The extreme cold conditions are tough for long-time Iowans to handle and even worse for those who are new to the state.

Volunteers at the Mary J. Treglia House in Sioux City are collecting coats and gloves, hats, and boots for those who have immigrated here. Executive Director Barbara Newhouse says this weather is something the newcomers have never seen. “They’re coming from parts of Africa, they’re coming from South America, they’re coming from all sorts of countries that have never experienced this level of cold and snow,” she says.

Newhouse says it takes time for people to adjust. “I can be down in Texas on a day where it’s 40 degrees, everybody in Siouxland thinks it’s warm and it’s cold down there. Then you come up here, and now you have single digit temperatures and a below zero wind chill, and now you’re just freezing,” she says. “So we have to realize that sometimes people come in from other countries, and for them, cold is 30 or 40 degrees.”

She says they can have anywhere from 25 to 50 individuals coming in on a monthly basis. “Sometimes they came in the summertime, and they’re still adjusting, because we’ll see children come into to the preschool and it’s like, ‘where’s your hat, where’s your gloves?’ And we’ll see folks families coming in, and we want to be able to greet them right away with coats and hats,” Newhouse says.

Newhouse says they need a large variety of the warm clothing. “We want to make sure that they’ve got something that fits them. You know, all these young people, they’ll think, okay, this will be warm enough. And then all of a sudden, we find that they’re just are shivering,” she says. The agency has provided citizenship and immigration services to the Siouxland since 1921.

All of the immigrants are in the process of becoming U.S. citizens.

(By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)

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