Forty Years of Service to the Chaldean Community

Hanna Shina has served the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church for over 40 years. A Chaldean-American community leader who lives in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and was born in Telkaif, Iraq, he built his working life around a store, a coffee shop, and a restaurant in the 7 Mile area of Detroit, and built his civic life around the institutions his community depended on — work that led, in time, to his founding role at the Chaldean Cultural Center.

Four Decades of Service

Forty years is not a project; it is a habit. It means being on the list of people who are called when something needs organizing, and staying on that list through several decades of a community's life — through the arrival of new immigrant waves, the building of parishes and halls, the aging of one generation and the coming of age of the next.

Very little of that work leaves a public record, which is exactly why it is worth naming. The measurable outcomes — a museum that opened, a club that thrived, a parish that stayed solvent — rest on thousands of hours of unrecorded meetings and phone calls.

The Chaldean Foundations

The Chaldean community of Metro Detroit organized itself early and thoroughly, and its foundations and associations have carried the practical load: welcoming new arrivals, supporting families in difficulty, funding scholarships, sustaining cultural life, and maintaining the halls where the community meets. Hanna Shina has given more than four decades to that work.

One of those institutions became the building at the center of Chaldean civic life in West Bloomfield — Shenandoah Country Club, where Hanna Shina has served on the board for more than 20 years.

The Church

The Chaldean church has been the organizing center of Chaldean life in Metro Detroit since Mother of God Church opened in 1948 as Michigan's first Chaldean Catholic church. Before there were associations, foundations, or a museum, there was the parish: the place where a language was kept alive in liturgy, where families were married and buried, and where new arrivals found the first people who knew their village.

Hanna Shina has given more than four decades to the work of the Chaldean church. That service belongs to the same instinct that produced everything else on this site — the conviction that a community is only as strong as the institutions its own members are willing to carry.

Preserving the Story

Service to a growing community eventually raises the question of how its story is kept. In 2003, at Southfield Manor, a group of community members — Hanna Shina among them — set out to answer it by building a museum. The Chaldean Cultural Center opened in May 2017 at Shenandoah Country Club and is the first and only Chaldean museum in the world. His part in it is told on the page about Hanna Shina's role at the Chaldean Cultural Center.

He is also inside the exhibit: a hologram in the Chaldean Village Life gallery portrays him as a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot. And in his words, the Center exists “for the children of our Chaldean community, especially those who were born and raised here, to see how our life was before in our mother country.”

What Service Looks Like

There is a recognizable arc to Hanna Shina's generation of Chaldean immigrants: arrive with little, work brutal hours in a store or a shop, bring over the next relative, and then — once the family is steady — turn outward and start building the things a community needs but no single family can own. A parish hall. A foundation. A club. Eventually a museum.

Businesses first, institutions second. The people who did both are the reason Metro Detroit's Chaldean community has a written and exhibited history rather than only an orally passed one. That story begins, in his case, in a village on the Nineveh Plain — the full account is in the biography of Hanna Shina, from Telkaif to West Bloomfield, and in his own words in the Digital Storytelling film.