous needs within the diverse African community. With his input, Bailey developed a program that included a coalition of Africans, empowering them and involving them in their own advocacy process.

African Services Coalition’s executive director, Omer Omer, says Bailey is so respected among local Sudanese leaders that they presented him with their national dress.

“That has a big, big meaning,” Omer says. “It means, 'You are one of us, man.’”

Contact Tina Firesheets at 373-3498 or tina.firesheets@news-record.com