Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Dalya Sarkees sat with her hands in her lap in the deserted cafeteria of Pima Community College, where she is a student, reflecting on the three years she has lived in Tucson as an Iraqi refugee, and on the injustice of war.
Six years ago, increasing violence forced Sarkees, 30, from her native Baghdad.
“I didn’t do anything to have everything collapse in my life,” Sarkees said. But she added that she’s thankful for the opportunities she’s had in Tucson. “I’m lucky to be here.”
Sarkees is taking 19 credits this semester, one last hefty load before she graduates with an associate’s degree in social services. She hopes to move on to Arizona State University to take courses in social work next fall.
She is one of 1,708 Iraqis resettled in Tucson since 1987, according to Charles Shipman, Arizona’s state refugee coordinator. The city has a reputation for providing the kind of close community that can be comforting for traumatized refugees.
Ken Briggs, executive director for the International Rescue Committee in Tucson, which helps refugees resettle, said of the city, “There are just so many people who pull together to help refugees restart their lives.”
Tucson has developed a network of refugee support services, including three national resettlement agencies and a long list of resource providers. But while the city has a reputation for welcoming refugees, it is now facing an unprecedented burden in having to provide for an influx of people from more countries than ever before, Shipman said.
“The situation is difficult these days” because such a wide range of languages and cultures have flooded the city, Shipman said, leaving too little time to develop programs specific to each one.
Erina Delic, executive director of the Tucson International Alliance of Refugee Communities, an agency that provides services to refugees, also singled out the challenge of meeting the needs of people from so many cultures.
“With everything that we do with refugees,” she said, “it’s very hard to put it just under one hut and say, ‘This is what we do and how we do it,’ and have a system that applies to everybody.”
For Sarkees and her family, a long-awaited call came Oct. 1, 2009, after they had been living in Syria for three years. They had been relying only on their savings, something less fortunate families are not able to do. The United Nations, which runs a program that resettles refugees, offered Sarkees’ parents the opportunity to emigrate to the U.S.
They settled on Tucson after chance put them in contact with Imad Rasheed, 56, who was Dalya Sarkees’ biology professor at the University of Baghdad. He had made the journey to Tucson with his family in November 2008.
Sarkees said she and her 28-year-old brother were able to join their parents one month later. But when she arrived, she was shocked by the cramped, roach-infested apartment where the social worker dropped them off, a sharp contrast to the family’s three-story Baghdad home.
“We didn’t expect that you would come here and no one would even carry the bags in the airport,” she said. “But of course that’s not the case manager’s job.”
Only a few weeks after her arrival, a social worker at the Tucson office of the International Rescue Committee discovered that Sarkees spoke both English and Arabic, and asked if she would work as an interpreter.
It gave her something that few Iraq refugees have: a job. Without the ability to speak English, Iraqi refugees are often forced to take entry-level jobs as security guards or housekeepers in hotels. After the recession hit in 2008, even those jobs were hard to come by.
The International Rescue Committee provides refugees with 90 days of direct financial assistance through U.S. State Department grants, Briggs said. When he first began working for the IRC, in 2007, 90 days was enough time for most refugees to secure jobs, he said. After 2008, that changed, leaving resettlement agencies scrounging for funds to extend aid for refugees reliant on welfare.
The daughter of an engineer educated in Germany and a dentist educated in Turkey, Sarkees, like many other refugees in the U.S., was dismayed to find her family’s and friends’ status had dropped precipitously.
Rasheed, her former professor, works as an office manager in the Islamic Center of Tucson. Though he took classes and is now certified as a medical assistant, he wasn’t able to find work. He said he aspires to continue his scientific studies, at the University of Arizona, but he faces a problem not uncommon for refugees and other immigrants: His diplomas aren’t recognized in the United States.
When she arrived in the U.S., Sarkees became part of the federal Matching Grants Program, which assists target populations, like refugees and asylum seekers, in finding employment. Enrollment is voluntary, and participants are required to accept the first job available to them.
For Sarkees, that was a position as a housekeeper in a hotel, a job that would have carried a stigma for a single woman in Iraq, she said. She refused to take it, saying she didn’t want to work below her skill level, and knowing that others were more desperate for work than she was. She was cut from the program.
“I just felt like my agency, instead of supporting me, was pushing me against everything I believe in,” she said. “There was no need to push me, squeeze me into this.”
Learning to speak English and finding employment are only two elements of the challenges Iraqi refugees face in resettling in the U.S. Aspects of everyday American life, like writing checks or building credit to buy a car, aren’t easily taught, especially to those less educated.
Imam Watheq al-Obaidi, 49, of the Islamic Center of Tucson, came to the U.S. from Baghdad as a refugee in the spring of 2009, he said, when his anti-terrorism views made him a target of al-Qaida.
Obaidi said the resettlement agencies and the United Nations should more carefully consider how well refugees will be able to integrate into their new communities. The agencies should be more selective, he said, so that those with more education, who may be better prepared to succeed in the U.S., are given priority.
Shipman said that he appreciated Obaidi’s perspective, but that refugee resettlement is an arm of U.S. foreign policy, and that the country resettles people based on their humanitarian needs, not their integration potential.
“This is about lifesaving,” he said. “This is about protection.”
Delic, of the Tucson International Alliance of Refugee Communities, said the U.S. invasion of Iraq had given some Iraqis too high an expectation of what the U.S. should provide for refugees, and that has made the resettlement process more complicated.
Sarkees added that tensions and distrust among Kurd, Sunni and Shiite refugees from Iraq have also made integration difficult at times because it can keep Iraqi families from developing relationships.
Obaidi, the imam, said he had witnessed some of these tensions at the Islamic Center, and tried to calm them.
Sarkees and her brother make a living as self-employed interpreters, working with social workers and counselors. Perhaps, she said, she’ll leave Arizona after graduation if she isn’t able to find a job as a social worker in Tucson. But for now, she finds the city a comfortable place to reflect on the past and rebuild her future.
Shifting her thoughts back to Baghdad and where she grew up, she said, “Every moment of my life I want just to go walk on that street.”
“The worst thing is that all of us did the right things in life,” she said. “So what went wrong?”
The New York Times Student Journalism Institute
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Sunday, October 09, 2011
SAN DIEGO — At the Saturday farmer’s market in City Heights, a major portal for refugees, Khadija Musame, a Somali, arranges her freshly picked pumpkin leaves and lablab beans amid a United Nations of produce, including water spinach grown by a Cambodian refugee and amaranth, a grain harvested by Sarah Salie, who fled rebels in Liberia. Eaten with a touch of lemon by Africans, and coveted by Southeast Asians for soups, this crop is always a sell-out.
New Roots, with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.
With language and cultural hurdles, and the need to gain access to land, financing and marketing, farm ownership for refugees can be very difficult. Programs like New Roots, which provide training in soil, irrigation techniques and climate, “help refugees make the leap from community gardens to independent farms,” said Hugh Joseph, an assistant professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts, which advises 28 “incubator” farms representing hundreds of small-scale producers.
Cameroonian peanut plants are growing at Drew Gardens in the Bronx, chronicled on the Facebook page of Angela Nogue, a refugee farmer. Near Phoenix, a successful goat meat farm and store was begun by Ibrahim Sawara Dahab, an ethnic Sudanese from Somalia. “In America, you need experience, and my experience was goats,” he said.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement in Washington formed a sustainable farming program in 1998, financing 14 refugee farms and gardens, including one in Boise, Idaho, where sub-Saharan African farmers have gradually learned to cope with unpredictable frosts.
Larry Laverentz, the program manager for refugee agriculture with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said inspiration came from the Hmong, Mien and Lao refugee farmers of Fresno County, Calif., who settled in the late 1970s and now have 1,300 growers specializing in Asian crops.
These small plots of land can become significant sources of income for refugees, with most farmers able to earn from $5,000 to more than $50,000 annually, as the Liberian refugees James and Jawn Golo do on their 20-acre organic farm outside Phoenix, including sales to five farmers’ markets, restaurants and chefs.
In Burlington, a four-acre farm started by Bhutanese-Nepali, Somali Bantu and Congolese farmers is still reeling from the flooding of the Winooski River after Hurricane Irene, which ruined crops at the height of the season and caused an estimated $15,000 in losses.
“This is a significant supplement to our diet, and budgets are geared to it,” said Yacouba Jacob Bogre, 38, executive director of the Association of Africans Living in Vermont and a lawyer from Burkina Faso. “Emotionally, we lost a lot, along with fresh vegetables for our households.”
New Roots in City Heights, which Michelle Obama visited last spring, is a model for today’s micro-enterprise. (It is also a culinary education, where a Zimbabwean grower can discover bok choy.) It was started at the request of his Somali Bantu community, said Bilali Muya, the effervescent trainer-in-chief. “There was this kind of depression,” he said. “Everyone was dreaming to come to the U.S.A., but they were not happy. The people were put in apartments, missing activity, community. They were bored.“
They were also homesick for traditional food, grown by hand. In City Heights, where half the residents live at or below the federal poverty line, the three-year-old farmer’s market was the city’s first in a low-income neighborhood, a collaboration between the nonprofit International Rescue Committee and the San Diego County Farm Bureau.
One can hear 15 different languages there, amid the neat rows of kale, rape and banana plants — but body language is the lingua franca.
“If I see a weed, I pull it, shaking my head,” said Mrs. Musame, the Somali farmer. “We understand each other.”
The hub of refugee life, City Heights was largely home to African-Americans and Mexican immigrants until the fall of Saigon in 1975, when thousands of Southeast Asian refugees arrived to a massive tent city at nearby Camp Pendleton.
From 1980 through 1990, the population almost doubled with immigrants and refugees (most recently from Iraq). The changing demographics of the neighborhood resemble an electrocardiogram of international conflict.
But the exquisite fruits and vegetables for sale, lovingly grown, belie the life experiences of the growers. Mrs. Salie, the Liberian, was raped by rebels and hid for two years in the bush after reporting the crime, she said. Mrs. Musame, a Somali Bantu, came to San Diego as a widow after her husband and three of her sons were gunned down.
The New York Times
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
The Hon Kachina Council announced that Dr. Barbara Eiswerth ’85 is one of six honorees to receive the Hon Kachina Volunteer Award, Arizona’s most prestigious celebration of volunteerism. The presentations will be made October 1, 2011, at the organization’s thirty-fifth annual awards ceremony.
Each honoree will receive a one-of-a-kind hand-carved Hon Kachina doll, considered by the Hopi Indian culture as the most powerful healing Kachina, and a cash award for their nonprofit organization.
Barbara is the director and founder of Iskashitaa Refugee Harvesting Network, which supports Tucson-based refugees from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East by harvesting and distributing thousands of pounds of food from backyards and local farms to assist families in need.
From the Hon Kachina Council press release:
Dr. Eiswerth downplays her growing notoriety as leader of Iskashitaa, a group of refugees from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East who partner with local Tucson volunteers to harvest approximately 75,000 lbs. of fruits and vegetables each year from backyards and local farms. These foods are then redistributed to refugee families and other Tucson organizations that assist families in need.
Coordinating complicated efforts to utilize local food resources that might have otherwise gone to waste is just the beginning of Dr. Eiswerth’s involvement with refugees. She becomes part family, part employment counselor, part advocate, and part friend to those who often arrive in Arizona with very little of any of the above. Even though she dedicates much of her time and energy into helping these new residents, Dr. Eiswerth would say the relationship gives her back far more than she gives.
“She’s just got a real way of quickly identifying and relating to their journey what they’ve been through and wanting to use that journey, wanting to learn as much as you can about their culture and their experience and what they have to teach her,” said Natalie Brown, who works with Dr. Eiswerth as a resource coordinator at Iskashitaa and nominated her for the Hon Kachina recognition.
Dr. Eiswerth’s biggest fans are the refugees themselves, who describe her frequently as “an angel” or “an answer to our prayers.”
“Barbara is my idol,” says Hari Nepal, who arrived in Tucson two years ago from Bhutan. While her family initially struggled, Dr. Eiswerth stepped in to help them adjust. Nepal recently graduated high school, earned a scholarship to the University of Arizona, and plans to become a gynecologist. “I have learned so much from her, and she inspires me to give back daily.”
Dr. Eiswerth’s work is also developing a reputation for her hometown as one that not only welcomes refugees from difficult situations across the globe, but one that embraces them and helps them succeed.
“For somebody like that to forget herself and care about others, it show us that as a refugee you could be loved anywhere you go—especially in Tucson,” says recent refugee Chris Garang.
To Dr. Eiswerth, her efforts are as much about demonstrating what a community can—and should—do in this trying economic environment.
“The only way we’re going to come out of this economic crisis, the only way we’re going to build a community is if we get out in the community and share our talents… and friendship,” Dr. Eiswerth says.
About Hon Kachina
Since 1977, more than 375 nominees have been honored for their dedication to causes that include health care, neighborhood revitalization, youth and senior activities, the arts, education, justice, housing, nutrition, or social services. Many have given what they can at great personal sacrifice.
The Hon Kachina Council, affiliated with St. Luke’s Health Initiatives, is a group of servant leaders from the business and professional community who promote volunteerism by recognizing ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things, applauding them and presenting them as an example to motivate others to volunteer.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
What was Walid Gamarelanbia, a refugee from Sudan, doing, climbing up in Lynne Ingalls front-yard cumquat tree in northwest Tucson – a tree her son had planted more than 30 years ago?
Harvesting fruit, of course.
On Saturday, Gamarelanbia (whose last name translates as "prophets of the moon") climbed up a ladder and, wearing a harvesting sack that looped around his left shoulder, proceeded to fill it with perfectly ripe and delicious cumquats.
Cumquats are "the little brother of the orange," according to Gamarelanbia. He and a small group of people rode up to a couple of households near Ina and Shannon roads and proceeded to harvest the citrus trees growing in two Northwest yards.
The group is called the Iskashitaa Refugee Harvesting Network. The word Iskashitaa means "working cooperatively together."
Barbara Eiswerth is the director and founder of the refugee harvesting network.
"I speak food," Eiswerth said. "Our group is the only one in the nation that has fused welcoming refugees and harvesting.
"Food is a common denominator among all cultures. Harvesting food is a concept that the refugees are familiar with. The food that we harvest is divided up in three ways: some of it is taken home, some of it is donated and some of it is sold. We recently filled two 18-wheeler trucks with harvested food and donated it to the Community Food Bank."
Last Saturday, Eiswerth and Natalie Brown, community liaison for Iskashitaa, came with refugees from Sudan, Somalia, Bhutan and other countries, along with volunteers from Catalina Foothills High School and college students to pick fruit from the citrus trees of two Northwest-side homeowners.
"The cumquats would have fallen on the ground and just gone to waste," said homeowner Ingalls.
"I don't like to waste things," said homeowner Ruth Denholtz, watching people harvest her lemon and grapefruit trees. "It helps me out, too. Anytime you can help people with something you don't need, it's a good thing."
The group worked quickly, cooperatively and efficiently. Some climbed ladders, some reached under the tree and others took long-handled fruit pickers to reach the fruit on the top. In short order, crates of lemons and grapefruits were filled.
"A refugee is a person who has fled their home country due to persecution or fear of persecution because of their religion, ethnicity or political activity," explains Natalie Brown. She has experience working with AIDS projects in the United States, Mexico and Tanzania, and points out there are three refugee resettlement agencies in Tucson.
Qamar collects lemons growing near the bottom and that have fallen down under the tree. She is from Somalia and her family fled during the war. Thirteen-year-old Fahima is from Sudan. She easily picks up a crate full of lemons and carries it, balancing the load atop her head. Lun Xu is tall; he can reach the higher areas easily. Sanz Ghalay, from Bhutan, reaches toward the top with a long-handled pole that has a basket on the end.
Benjamin Matiella is a volunteer from Catalina Foothills High School. He is considering an Eagle Scout project with the Fruit Harvesters Network. Jena Decker and Talia Chonover are college students on winter break.
Harvesting and saving food that would otherwise go to waste is just one of the benefits of the harvesting network. The refugees learn English, life skills, how to navigate through the city, friendship with each other and Americans, physical activity and better nutrition, according to Eisworth.
"By donating much of the food that is picked to organizations like the Food Bank or the Gospel Rescue Mission, they are giving back to the community right away," she said. Anyone interested in being a fruit donor can call (520) 440-0100, or e-mail harvest@fruitmappers.org. More information about Iskashitaa and a catalog of items the group creates and sells, such as marmalade, mesquite flour, prickly pear vinegar and harvesting sacks, can be viewed at www.fruitmappers.org
Within an hour, the trees are stripped bare of fruit and the filled crates are loaded into the back of a truck.
"Many hands make light work," said Brown.
"No fruit left behind, no refugee left behind," adds Eisworth.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011