Exactly 18 years ago, I started the most rewarding job I have ever had, Executive Director of IRIS. (Back then we were called the Interfaith Refugee Ministry).

Later this year, I will be stepping down from my position at IRIS.

I love this work, and I have thoroughly enjoyed working with my dedicated colleagues, our amazing clients from all over the world, and our incredible family of friends and donors. Very few refugee and immigrant service organizations enjoy such generous, sustained, and energetic support.

Welcoming refugees and immigrants is our most noble national tradition. And it’s a demanding job.

At this point in my life, I’d like to spend more time with friends and family. My two daughters live overseas, and, I would like to visit them more often. One is about to have her first child, my second grandchild. And I love babysitting for my first grandchild, who lives in Brooklyn.

I am not leaving anytime soon. As soon as I informed the board, they began preparing for this transition. They hired a search firm to help find excellent candidates and to ensure a smooth transition. I will not leave until we have a new ED in place.

IRIS has always embraced change and has never been afraid of doing new things. Changing leadership is a healthy process. It will bring new ideas and new perspectives.

While I’ll be leaving my position at IRIS, I will continue to stay involved in this work. I hope to work part-time on Welcome Corps – our country’s new national private sponsorship program. I’m looking forward to strengthening our democracy by working on voter registration and voter turnout. I might even work on a political campaign next year.

And here is a secret: I’ve always wanted to run a marathon, but could never find the time to train. Next year, at the young age of 70, I will run my first marathon!

Thank you all for your support and amazing commitment to this mission,
Chris

Photo © The New Journal & New Haven Register

My name is Masha,* I am a mom of three beautiful kids. We arrived here with my sister and her daughter 9 months ago. My kids and I used to live in a small charming city, Bucha, 15 minutes away from Kyiv. We loved our small apartment and our time together. I loved my job, and my kids loved their school and friends. Most of all, the kids loved the moments when my mom and dad came to visit us. It has already been a year since they saw their grandparents for the last time. It has already been a year since they saw their dad for the last time. It’s so hard.

I still remember that morning when Russia invaded Ukraine. I remember the helicopters that flew over our house and bombed the airport in the city next to ours. We saw it through our kitchen window. I remember the basement where we slept for two weeks, the longest weeks in my life. I remember the fear on my kids’ faces when they saw tanks and burned bodies next to those tanks. It was a nightmare.

The day we fled Ukraine was so hazy. We couldn’t believe that we were finally safe and we didn’t know what was gonna be next. Thank God we got a chance to get to the USA. It was so hard to start building a completely new life in a completely different country. I was not sure that we would be able to survive.

Luckily, I found a job I have been working at since July. As I didn’t have my work permit, my new employer, Dean, offered to keep track of my hours until I got it. They were so kind, but it was very difficult to survive until I got my first paycheck. I finally got it in October, when I got approved for work authorization. It was so hard for my kids, after everything they have been through without speaking any English to adjust here. The same for my sister.

We are still struggling every day. But thanks God, we met a lot of nice people that helped us and made our lives easier. I am so grateful I met these amazing and kind people from New Start Ministry that have been helping us for almost 4 months.

It is hard but now I know we are not alone in this country.

The same about my motherland. It’s hard but I know the entire world supports and prays for Ukraine.

Together we are stronger and we will win.

*Masha’s name has been altered for privacy. She delivered this speech as part of a rally in solidarity with Ukraine one year after the Russian invasion.

Make a donation to IRIS to rebuild lives of Ukrainian families, and immigrants from all over the world.

By John Curtis

Almost three years ago, Mario and Ruth and their three children arrived In New Haven after an odyssey that had begun in 2016 when religious persecution forced them from Angola.

They spent two and a half years in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, where Mario resisted drug gangs’ efforts to recruit him. After several attacks and the murder of a friend, the family decided to leave. With just $500, they began a journey to the United States that took them by bus across Brazil and through Peru and Ecuador to Colombia. There they joined other refugees on a harrowing two-week march through the Darien Gap to Panama. In the jungle they lost their money and passports to bandits armed with guns and machetes, were separated from two of their daughters, forded rivers that rose to their necks, and saw fellow travelers washed away in swollen streams.

“If your friend falls dead, there’s nothing you can do for him, you have to keep walking,” Mario said a few days after their arrival in New Haven. “If you gave me $10,000 to do that again, I wouldn’t do it.”

They found their daughters, who had traveled ahead when their group split up, at a camp in Panama. After a month they continued traveling north. People along the way provided food and Mario cleaned windshields, begged for money, and did whatever he could to keep going. In December of 2019, after more than seven months of travel, they reached Reynosa on the border between Mexico and the United States. On January 20, they crossed into McAllen, Texas, and found shelter with Catholic Charities. When they arrived in New Haven in February after a 53-hour bus trip, there to greet them were IRIS staff and members of the Jewish Community Alliance for Refugee Resettlement. They were the fifth family resettled with the help of the partnership which includes the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven and six local synagogues.

Within a few days the family was settled in an apartment in the Hill neighborhood. Because they entered the country on temporary parole as asylum seekers, they are ineligible for such benefits as health care and can’t work without authorization. When permission to work came through from the U.S. government, Mario, who had worked as a chef in Angola and Brazil, found a job making bread at a restaurant. Ruth, who’d worked in supermarkets in Angola and Brazil, found a job in a market in New Haven, but is now home with their three girls and their eight-month-old son. The girls, who are 9, 8, and 4, are in New Haven public schools. A year ago the family moved to a new apartment in Newhallville, and Mario now has a full-time job in a shipping facility in North Haven.

While their life is safer and more stable than in previous years, their future remains uncertain. As Seventh Day Adventists, they were persecuted in Angola. Mario’s father was killed because of his religion. Unlike refugees, who enter the country with their residency status settled, asylum seekers may stay while their application is processed. The family’s application is still pending.

They were one of two asylum-seeking families on the bus trip from Texas in February 2020. The other family, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, was resettled by another co sponsor, the First Congregational Church in Madison. Although IRIS has provided some assistance to asylum seekers in the past, this was the first time IRIS and its co-sponsors had taken on resettling asylum-seeking families.

“Catholic Charities, which runs the shelter in McAllen, Texas, sent out an APB that they have African families that don’t seem to have anywhere to go,” said Chris George, director of IRIS. “We responded immediately that we will take five families.” Sustaining families without social and health benefits was challenging, but George felt that IRIS’s robust network of co-sponsor groups was up to the task. In the end, Catholic Charities sent just the two families to New Haven.

Many refugees have friends or relatives to take them in, but that has not been the case with many from Africa. “We have no family here, no one to help us,” Ruth said a few days after the family’s arrival in New Haven. “We had nowhere else to go.”

Jean Silk, coordinator of JCARR, said deciding whether to accept the family required a consensus among the member synagogues and the federation. “It was an unknown for IRIS as well as for JCARR. Each rabbi conferred with the president of their board. Everybody said yes,” Silk said. Ultimately, the decision rested on their faith. “Torah instructs us 36 times to care for the stranger—far more than it commands us to observe the Sabbath or any other law.” JCARR committed $10,000 plus resettlement services that included finding an apartment, helping register the children in school, providing food and transportation and orienting the family to life in New Haven.

JCARR began in 2016, during the Syrian refugee crisis, after Silk attended an IRIS information session to learn more about resettlement. “I knew every Jew in the room,” she said. “We all got together and said, this is huge, we have to do this.” Because each synagogue was too small to take on resettlement individually, they decided it had to be a group effort by member congregations and the Jewish Federation. Silk signed on as the group’s coordinator. 

Their first family arrived in 2016 from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their second family, from Syria, arrived on election night that year. Another family from Syria arrived early in 2017 during the Trump administration’s Muslim ban. “We knew they were in the sky, coming from Turkey, but we didn’t know whether they would be allowed to stay in America once they landed at JFK,” Silk said. The family was granted entry. The fourth family came from Iraq, followed by the family from Angola. Since then, JCARR has welcomed a family from Syria and a family from Afghanistan. JCARR is now preparing to welcome its eighth family, from Ukraine.

JCARR has followed a structure recommended by IRIS, which involves assigning specific duties to task forces. In addition to one or two leaders for each task force, partner synagogues provide one or two liaisons for a total of about 24 in JCARR’s leadership group. There are also volunteers who find apartments, furnish them, provide transportation, and help out on moving day. Of those volunteers, Silk said, “They’re sort of uncountable.”

Silk said JCARR members have also learned to handle unexpected challenges, like tracking down a lost family in New York’s Port Authority bus station. “I have to reach out to other people, and we just figure it out,” Silk said. “The learning is two ways—we learn as much from our families as they learn from us. We love talking with each other. Sharing information about what is Judaism, what is Islam is so rewarding. Working with other volunteers is one of the most fulfilling things I have ever done. People all care about the same thing and we work together to figure it out.”

Max and Abdul were paired up as part of IRIS’ Cultural Companions program. They’ve bonded over coffee, walking around New Haven, and knowing multiple languages.

“I don’t always understand English but Max speaks Turkish and some Dari, so I don’t need an interpreter!” Abdul says.

Abdul works for Amazon, but aspires to be a plumber, his former profession in Afghanistan. Once he gets better at speaking English, he’ll apply for his plumbing license.

Abdul arrived in 2021, just days before the Taliban takeover.

“Abdul has been full of stories. I’ve learned what the life of a refugee is like, particularly an Afghan refugee, which is a world I didn’t know too much about. He’s opened my eyes.” Max says. 

Max and Abdul get together once a week. Next up, they’re planning on visiting the beach or hiking up East Rock Park. 

IRIS’ Cultural Companion program pairs volunteers with immigrants like Max and Abdul to build friendships and exchange cultural traditions. 

“We deal with the problem of isolation because a lot of immigrants coming to this country are lonely,” says Mbeki Yunana, IRIS’ Cultural Companions Coordinator. “We try to create this platform where people can meet and become friends, and work towards a better life of self-sufficiency for refugees.”

The Cultural Companions program runs on the backs of our wonderful volunteers. If interested in becoming a Cultural Companion, please sign up here.

Five years after reaching Connecticut, members of a Syrian family become citizens and homeowners and reflect on their first days.

By John Curtis

In January 2017, Reem Alhaji arrived in Connecticut with her husband, Khaled, their two-year-old daughter, Elin, and a mix of emotions. The family had left Syrian’s Kurdish region to escape the country’s civil war and lived in Istanbul for three years while applying to enter the United States as refugees. They arrived in America with two bags of clothes and diapers for Elin.

“I was scared and happy at the same time,” Reem recalled. “We had no family here, no language. We were thinking, how is it going to be there?”

After the ride from the airport in New York City, they arrived in New Haven where Susan Suhr, from Woodbury’s New Start Ministry, greeted them in the company of an Arabic interpreter. Then, they drove to Waterbury, where an apartment was waiting for them.

“She gave my husband a key, teaching him which door you can open,” Reem said. “Everything was clean, everything was available—clothes, food, furniture, diapers, whatever we needed. We were so happy.”

Five years later, the family has reached major milestones in their life as immigrants—they own a house in Manchester, Khaled has steady work as a driver for Fedex, their two older daughters are in school, their third daughter was born in May, and this summer Reem became a U.S. citizen. Khaled is still going through the citizenship process.

“I was so excited for them,” Suhr said of their accomplishments. The Alhajis were the first of four families to resettle with the help of New Start Ministry. In 2019, the group welcomed a family from Afghanistan, and in November 2021, received another family from Afghanistan, who were evacuated from the Kabul airport. The ministry is working to get a green light to sponsor a fourth family.

The ministry started in 2015 at St. Paul’s Church in Woodbury, when members of the congregation considered becoming co-sponsors. After a presentation by Ashley Makar of IRIS, they reached out to clergy in neighboring towns, built a team, and in the summer of 2016 were close to ready to welcome a family. The Alhajis arrived in January 2017, just a couple of weeks before then-President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” went into effect.

A core group of between 21 and 28 volunteers meets weekly to coordinate their activities, Suhr said, adding that they come from at least a dozen houses of worship in the area. “We have Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, agnostics on the team.” They’re organized in such task areas as acculturation, English lessons, child care, education, employment, finance, health care, housing, household furnishings, social services, transportation, and translators. “We have found that it is best to divvy up the responsibilities among those people. It’s also very important for us to stay coordinated.”

Even though volunteers work in specific areas, Suhr said, New Start Ministry makes a point not to “silo” people by their tasks. “I don’t think that works very well, because you isolate people too much and you’re not getting the full picture of what’s going on with the family,” she says.

One of the key lessons she’s learned, Suhr says, is “how amazing it is that people who don’t know each other can bond so quickly and work so beautifully together. I am so grateful that I have had this opportunity to work with people and help make significant change in the lives of people and watch them grow and become independent.”

Another lesson came from their experience with the family evacuated from Afghanistan last year. New Start Ministry’s first two families had already been through the trauma of leaving their country and culture when they arrived in the United States. Years of living in a third country and waiting for their visas had given them time to come to terms with their situation and the realization that they’d probably never see their home country again. “The Afghan evacuee family didn’t have that time. It was still in the moment. It was still raw for them,” Suhr said, adding that the family has since moved to Houston to be near family. “If we got another evacuee family, we would deal with them differently. We will listen a lot more and try and better understand what their goals are, what their dreams are, recognizing that their experiences are quite different from what refugees experience.”

The husband in the evacuee family had been a journalist at home and hoped to find similar work in the United States, even though he spoke no English. “He hadn’t had the time to process the change, that this is a totally different life, that he needs to rebuild,” Suhr said. “That is the distinction that I saw, the refugees had already gone through that self-awakening while they were exiled in Turkey.”

The Alhaji family’s time in Istanbul was difficult, Reem said. “They don’t like refugees. Everywhere they don’t like us. Nobody helped refugees there.” Khaled had gone ahead in 2014 and Reem followed later. The civil war in Syria drove their decision to leave. “We don’t have enough freedom to live. There was the war,” Reem said.

They married in a religious ceremony in Turkey and Elin was born there. Khaled supported the family with work as a tailor, which he’d been in Syria.

Now settled in their three-bedroom suburban ranch home in Manchester, they feel safe and secure. Elin, their oldest, is seven and in the second grade. Ella, 3, who was born in Connecticut, is in preschool. Reem stays home with four-month-old Mila, and Khaled works six days a week. The family speaks Kurdish at home and has found friends in a Kurdish community in South Windsor.

Their first months in America were very busy, Reem said. They had interviews for work, they learned how to drive, they studied English. “It was so busy, paperwork, vaccines,” she said. Every step of the way, she said, volunteers from New Start were there to help. “Some people were teaching us English, some people were taking us to doctors’ appointments, grocery shopping.”

Khaled first found work with Marie’s Movers in Southbury, and after about two years moved to Fedex. Reem worked for 18 months as a cashier at Brooklyn Baking in Waterbury. The job helped her learn English, but she stopped when she was expecting Ella.

In 2017, Reem and Khaled married again in Southbury because their religious ceremony in Istanbul was not recognized. In attendance at the wedding were volunteers from New Start Ministry and IRIS staff.

“I am happy here,” Reem said. “I know my kids are safe. They are going to school. They have food. Everything is available.”