Loading ...A Refugee's Story: From War in Syria to Poverty in the US
Amena* never wanted to leave Syria, but she didn’t have a choice. In 2012, the place she called home was hit by an airstrike and then destroyed by artillery fire amid intense fighting between government security forces and militants fighting for control over the city of Homs.
“We were trapped,” Amena told teleSUR. But in a conflict that has killed over a quarter-million people, she was one of the lucky ones, even though she lost almost everything: She got out. And she was even luckier than most of the 4.1 million Syrians who have escaped the horror that is their country today, managing to avoid both the squalid conditions of a refugee camp and the often deadly trip to an increasingly unwelcoming Europe.
The 36-year-old Amena, her husband and her four children—two boys and two girls, the oldest 14 and the youngest, at 2, knowing only a life on the run—made it to the United States after “lots of interviews,” “lots of paperwork” and two years of trying. Only 1,800 other Syrian refugees can say the same.
Twice as many people have fled Syria than fled Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation, making Syria the source of what is by far the worst refugee crisis in the 21st Century. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, another 7.6 million Syrians are internally displaced, having fled their homes but not their country, at least not yet.
Making it to the U.S. is an exceedingly rare achievement, then. Nearly 100 times as many Syrians have sought refuge in Germany as in the United States, while considerably less wealthy countries like Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are host to millions of refugees
What’s it like hitting what many refugees—and many on the U.S. far right—see as the asylum seekers’ jackpot? Not so great, it turns out. As Amena discovered, the fact that the U.S. government deigns to allow a precious few war refugees resettle in the United States does not mean it will do much for them once they are in fact resettled.
Like many Americans, Amena has discovered that living in the land of the free is an exceedingly expensive endeavor. “There are a lot of bills,” she said, and it’s not easy coming up with the money to pay them.
A non-profit organization helped Amena and her family find a home in Connecticut, but it wasn’t ready when it was supposed to be; after landing in February 2015, she had to foot the bill for three days in a hotel. When she finally moved into her two-bedroom home—along with her husband and kids and two of her relatives, it was four to a room.
With just US$2,000 to her name, Amena was immediately asked to start paying rent; she could barely afford the cost of staying warm in chilly New England, where a heating bill can easily be hundreds of dollars. Possessing rudimentary English and little more, she went out and got a job—no one helped with that, either.
“I had to ask around,” she said.
And that is Amena’s biggest complaint: After getting off a plane more than 10,700 kilometers away from the place she called home for the first 35 years of her life, no one really told her what to do or what came next. A freshman in college gets a week-long orientation on the ins and outs of life on-campus, but a Syrian refugee gets nothing in the way of an introduction to life in an entirely new country—other than a bill. She and her family were resettled, and enormously grateful for that, but otherwise they were left on their own in a strange and often inhospitable land.
Source: www.telesurtv.net