As our city becomes more diverse it’s important for our city government to be prepared to respond to challenges created by that diversity. I thought it would be a good idea to figure out what resources we had on hand here among our city employees to address those challenges . So I put out the call among City employees for people who spoke other languages fluently. I gathered them all together today for lunch.
What a great lunch it was! I learned that we have city employees working here that are fluent in Mandarin (Chinese), Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Italian, Greek, Afrikaans, German, Somali and Spanish. In addition to learning who can speak what language, it was even more interesting to hear the stories of these employees about how they got this country from places as diverse as South Africa, China, Bosnia and Belarus. They were touching and inspiring stories of people who risked a lot to come to this country to start over and invest their time, talent and energy in our country.
It’s good to know that we have a broad range of languages spoken by the talented people that work for the City of Eden Prairie. I’m sure we’ll put them all to use some day.
