BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer World leaders gathered at the United Nations on Tuesday to discuss the ongoing refugee crisis. At the UN’s annual Summit for Refugees and Migrants, President Obama delivered his final speech to the General Assembly. The president called on fellow world leaders, organizations, and corporations to double down on their efforts to … Continued
BY: Zane Ziebell/Contributing Writer The Obama Administration plans to increase the number of refugees the United States will take in during fiscal year 2017 to 110,000. Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers that, “the administration wants to admit 110,000 international refugees in the fiscal year that begins October 1.” The new number of refugees … Continued
BY MATT RIEDL
Kansas.com
A unique exhibition on display at multiple galleries in the Wichita area features artwork made by refugee Iraqi and Palestinian artists from Gaza.
The exhibition, called Building Bridges: Art Exhibition and Sale, is an attempt to emphasize common humanity around the world and combat negative perceptions of Muslims, according to Jan Swartzendruber, who is helping publicize the exhibit.
“The idea is art of all sorts communicated across cultures and across geography and across religion, and that all builds bridges of understanding in a much more direct way than any kind of verbal lecturing or explaining does,” Schwartzendruber said.
Most of the artists whose work is displayed in the exhibition have been resettled in the United States or Canada. The artwork is from 19 Iraqi artists and 9 Palestinian artists.
One of those artists is Khalid Alaani, a native Iraqi painter.
Alaani had to leave Baghdad in 2006 because of the war. He then sought refuge in Damascus, Syria until 2012.
While in Damascus – which he praised for its generous, “welcoming” people – he met up with other Iraqi painters and put on exhibitions.
He was relocated to Maryland in 2012, and moved to Alexandria, Va., in 2015, where he participates in the local art scene while studying to practice pharmacy.
His paintings, he said, will hopefully make people realize “all people around the world share a lot of common things.”
“There’s no vocabulary in painting – the image itself is the language,” Alaani said. “The acrylics are the same, but … maybe the landscape is different. … At the end of the day it’s all human contribution, so when you feel that – the other people are happy with what they have and their culture, their landscape that they live in – I think it really gives that message that we are the same. We’re not different.”
People can bid on the various paintings, and 80 percent of the proceeds from any sale goes to the artist. The rest of the proceeds go to Common Humanity, the New York City nonprofit that created the exhibit and brings the paintings in.
“It’s like a highway, two-ways,” said Ranya Taha, who helped plan for Building Bridges in Wichita. “We’re helping them and at the same time they’re helping us. We learn from them, they learn from us.”
Taha, who was born in Syria and moved to the United States when she was 22, said the focus on art by refugees will inspire compassion for their plight.
She knows how quickly life can change.
“My mom and dad, they’re professionals – one is a physician – and they had a summer house, cars and everything in Syria,” Taha said. “All in one day, two days, three days, they lost everything.”
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen. If you help somebody, somehow the good will come back to you and when you need help, you will get the help in some form.”
Student exhibition
In addition to the main Building Bridges exhibit, which travels around the country, Muslim students at Wichita State University have created another exhibit, “Building Bridges ICT,” currently on display at the WSU Shiftspace Gallery, 416 S. Commerce.
“Building Bridges ICT” features paintings and other art by the students that feature their interpretation of their culture and how it interplays with the West.
Most of the students exhibiting there – only one of which is an actual art major – are second-generation Muslim-Americans, said Maira Salim, a member of the WSU Muslim Student Association.
“It just kind of showcases the culture here,” said Salim, whose work is exhibited at Shiftspace. “I feel like a lot of the art portrayed both of the cultures that many of the artists have.”
How the exhibit came about
Building Bridges was a project of Mel Lehman, founder and executive director of Common Humanity, a nonprofit in New York City.
Lehman frequently had made humanitarian trips to Iraq and Syria since the 1990s, but the U.S. invasion in 2003 caused instability in the region, affecting many.
He began organizing medical delegations to Damascus, in which North American doctors shared their medical expertise with Syrian colleagues.
Soon, Lehman met a group of Iraqi refugee artists who had fled to Damascus. Lehman started cosigning the artists’ paintings and bringing them back to New York to exhibit, with the hope that exhibiting and selling them in the United States “could call attention to the plight of refugees in the region, provide an income to the artists, and build inter-cultural understanding,” according to a news release.
After exhibiting in New York, Lehman began taking his show across the country.
The Islamic Society of Wichita said in a news release that it is “proud to partner with the forward-thinking, bridge-building, and creative ‘Building Bridges.’”
“The artwork focuses on a world few see, but the impact is long-lasting, captivating, and provides hope where there was none,” Islamic Society of Wichita spokesman Hussam Madi said in the release.
Before heading out to the galleries, you can see all of the paintings on display at www.ictcommonhumanity.org. Click on the “paintings” tab, and then select which gallery you want to look at. Along with each picture, the artist and starting bid is listed.
Taha, the Syrian woman in Wichita, is an architect. She said the exhibition helps teach children “to help build bridges and never burn bridges.”
“We’re in a culture where sometimes it’s very easy to just burn a bridge and say something that can be so hateful – it’s harder to build a bridge,” Taha said. “As an architect, building takes way, way more time and calculating and effort than burning or breaking bridges.”
Source: www.kansas.com
Julia Raeside
The Guardian
Most people would see clean water, food and clothes as essentials, but a phone might not be thought of as a necessity. Yet for the thousands of displaced men, women and children in refugee camps around Europe, they provide a vital connection with home.
Now, a grassroots organisation is offering refugees help to maintain links to their families. Members of the Facebook group Phone Credit for Refugees and Displaced People can respond directly to an individual’s request for help, sending them £20 via the group to top up their phone.
James Pearce, 32, a social services worker from Norfolk, started making volunteer runs to the Calais Jungle at the beginning of the year. He was struck by the number of people, particularly unaccompanied children, desperate to speak to their loved ones. He started the group in February, and was soon joined by others who had seen the humanising effect a means of communication could have on someone alone and fearful in a foreign country.
Aziz, 29, from Afghanistan, an assistant to an MP, lives in a Red Cross camp in Belgium. He told group members: “The refugees who are exactly in need of your help, they will never forget your single cent of help (sic) because we left our loved ones in war, in darkness, and you help connect us with them.”
That simple gesture of acknowledging someone as not just a charity case, but a fellow human being, suffering the heartbreak of enforced separation, is what has driven so many to join Pearce in his efforts. The group has swelled to 20,000 members and has raised almost £100,000, but the pile of requests increases daily and Pearce fears they won’t be able to keep up with demand.
“My hope for the group is that we will be able to grow to the size necessary to meet the need that’s out there,” he says. “And in the process, that we can humanise and raise the profile of those caught up in the refugee crisis among ordinary people.”
Already working alongside Calais youth services and the local women’s centre, Pearce wants a major charity already involved in the refugee crisis to support their efforts and enable them to widen their scope.
Those wanting to help can search the Facebook group, send PayPal donations to phone.credit.1@gmail.com, text CALA85 and the amount you want to donate to 70070, or contribute via the My Donate page.
Source: www.theguardian.com
BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gave his long-awaited immigration speech last night in Phoenix, Arizona after a meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico. During his visit, Trump spoke highly of Mexican officials and insisted that the country will work with him to combat illegal immigration across the border. His … Continued
The people sharing their homes with refugees Photographs by Aubrey Wade and text by Nadine Alfa for UNHCR (CNN) When hundreds of thousands of refugees began arriving in Berlin last summer, Manuela and Joerg Buisset abandoned plans to rent out their newly-renovated basement, and instead offered it to refugees in need of shelter. Ahmed and Nourhan … Continued
Press release: UNHCR
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has welcomed news of the arrival in the United States this week of the 10,000th refugee from the conflict in Syria, and calls for greater global solidarity ahead of summits next month that will look at ways to increase efforts to deal with the unprecedented refugee crisis worldwide.
“The United States has long been a leader in welcoming people fleeing global persecution and the arrival on Monday of the 10,000th Syrian refugee is a further expression of this leadership,” said UNHCR Regional Representative in the United States, Shelly Pitterman.
“We thank the communities in the United States that have kept their doors open and also our civil society partners for their tireless humanitarian efforts. Much more needs to be done for Syrian refugees and for the global crisis that has seen more people flee persecution than at any time ever recorded.”
At the end of 2015, war, conflict and persecution had forced 65.3 million people globally to flee for their lives, an all-time high. The Syrian refugee crisis is the world’s largest and more than 4.8 million have fled mostly to neighbouring countries whose resources are stretched thin so that increasing numbers of refugees live below national poverty lines.
To aid the most vulnerable refugees and to share the tremendous burden of these refugee-hosting countries, UNHCR has called on governments to resettle those most at risk. So far resettlement countries have pledged a total of more than 220,000 places for Syrians under resettlement and other humanitarian admissions programmes. Around 478,000 Syrians are considered to be in need of resettlement – close to 40 per cent of the 1.19 million people who are in need of resettlement globally.
UNHCR recognizes that opportunities for resettlement are extremely limited and so reserves this for persons who are most at risk, such as unaccompanied children, women-headed households, victims of torture, and persons with special medical needs. UNHCR identifies and carefully screens all refugees before they are referred to a country for resettlement. In the case of the United States, all refugees who are referred then undergo extensive face-to-face interviews with Department of Homeland Security officers, along with multiple layers of identity and security checks in a thorough process undertaken by US authorities.
UNHCR calls for increased efforts to provide Syrian refugees with additional safe and regular pathways for admission. The United Nations General Assembly Summit for Refugees and Migrants on 19 September and the President of the United States Summit on Refugees on 20 September will provide opportunities for countries to show solidarity with refugee-hosting countries across the globe by giving Syrian and other vulnerable refugee groups legal opportunities to access safety and protection through resettlement and other pathways for admission.
“Resettling refugees, along with continued humanitarian funding, is a critical form of solidarity with refugee-hosting countries and it needs to be expanded worldwide,” said Pitterman.
Source: www.unhcr.org
BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer The 10,000th Syrian refugee arrived in the U.S. this afternoon, fulfilling President Obama’s pledge announced last year. The Obama Administration set the goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees within the 2016 fiscal year, which was achieved a month ahead of schedule. “This achievement is a testament to the hard work … Continued
By Katie Zezima Washington Post INDIANAPOLIS — After a terrorist attack in Paris last year carried out in part by Islamist terrorists who masqueraded as migrants, Gov. Mike Pence directed all state agencies to halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees here in Indiana. Pence is now running on the Republican presidential ticket with Donald Trump, who has called for … Continued
By Perry Stein The Washington Post Amr Arafa is photographed at his apartment in Washington. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) Amr Arafa doesn’t pay attention to any incendiary rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims playing out on the 2016 election stage. The 34-year-old from Egypt thinks immigration is about more than politics: It’s about … Continued
The Guardian In a video filmed by the Lajee Center, children in Bethlehem thank fans of Celtic Football Club for their recent donations to charities based in Palestine. Celtic supporters have raised more than £130,000 for charities in the region in an attempt to match an impending Uefa fine for displaying Palestinian flags at a … Continued
By Joe Cote
SNHU.edu
Bara Alkafil ’16 was just five when a relief organization flew her family out of the Middle East and to America, but she has a few clear, strong memories of that time. Some of them are even beautiful.
She remembers the sky. Having fled Saddam Hussein’s reign in Iraq, her family was eventually housed in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia along the Iraqi border. The mud building had thin metal roofs over the bedrooms, but what served as a common room was open to the sky. Alkafil sometimes slept there and recalls too many stars to even remember which ones she had already counted. “I was old enough to remember certain things. I would remember some of the good moments,” said Alkafil, now a Dearborn, Mich., resident. “The sky was unbelievable. The atmosphere was so clear. It was not polluted.”
But the good moments were few. “There was nothing else that was beautiful about living as a refugee,” she said.
Her family’s journey from being a target of the government, because they were Shia Muslims in Hussein’s Iraq, to Southern New Hampshire University and the completion of her online degree in criminal justice almost defies logic. But Alkafil’s journey isn’t over. Right now, even she doesn’t know where it ends.
Flight
By Alkafil’s estimation, families like hers were at war with Hussein and the brutal dictatorship he imposed on the country for three decades by the time she was born in 1989. Anger at Saddam helped fuel an uprising against his government in the northern and southern regions of the country, according to a policy brief issued by the Migration Policy Institute in 2003, ahead of America’s second invasion of Iraq. In March 1991, Saddam appointed his cousin, Ali Hasan Majid – who was already reviled for his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish citizens – to be in charge of the government’s response in the Shi’ite-dominated south of Iraq.
“The revenge was characteristically brutal with public executions, bombarding of city centers, and wholesale destruction of homes and mosques,” according to the policy brief. Some estimates put the number of southern Iraqi killed from March to September 1991 at 200,000, according to the brief.
Alkafil’s family lived in Basra in the country’s southeast region near the Persian Gulf and the borders of Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The family found itself on what she described as a government-maintained kill list. When an uncle was killed, the rest of the Alkafil family fled with the tens of thousands of other citizens. The rebellions were crushed. Somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 Shi’ites escaped to Iran. Another 37,000 were displaced to Saudi Arabia.
Alkafil was 2 years old in 1991 when her family made its way, on foot, to neighboring Saudi Arabia, which for the Shi’ite Alkafil family was something akin to jumping from the fire to the frying pan. The Saudi army first brought the refugees to a government building where they were detained. Alkafil doesn’t remember the trip, but her mother and others told stories later – how city residents spit and cursed at the refugees and threw their shoes at them, a sign of great disrespect in many Middle Eastern cultures. “It was just complete hate,” Alkafil said.
Eventually it was decided the refugees, thousands of them, would be housed in an encampment in the desert along the border of the two countries called Rafha, where they spent the next four-and-a-half years. A collection of mud houses was erected and, in time, neighborhoods of sorts formed. The Red Cross brought food and water but conditions were still horrible, Alkafil said. There wasn’t enough to eat. She remembers her mother picking lice out of her hair and then killing them with kerosene. “It was just a desert. Nobody lived there,” she said. “It’s not a life anyone wanted to live.”
American workers began to come to the camp. It was then the young Alkafil began hearing about America. Compared to her life up until then, it quite literally sounded like heaven, enough that when a Baltimore-based relief organization, World Relief, arranged for the Alkafil family to immigrate to the United States, Alkafil thought she was escaping hell. “I was like, ‘I’m getting out of hell and getting into heaven,'” she said. The family flew into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on June 20, 1995. Alkafil was 5 and not only remembers the family’s arrival but still can’t adequately describe it. “The feeling, I can never even begin to explain it. Just – life was different,” she said.
Adjusting
It’s difficult to overstate how much life improved for Alkafil and her family after leaving the Saudi desert. As she put it, it was when they were able to begin dreaming of something more than the next good meal, to plan for something other than basic survival. “Life is just – I can’t even explain it. I was living in fear, like we were going to die,” Alkafil said. “Now we start dreaming. We start going to school. We start living like human beings.”
Workers from World Relief continued their support of the Alkafil family as they settled into life in the United States. The agency helped the family apply for government assistance, helped them get necessary immunizations and walked them through enrolling the young Alkafils in school. She remembers two women in particular, a woman named Claire and another named Lisa, who would visit the family often and bring them food and share meals with the extended Alkafil family. One of them still works for the organization and stays in touch with family members who remained in the Atlanta area, Alkafil said.
But there were still many challenges. Alkafil wasn’t used to even basic aspects of life in Western civilization, especially indoor plumbing. The language, of course, was foreign as well. Her mother and sister were stared at and questioned for wearing hijabs in the Southern heat. It sometimes felt like a third rejection, Alkafil said. Her family had fled for their lives in Iraq, clawed a basic level of survival in the Saudi refugee camp and felt adrift in a foreign land in America. “We struggled because it was just a different kind of lifestyle. It was a good one, but it was so hard,” she said. “Sometimes we felt like there was never a place for us. When I get emotional, it’s because it’s so hard living in a world where you feel like you don’t belong because you’re different.”
Dearborn
Somewhere along the way, Alkafil’s father, Jafer Alkafil, learned about Dearborn, which has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the country, along with the largest mosque in the United States. About one-third of the city’s roughly 95,000 residents are Arab, Muslim or both.
“The city is just amazing, honestly,” Alkafil said. “It’s exactly who we are. We are Arab-Americans and this was the perfect place to grow up.”
Where once Alkafil’s life consisted of no more than surviving the day, she now is able to create goals – and she speaks passionately about what she hopes to achieve. They’re goals that she’s held for a long time, nearly as long as she can remember. While Alkafil isn’t exactly sure what she will do next, in some ways her goals haven’t changed – and now with her online degree in criminal justice, she can begin making them a reality. Alkafil has a drive to help people, particularly those who have been displaced as she was. Watching the current refugee crisis in Syria and Europe is difficult. She wants to become a lawyer some day, though law school is not in the cards for now with three young children. “You always want to give something back. I want to give back to someone like me who struggled in the Syrian war,” she said. “I got to live the American dream, and I wish everyone gets to live their dream. I never gave up on my dream. I wanted to finish school.”
Alkafil said one of her “biggest opportunities” was the chance to enroll at SNHU, which was able to accept all of the 90 undergraduate credits she had already earned and finish her online degree in criminal justice. “The school was exactly what I needed to finish my degree,” she said. “The flexibility of attending class whenever I wanted was the highlight of my whole degree and it was the reason behind what kept my momentum going.”
Alkafil said one of the most positive experiences she had at SNHU were classes taught by active-duty and retired police officers. “Whenever they discussed what happens in the real world, it made me want to learn more about law enforcement,” she said. “Every time I had an officer as a teacher, I knew it was going to be a ‘good’ semester.”
She chose criminal justice, she said, because it will allow her to help people the way she and the rest of her family were helped so many years ago. “It is because of people’s ability to help one another and serve justice (that) I am no longer a refugee and (am) a citizen of the greatest country in the world,” she said.
Having earned her online degree in criminal justice, Alkafil said she wants to earn a graduate degree and someday work for the United Nations, perhaps as a human resources officer in Iraq. “I would love to improve Iraq with the help of the UN. I know that is very difficult but not impossible,” she said. “It is because of the efforts of the United Nations that refugees are protected. The UN serves as the court of the world, continuously striving to protect (human) rights.”
It was SNHU, Alkafil said, that gave her the opportunity to begin down the road to that dream, starting with her online degree in criminal justice. “I knew I needed to go to school.” she said. “The school really provided me with an opportunity no school could have. The instructors, the timing, just everything.”
Now, sometimes Alkafil thinks about just how drastically her life has changed. Thousands of miles from the refugee camp where she spent such difficult years as a young child, on a recent Sunday she was outside the home she owns with her husband of eight years gardening with her three daughters.
“I’m so, so grateful. I can’t even explain to you. I’m just blessed. I’m just blessed to have this lifestyle and it makes me want to help so many people and not just work for the paycheck,” she said. “It just makes me think that life has so much more to offer. I believe that in some way, you should give back.”
For Alkafil, an online BS in Criminal Justice was one part of her path to doing just that.
Source: www.snhu.edu
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