Valley Interfaith Council

September 2019 | Written by John Curtis | Photography © John Curtis

In the past three years, refugee and immigrant resettlement has declined, deportations have increased, and the country faces a humanitarian crisis at its border with Mexico. At a meeting on September 19, members of the Valley Interfaith Council, a consortium of 22 faith communities, learned about local actions from those who have worked on aid projects, resettlement, and the sanctuary movement.

Niki Harvell, pastor of Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Oxford and the council’s chairperson, said increasing numbers of immigrants are moving into the Naugatuck Valley, and the council is looking for ways to welcome them. “I am hoping that people are inspired and aware of not only what is happening in the valley, but also that they are empowered with resources they can bring back into our faith communities and have a rippling impact,” she said.

Guest speakers at the meeting at the Seymour Congregational Church included Chris George, the executive director of IRIS; MaryJoan Picone, a Hartford area social worker and creator of the Emmaus the Migrant Advocacy Project; and Herb Brockman, rabbi emeritus of Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden.

George offered a history of refugee policy, noting that since the election of President Donald Trump the number of refugees accepted into the United States dropped by 75% to a historical low of 30,000. “The numbers next year could be as low as 10,000, or maybe zero,” George said.

IRIS has a co-sponsorship program, he said, which trains community groups to resettle refugees. About 40 such groups are working with IRIS and have resettled about 320 people.

Picone does outreach to help migrant farmworkers in the Connecticut River Valley access basic health care. In Hartford she’s part of a team that helps asylum seekers, providing interpreters and accompanying them to court dates. And she has worked with humanitarian aid groups on the border in Arizona.

Brockman’s congregation helped resettle Jews leaving the Soviet Union, and, in 1996 resettled a Bosnian family. A few years later they resettled an Iraqi family.

After Trump’s election, clergy in Hamden considered how to continue to help immigrants and refugees. “This is not about politics,” Brockman said. “This is about who we are as a people of faith, who we are as Americans, who we are as human beings.”

With refugee arrivals declining, both George and Brockman said they have brought more attention to helping asylum seekers. One of IRIS’s co-sponsors has begun working with a family from Mexico that is seeking asylum, George said.

Brockman and other clergy have created a network of sanctuary congregations for people under threat of deportation. In 2011, he said, the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement established policies that houses of worship, as well as schools, hospitals, and rallies, would be considered “sensitive locations,” and as such would not be entered by ICE agents. “As people of faith we have houses of worship, and thereby we have protection for people who get deportation orders,” he said. Of eight people who have sought sanctuary in the New Haven area, he said, seven have secured legal relief.

After the presentations, council members asked about co-sponsorship. How great was the financial and time commitment to support resettled families? Only as long as needed to get them on their feet, George said, and no more than a year with a financial commitment of $4,000 – $10,000.

What does co-sponsorship training entail? A day-long session in which IRIS staff cover what’s needed to prepare for a family’s arrival and how to prepare the family for independence.

How long does it take refugees to find jobs? About 70 percent of refugees, George said, have work by six months.

For Tom Mariconda, deacon of Trinity Episcopal Church in Seymour, the meeting was about reaching out to others. “All we are hoping we can do is touch people’s hearts so that we would look at our brothers and sisters and see that we are all one and that the suffering of one is the suffering of all,” he said.

 

Norine Polio

May 2019 | Written by Lisa Dilullo | Photography © Lena Kavalenko

It’s wildly colorful, and yet deftly organized. It’s bright and engaging, first stimulating and then calming as your eyes dart from the puppet theater to colorful learning aids, skip to the flags of many nations, and then linger on rows of books for the students who had just been dismissed.

Even empty of students, this tiny classroom for the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program at the East Rock Elementary School feels electrically alive.

The architect of this sensory wonderland, teacher Norine Polio, stayed after school recently to discuss the ESOL program. Her ESOL tutoring assistant is Tamarah Shannah, an Iraqi refugee.

Their efforts are firmly supported by their New Haven Public Schools peers and administrators, a generous community of donors and tutors, and organizations like IRIS that help refugees and other displaced people establish new lives in America.

“It certainly takes a village to welcome these wonderful children,” Norine said.

With 38 years teaching experience, Norine understands the need for a diverse, supportive environment to enhance ESOL learning. She’s been teaching ESOL for 25 of those years, dating back to when East Rock hosted the district’s New Arrival Center.

Today, the East Rock ESOL instructional program hosts 60 children in grades K-8. Norine estimates about 20 are refugees; the remainder are immigrants or temporary residents whose first language is not English. This year, her students hail from 19 countries, and speak 11 languages.

The ESOL students have content classes, which the ESOL program is designed to augment.

“From my initial years at East Rock through the present, the administration has always trusted our subject area knowledge,” Norine said. “I so appreciate the supportive staff and caring teachers here. They, like I, see the enthusiasm for learning, motivation and family support these students embody.”

When Norine first started teaching ESOL at East Rock, she said children from Bosnia were the largest group. Throughout the years, the countries of origin have changed while other things have stayed the same: For example, the respect and care the staff shows by not questioning students about their backgrounds.

As the students adjust, Norine might learn more about life in their countries of origin. Some are stories of children being children.

“Just recently, we went outdoors to collect small rocks for a geology lesson,” Norine explained, pointing to the neat row of work papers and rocks lining the center table. “One of the children showed me a game they played in Syria, using the small stones in a game just like American ‘Jacks’. We have so much in common!”

Being in the field for decades has allowed Norine and her peers to follow the progress of ESOL students as they leave East Rock for high school, thrive in college, and later establish themselves in the community. “I’m continually amazed at how motivated these children are, and how well they do,” she said.

Again, though, Norine stressed the importance of “the village” in this success.

At any given time, the village may have an IRIS employee tutoring a promising student through temporary woes in math. It has a steady flow of Yale University tutors and generous donors. It has supportive families. It may have a New Haven business owner considering retirement, who recognizes a refugee’s incredible work ethic and honesty, and decides to sell the refugee his business.

Among the many families Norine has met during her 25 years in ESOL instruction, she said, “There are so many success stories.” Her eyes light up with energy, just like the room she’s sitting in. “I love it.”

Refugee, Joshua Preaches in Swahili & English at 1st Baptist Church

April 2019 | Written & Photography © John Curtis

At first glance, Joshua Ruzibuka comes across quiet and soft-spoken. But when he steps behind the altar at the First Baptist Church in New Haven, his voice rises with fervor and he gestures like the Pentecostal preacher he once was. As his sermon moves from English to Swahili and back, his wife, Sandra, stands at his side, translating in both languages.

On the last Sunday of 2018, Ruzibuka filled in at the altar for Rev. Joseph Delahunt, who was away. About half the members of the congregation were, like Ruzibuka, Congolese. A choir of nine sang hymns in Swahili, before Ruzibuka offered prayers for the elections taking place the next day in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo.) His sermon included verses from the Book of Exodus and the Book of John, references to Pontius Pilate, and hopes for the new year that was about to begin.

Although he now preaches in a Baptist church, Ruzibuka first ministered in a Pentecostal church in a refugee camp in Malawi. A nine-year odyssey that began in DR Congo when he lost his family to tribal warfare brought him there at the age of 15. In 2013, shortly after his arrival as a refugee in New Haven, he found the First Baptist Church. “I was looking for a way I could worship and keep my faith,” Ruzibuka said. “I was touched by how the pastor preached. The people showed me love. They have love and the Bible asks us to have love.”

Ruzibuka’s then-fiancée, Sandra, joined him at the church. Her sister followed soon after. Now 11 Congolese families comprising more than 50 people worship at the church on Livingston Street in New Haven. Their presence has revitalized a congregation that just a few years ago was on the brink of disbanding, providing a mission and sense of purpose as they sought ways to welcome the new arrivals to America.

“Before Joshua came, we were at a low point. Our congregation was demoralized,” recalled Kingsley Emerson, a retired pastor who is a member of the congregation. The church’s pastor had died, and the congregation had dwindled to about 40 people. “Now we have a vibrant community.”

“This church is going against the stream of older established churches, which tend to be in decline, as this one was,” said Delahunt. “A major reason why we are growing and there is a sense of energy here is because of this work. Other people join this church because of this sense of mission.”

For a time, the congregation considered co-sponsoring a refugee family, but soon members realized they had their hands full with what they were already doing. They also realized they needed help. They contacted Ashley Makar, IRIS’s community liaison. IRIS invited them to the same day-long training they provide to co-sponsors, who work with refugee families over the course of several months to help them settle into life in the United States.

“They wanted to know if they were doing the right things in terms of what services they were providing and how they were doing it,” Makar said. “It seemed like they had organized really well. They were doing great.” For more specific questions, Makar put them in touch with Linda Bronstein, IRIS’s senior case manager, who works with most of the Congolese families who joined First Baptist.

Congregants have organized a slew of services for the refugees, all of whom had been resettled by IRIS. The church offers limited financial support, conversational English, mentoring, help with shopping for groceries and clothes, planning a budget, teaching interview skills, and help with job searches. A physician in the congregation provides pro bono house calls. Every Sunday 18 volunteers drive people to and from church. Sunday school has seen a boom in attendance. With two small grants over the last three years from a benefactor committed to lifting people out of poverty, the church bought winter footwear for all the youngsters in the congregation at Payless on Black Friday. “Payless is already cheap, and everything was half price that day,” Delahunt said.

Ruzibuka has not only shared his new spiritual home with newly arrived Congolese families, but he also preaches there several times a year, on the final Sunday in any month in which Sunday falls five times.

His story begins in the 1990s in DR Congo, where his ethnic Rwandan family lived. The tribal violence between Hutus and Tutsis that first erupted in Rwanda recognized no borders and one night, Joshua, who is Tutsi, hid under a bed when a mob came for his family. He was six years old. He came out from hiding the next morning. “I saw my mom, my dad, my sisters,” Ruzibuka said. “I saw people running. I just followed them. I didn’t know where we were going.”

He followed the crowd to Rwanda, where a man took him in until it became too dangerous. Ruzibuka returned to DR Congo to live with family friends, until the threat of violence forced him move again. He spent a short time in Tanzania before landing at the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi, home to 12,000 people. He lived in a shelter made of plastic and subsisted on monthly rations that included a cup of sugar, some salt, a small bucket of maize, and two cups of beans. He had one large can that served as a stove and two others as cooking pots.

He was teaching hymns in Swahili to a church choir when the pastor took him aside. His voice, the pastor told him, was no good for singing, but great for preaching. He apprenticed with the pastor, then formed his own congregation, which grew to 250 people.

Eventually, Ruzibuka had a chance to seek asylum when representatives of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees arrived. After interviews and a lengthy vetting process, Ruzibuka waited to hear whether he’d been accepted to live in another country. Then a letter arrived. “I opened the envelope and it said, ‘Welcome to America.’”

Ruzibuka, now 27, is married to his fiancée, Sandra, who is also from the Congo. They have a 4-year-old son, Eldad Joshua Ruzibuka, and live in New Haven. Sandra is studying nursing at Gateway Community College, and Joshua works as a cook at the Madison Beach Hotel on the Connecticut shoreline.

“God is so amazing. God gave us an opportunity,” Ruzibuka said. “We have everything we need. You are free to do what you can. We are very happy. We enjoy life.”

Sabeena

March 2019 | Written by John Curtis 

In 2014 Sabeena Ali retired after 30 years as an occupational therapist. Her physician husband was still working and two of her three children were grown and out of the house. ”Now what do I do with myself?” she asked. The answer came a year later on the nightly news, as she watched the worldwide refugee crisis unfolding.

“I have to do something,” she said. “God has given me so much and I am sitting here all comfy.”

The next day Ali Googled refugee agencies, got on the phone, and called IRIS. “What can I do to help?” the Newtown resident asked. “They asked if I could get a bunch of people together to sponsor a refugee family.”

Ali first reached out to a friend in Easton, Conn. They, in turn, found others willing to help and, as their group grew, took on a name, Connecticut Refugee Resettlement Connection. Unlike most co-sponsors, they were not centered around a church or within a town. Members came from all over Connecticut. “We were just a bunch of people coming together,” Ali said. “We didn’t want to make it a faith-based group. We wanted it to be for purely humanitarian reasons.”

They worked with the Islamic Center of Bridgeport and the Madina Academy in Windsor, where there’s a large community from the Arab world. They collected furniture and money and went to IRIS for training. By May 2016, they had resettled a Syrian family in Bridgeport, which has a multi-cultural community and good public transportation.

“After we resettled this family, because we were from so many different places, we weren’t able to organize resettlement to support a second family,” Ali said. “That was one of the drawbacks to not being from a church group or the same area.”

Since then, Ali has continued to volunteer with IRIS, about five to six hours a week. In each of the past two years she’s collected between 50 and 60 coats for the annual winter coat drive. She collects fabric for a sewing group, as well as bedding, sheets, pillows, toys and books for children.

Just over a year ago, Ali began to help with CORE, a mandatory three-day educational session that instructs new arrivals in the customs, laws, and bureaucracy of life in America.

“We help bring people to and from CORE, giving them rides,” Ali said. “Sometimes we would help with child care or getting lunch. Whatever they needed at the time, we would do.”

In addition to her time with IRIS, Ali also works in her home community, raising awareness of the plight of refugees. She has staffed a table for IRIS at the Newtown Arts Festival and arranged a screening of a film about Palestine at a local church.

Like the people she helps to resettle, Ali and her husband came from another country, Canada, in search of better opportunities. They found them in Newtown, where they have lived on and off for about 15 years.

Ali has found satisfaction and rewards in her work for IRIS, particularly the Syrian family she helped resettle. The family had left Syria after losing their home to a bomb. “They were having a difficult time wrapping their heads around everything,” Ali said, recalling a day when she was driving the mother to a doctor’s appointment. “She looked at me and said, ‘Our home is good. Everything is good.’ I saw her go from everything is just wacky to having that peace to be able to say ‘I am in such a better place. Yes, there are troubles, but it’s all good.’”

Boxes, bikes, and then a friend. It widens your world view

March 2019 | Written by John Curtis

For Sandy Parkerson, perhaps her most rewarding experience as a volunteer for IRIS has come during her time as a cultural companion to a woman from Syria. “It’s basically being a friend that commits to spending regular time with a person and helping introduce them to some of the things that life in the United States can offer,” Parkerson said.

The woman and her family arrived last August from Syria, where she had lost a child in a bombing and her two surviving children were severely burned. “They have a lot of health problems because of that,” Parkerson said.

In their first meeting, the two stayed at the Syrian woman’s home and got to know each other. Their next meeting was an excursion to Yale’s Peabody Museum. “She was fascinated by the rocks and minerals,” Parkerson said.

Over time Parkerson watched her companion adapt to life in the United States and make great strides in learning English. “She is already cracking jokes and making puns.” Parkerson’s hoping her 8-year-old daughter and her Syrian friend’s 8-year-old daughter can become friends.

Parkerson began working as a volunteer with IRIS in December of 2015. Like many, she was moved by the burgeoning refugee crisis in Syria. Parkerson, her husband, and their four children had recently moved to Cheshire, Conn., after several years abroad. The family lived in Bolivia and Uganda, where her husband, who works for Innovations for Poverty Action, evaluated the effectiveness of poverty eradication programs. “I was settling in, figuring out what I wanted to do,” said Parkerson, a former high school physics and biology teacher. “A friend told me about the IRIS coat drive. I said, “What’s IRIS?’”

IRIS put her to work in housing and donations. Because the refugee crisis was constantly in the news, donations were arriving from around the country. “We would fill up rooms in IRIS in a day with donated goods, not just used pots and pans, but brand-new things from Amazon,” Parkerson recalled. “Every time we walked in the door, there would be piles of boxes to be opened and categorized, and thank you notes to be sent.”

Those donations were put to use when families arrived—between four and five families every week—and homes had to be made ready. “We would pull things off the shelves, load them in the truck, and set up the apartment. It was physically hard work, but it was fun. It was gratifying to get to know the refugees.”

Her next project at IRIS was running a bicycle donation program that has given away about 180 bikes since 2016. Donated bikes go to the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op, which partners with IRIS and other organizations to recycle them. Parkerson also organizes a course in bike safety.

“It started out with a lot of adults wanting bikes,” she said. “A lot of them work odd hours and it’s a free means of transportation.”

Parkerson has also been supporting IRIS’s “CORE” (Cultural Orientation & Refugee Education) program, a required course for newly arriving refugees that covers health, education, driving, domestic violence, work, and other issues. She offers rides to participants, pitches in if lunch needs to be delivered, or helps with child care. (On top of all her volunteer work, she’s taking courses at Gateway Community College so she can go to nursing school.)

“I just find it rewarding to come in contact with people of different cultures,” Parkerson said. “I find it rewarding to feel like I am helping someone, even though they are helping me even more by giving me the experience of knowing them. You put yourself in someone else’s shoes and your eyes are opened to other people’s experiences. It widens your world view.”

I’ll Jump When I See Them

Written by Ashley Makar | February 2019

A portrait of Kamal, a refugee from Darfur, painting by Linnéa Spransy

Imagine a Goodwill inside a school, with the vibe of a Cairo airport gate. That’s the scene, on busy days, at IRIS, the refugee resettlement agency where I work in Connecticut. People speaking Arabic, Swahili, Dari, Pashto, and English bustle and wait to see their case managers, with cups of tea and paperwork. Along the walls are world maps and local bus routes, kids’ drawings of planes and stars, flashcards for the US citizenship exam. The donation space overflows with coats; lamps stand over bassinets, pots, and pans.

Reporters used to dash in to do stories on the travel ban. But that was only the beginning of the President’s effort to shut Muslims and refugees out of the country. Through a convoluted series of executive actions, he has decimated the U.S. refugee resettlement program. Millions of displaced people are left in precarious straits.

Working with refugees is unsettling sometimes. Knowing whose brother tried to get to Europe on a raft, who has trouble eating because she thinks about her mom not having food back home, who survived genocide only to get hit by a car. They’ve got so much to grieve while they work long days to make ends meet. It’s not how they envisioned the American dream. But they keep working and waiting for better days, with a resilience I get to witness. They endure in light of the loss that brought them here.

I got to know a young dad named Kamal while he was trying to understand what the travel ban would mean for his family. (Names have been changed, to protect the privacy of the people in this story.) They are refugees from Darfur, a part of Sudan where militias burn villages and massacre civilians. Kamal fled over the border into Chad, where a UN field office determined his eligibility to apply for resettlement to the U.S. in 2013. That was the beginning of an arduous process of interviews and security screenings. Between each step there were months of waiting, with no indication of when or if his application would be approved.

During that time, he worked in the Breidjing camp as a history teacher for other refugee adults, in a makeshift school where he met a young woman named Safa. They got married in 2014. A year later, Kamal finally got the news that he’d been granted resettlement to the U.S. But because Kamal and Safa had started their resettlement applications before their marriage, they were considered separate cases, and Safa was not allowed to join him, even though she was eight weeks pregnant with their first child. They were told he could apply to bring her later, through the “follow-to-join program” that reunites refugees in the U.S with their spouses and children overseas.

Kamal was faced with a difficult choice. If he stayed in the refugee camp, his visa would expire, and he would have to start the process all over again. He and Safa could end up waiting ten years or more, with no guarantee that they would both get resettled in the U.S. If he went, they would be separated, but she might get her visa six in to eight months. Kamal decided to go. He was assigned to IRIS, the resettlement agency in New Haven, Connecticut where there was a growing community of refugees from Darfur.

Soon after arriving, Kamal started his family reunification application. He had to submit photos and other documentation of his wedding in the refugee camp. He and Safa were waiting for the State Department to process her background checks when their daughter Rama was born. They had to complete paternity testing before he could update his follow-to-join application: Now, he was applying to bring his wife and their child to join him in the U.S. After ten more months, they thought they were close. Safa had her last interview with the Department of Homeland Security in January 2017.

Two weeks later, just before Rama’s first birthday, the White House issued its first travel ban. The executive order temporarily banned people from seven Muslim-majority countries and all refugees from entering the U.S.

Before 2017, Kamal and his family had been separated by a bureaucratic machine that moved slowly, but did move. In the wake of the travel ban, they had no idea what was going to happen. Safa called Kamal crying. She and the baby were now in Cameroon—they needed to be close enough to an American embassy for any visa interviews. This was supposed to be the last step in their family reunification process. She told Kamal she wanted to go back to Sudan. She hardly knew anyone in Cameroon, and she didn’t speak the language.

“Please wait,” Kamal told her. “Our country is not safe.”

Before I got to know Kamal’s community, all I knew about Darfur was headlines of genocide. But the Sudanese refugees I know are helping me see the life that doesn’t make the news. Kamal’s friend Ali showed me a home video from Darfur: Ali’s brother is playing a stringed instrument made of tin, sitting next to a man in a suit singing. The people gathered around are standing and clapping along. Someone starts jumping, then another jumps and another, heels to the height of where their knees were. They swing their arms to launch, and up they go, each time like a geyser, and somehow synchronized.

“I love this jump dance!” I said. “What’s it called?”

“Masalit.” It’s the name of their tribe and their native language. “Darfur is the most beautiful part of Sudan,” Ali told me. “On Fridays, you wash all the clothes and hang them outside to dry. You leave the doors open so the angels can come inside.” Ali’s mom is a traditional healer. He remembers her making medicine out of neem trees. She’d started to teach him the healing secrets, he told me. “But then we got war.”

Kamal’s six-year-old nephew Ammar has also resettled in New Haven. Ammar has never been to their homeland, a lake-filled part of Darfur in Western Sudan. Like Rama, he was born on an arid patch of land in Eastern Chad, in a refugee camp where even water is rationed. But he got out in 2015, when talk of a Muslim ban was just the overblown campaign rhetoric of an unlikely candidate.

Ammar came as a toddler, with his parents, siblings, and their dad’s brother, his Uncle Kamal. When I met them at IRIS, he was hiding behind his parents’ legs. Now, he’s a kid who can get up to some mischief on the playground, who climbs jungle gyms and isn’t afraid to go down the slide, who asks you over and over on the swing set to push him high. This is the best medicine I can imagine for what one refugee calls “this disturbing life.”

Kamal’s application to bring his wife and baby to join them in the U.S. was a long haul in the dark, but when I see him with Ammar, I see sparks of light. Ammar is the type of child Emerson must have been writing about in Conduct of Life, the kind whose happiness “makes the heart too big for the body.”

Sometimes Kamal shows Ammar videos of Masalit celebrations on Youtube: People gathered under the trees around a singer or two, and jumping. “Try to do this,” Kamal tells him. “This is your home song.” Sometimes Ammar tries to jump as high as he can to dance along.

About a month before the first travel ban, Sudanese community leaders invited me to what they call a welcome party, a celebration they were throwing for a group of refugees from their home region who arrived to New Haven in 2016.

At the party, I found Ammar sitting next to his Uncle Kamal. Ammar was wearing a button-up shirt with a silver suit vest, looking askance at a platter of watermelon. When I sat down, he asked, “Do you have ice cream?”

“No,” I told him. “I wish I did.”

“Do you have a car?” he asked.

“No, but I have a bicycle.”

“Then can we go get ice cream?”

Kamal showed me a picture of Safa holding baby Rama. At the time, they didn’t know what was delaying their family reunification application. “Since I left,” he said, “my heart has been thinking [of] my wife.” They would talk—across the Atlantic and half of Africa—through a video chat app. That’s how Kamal watched their baby Rama grow—her first tooth, her first word. “Somehow, she knows me,” he told me. “She’s started to say ‘Baba’”—Dad—to his picture on her mom’s phone, to the hand waving at her on the screen. She’d started to wave back.

Meanwhile, the welcome party was turning into a dance-off. “Are you going to do the jump dance?!” I asked.

Kamal shook his head. “I’ll jump when I see them.”

The U.S. used to be a global leader in resettling refugees: people fleeing torture in Eritrea, persecution in Myanmar, insurgency in Somalia, genocide in Sudan, the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. That has changed during Trump’s presidency. With a barrage of executive orders, he has slashed the number of refugees who can come to the U.S. Most recently, he set a record-low cap on refugee admissions—just 30,000 for 2019, less than a third of the annual average since 1980.

Federal courts blocked Trump’s first travel ban. The White House issued another ban two months later, which was again halted by federal judges. Meanwhile, Kamal and his wife were on a roller coaster of U.S. doors slamming shut, then cracking open again, not knowing if Safa and their baby Rama would make it in.

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld a third version of the travel ban in June, but the resistance in the courts made all the difference for Kamal’s family. It was during that brief legal opening after a federal court suspended the second travel ban that Safa and Rama received their visas. The family would finally reunite in America.

Empowering Women

January 2019 | Photography © Lucy Gellman

Zafa’s Story

Zafa is a 27-year-old mother from Afghanistan who arrived in the USA in 2016, with her husband and four children. Her youngest daughter came to class with her. She, a pleasant little girl with big brown eyes and a thick brown bob, never said anything to us, but she always listened intently as they spoke to her while she played with dolls and squished play-doh.

Zafa first came to class knowing a few phrases in English:

Hello, my name is…

How are you…

She did not have much of a grasp on the English alphabet and had to be shown how to grip a pencil correctly. She was shy at first, but was very motivated. She participated and practiced diligently in class. Phonics lessons allowed her to begin reading and by the end of the course, she was able to read consonant-vowel-consonant words with accuracy!

During the course she learned practical skills like how to read a food store advertisement and plan a shopping list, how to express that she or her child is ill and when to go to the doctor, and how to respond to a text message. Her progress has been dramatic. At first her husband dropped her off to the first class, but then she started getting to class by herself or together with other mothers. She had even made friends. With her English literacy progress and social interactions, she gained confidence to navigate the New Haven community.

A special message from one of our students…

The Program

The Family Literacy Program is uniquely designed to meet the needs of refugee mothers with young children, who have no other options for learning English. Four mornings a week, refugee mothers bring their young children to an adjacent preschool readiness class and then attend English class. The multi-level class—taught by an experienced teacher and many volunteers—focuses on extremely practical applications of reading, writing, and speaking English in order to improve the women’s integration and help them manage their family’s daily tasks, support their children’s education, and engage in community life.

Our Supporters

The Family Literacy Program is made possible by dedicated volunteers, generous donors, the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven Women & Girl’s Fund, Women’s Congregational Home Missionary Union of Connecticut (WCHMU) Anna Harris Andrews Fund, J.Walton Bissel Foundation, Dollar General Literacy Fund, and IRIS Staff.

Taha’s Story

December 2018 | Written by Lisa DiLullo | Photo by Lena Kovalenko

Daad Serweri arrived to the U.S. in 2017 from Afghanistan with a special immigrant visa he obtained working with the U.S. Armed Forces.

When Taha Al-Hayder says 2018 was his lucky year, he’s not kidding!

In October, the 29-year-old Iraqi native became a first-time home buyer, just seven months after earning his American citizenship. IRIS heard about his exciting news after he invited his former Case Manager, Linda Bronstein, to his house warming party.  But it’s clear that behind his “luck” is some incredibly hard work, resourcefulness, and persistence.

The youngest of five children, Taha said he never intended to leave Baghdad because his sisters were there.  Although his sisters were married, Taha said he felt obliged to look out for them. He was managing to save a little money while working full-time and attending school. But as the Bath party made things “difficult”- particularly for young men like Taha who worked for the U.S. military – he knew it was time to leave Iraq.

After a three-year resettlement application process, Taha and his mother arrived in the United States in 2012. As a young man in Baghdad, Taha had worked full-time and attended school.

Once in America, Taha and his mother settled into an apartment furnished by IRIS, and IRIS staff also helped him find a first job.

“I depended on carpools to get to my job, because I didn’t have a car,” he explained. “When the carpool broke up, I had no way to get from my apartment in New Haven to the job in North Haven. So that job was gone.”

Undeterred, Taha searched for and landed a series of temporary placement jobs. Over time, he obtained a driver’s license and bought his own car. And he dreamed of bigger things.

“About two or three years ago, I began thinking of buying my own home,” he said. “I found a place for my mother and me, but the mortgage didn’t go through.”

As “luck” would have it, Taha was offered permanent employment at a temp assignment he had taken at a Branford manufacturing facility. While he didn’t know it at the time, this job would provide the income stability needed to buy a home.

“I was there a few months, and they offered to train me in CNC, computerized numerical control. Of course, I accepted even though I’d never seen machines like this.” He still works there today, five years later.

At one point, Taha added two part-time jobs to his full-time employment to save enough money to buy a home. He just recently dropped one part-time job, making space to take a course or two a semester at Gateway Community College.

And he ramped up his search for a home to buy. “In July, I started looking at a lot of homes. My deadline to do this was the end of this year,” he said.

The home search brought him to the tan Cape Cod home in New Haven, which he selected as the home for his mother and himself.

“The process of buying this home was not easy. The paperwork was very difficult. There were many, many questions about income. But I knew it was worth it. The rent money I was paying the landlord is the same as I would pay for my mortgage.”

On October 12, his dream of home ownership came true when Taha closed on the three-bedroom home. It sits on .29 acres.

“It’s great! No one is living above or below me. And I love having my own yard! There’s so much joy to go out there, to enjoy my hookah and just look around. I’m a lucky guy!”

For other young men aspiring to buy a home, Taha has some advice.

“Stay in one job, keep that stability. While you’re working, you can always look for something better.”

To be sure, Taha is looking at new goals now. In 2019, he plans to build a garage for his home. He hopes one day to buy a second, larger home for himself and his mother, and rent out his current house.

And one last message?

“Work hard, play hard,” he said. “It’s real!”

A with Daad Serweri

July 2018

Daad Serweri arrived to the U.S. in 2017 from Afghanistan with a special immigrant visa he obtained working with the U.S. Armed Forces.

Now he works as an IRIS case manager, helping refugees & immigrants with the same challenges he’s experienced leaving his home & starting over in Connecticut.

Do you have any goals you want to achieve in the U.S.?

We have a strong ambition but first, we have to be able to empower ourselves in terms of education. I have a Bachelor’s degree in international relations but I would like to continue my education and so does my wife. My wife has a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry. So if I’m in the United States, we do have ambition that we should add value to the society. We should share some of the experiences we have that could be fully utilized here too, as well as leave new experiences to better society.

How do you like living in the U.S.?

What I really love and respect about the United States are the values — tolerance, diversity of opinions, diversity of religions and beliefs. People like me coming from underdeveloped countries, they definitely suffered from a lack of these strong values. But here, I enjoy them. I’ve enjoyed it from the first moment I got off the plane.

How did you get involved working at IRIS?

I joined IRIS because I thought I could play a small role helping IRIS to deliver services to our clients, coming from different parts of the world. My experience helped me because I went through the system and the challenges. It’s not only language, it’s culture, custom, and tradition.

How does it feel to raise your kids in America?

The reason you leave your country is a mixture of many hopes but there is a bit of a struggle. They are much luckier than their dad because they live in a better society where everyone can practice their opinion freely and they can get a better education and work for a better future.

How was your transition moving from Afghanistan to the U.S.?

When you leave your country because of a number of issues and then come to a new country there are new issues. In general, because we were re-settled through IRIS, I have to admire the way refugees benefit from the services by IRIS – starting from housing, helping with rent, connecting refugees to social services, enrolling my children into public school, employment opportunities — I thought it was fantastic. We found it very useful. We really felt like we were in good hands.

Written by Grady Trexler

For the past two years, Eldina Muratovic has spent her summers working with IRIS’s Summer Learning Program, as an intern in 2019 and then an assistant program coordinator in 2020, when the program was virtual due to COVID-19.

But her involvement with IRIS didn’t start there–Eldina’s first experiences with IRIS came in 2000, when the organization resettled her and her immediate family in Branford, Connecticut, where they were taken in by relatives who were already living there.

Eldina’s parents moved her family to Germany from Bosnia before she was born, and then after they had a problem with immigration paperwork in Germany, the family applied to be resettled in the United States.

“I was only five years old when I came to the U.S.,” says Eldina. She said that although she didn’t have too much trouble with the language barrier, because she was so young and able to pick up English quite quickly, she still felt like she didn’t belong for a while in the United States.

“All of a sudden I was in a different place,” she says. “And that was a little bit of a culture shock.”

Now in her third year at the Summer Learning Program, Eldina is the lead teacher for a class of first and second graders, which has had anywhere from three to eight students come on a given day.

“I want to work with immigrant children such as myself, and help them kind of navigate and find their own sense of belonging,” she says. Eldina says that while she may not understand everything her students are going through, she wants to communicate to them that they — like her — will be able to make this place their home.

“This year, it feels good to actually be in a physical classroom and work with them,” says Eldina. Last year, the instruction was completely virtual, and Eldina said that the few times that she got to interact with the students in person, when she would drop off their supplies to their homes, their faces would light up, and she could tell they were craving more in-person interaction.

Eldina says the class is fluid, and that rather than follow a specific curriculum, she asks the students what they want to focus on and learn. Moreover, she says she has to be adaptive, since all the students are coming into the classroom at different levels.

“It’s a challenge, but it’s fun,” she says, adding: “I have a great group of volunteers and helpers that are able to make that happen as well.”
“It feels good,” she says, about working once again with IRIS. “It definitely feels good to be back.”