Rosy Moo knew, as November approached, that the outcome of the 2020 presidential election could have been decided by her adopted state of North Carolina. She wanted to make sure that her voice—and the voice of other Karen refugees—was heard.
“It finally feels like I have a voice, and I am prepared to use it, and help others use theirs,” Moo, a 2015 graduate of Chapel Hill High School, said.
Moo, now 24, was just 11 years old when she emigrated with her family from a refugee camp in Thailand. Before moving to North Carolina, Moo said she had no rights and wasn’t even treated like a person.
After gaining American citizenship, though, she voted and said the experience was transformative.
“I went voting for the first time, and it was life changing for me,” she said.
The experience led her to help others in her community overcome the obstacles they faced voting so that their voices could also be heard.
“We have a lot of people in the Karen community who can vote, but just don’t know how to,” she said. “This is all I wanted to do—educate communities who don’t know anything about voting, but are qualified to vote.”
Even during the pandemic, she began helping others in the Karen community vote, accompanying Karen community members to polling locations during the early voting period and helping them to fill out ballots.
“I told them a little history about voting and why it’s important, and what the candidates stand for,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know where to vote, so I gave them rides and went with them to the polling places to make sure they knew what to do.”
Moo also used podcasts—made with some of her Karen peers through the Karen Organization of America—that were uploaded to Facebook in order to help educate community members about voting in their native language. Moo has also used the podcasts to address issues such as mental health, hoping to “normalize talking about mental health” in the Karen community.
Moo said, in part, that the feeling of community at Chapel Hill High School made her comfortable enough to start using her voice and helping others find theirs.
“The teachers at Chapel Hill High School were amazing; they all were super welcoming and made me feel like I belonged,” she said.
And that feeling of belonging, and of finding a voice and a community, is something that Moo hopes to spread even now that the election is over.
