Iraqi Refugees in Arizona
Many Families Find Adjustment Tough, Even Though the Southwest Reminds Them of Home

By Omar Fekeiki
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, November 8, 2007

TUCSON - After escaping death threats in a town north of Baghdad, Nadhum Ali al-Hasnawi and his family landed in the United States six weeks ago as refugees, hoping to build a new life for themselves. But since its arrival, the family has rarely left their apartment.

"It is like Iraq all over again," said Hasnawi's wife, Buthaina Hassoun, 28. "There, we were under house arrest; and here, we are under house arrest, too."

Although they consider themselves fortunate, given that there are hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis awaiting resettlement outside of their country, life here has not been easy. They have to navigate an alien city, where they do not speak the language and do not know the culture. Their children have had trouble understanding lessons and making friends at their new school.

"We are strangers in this country," Hasnawi said.

The Hasnawi family is part of a vanguard, among 34 Iraqi Muslims and Christians who arrived in Tucson in August and September as refugees. They are among the 1,600 Iraqi refugees that the United States has resettled. That number is far short of the 7,000 the Bush administration promised in February to settle by the end of September, a figure it later lowered to 2,000.

Like the Cuban, Vietnamese, Laotian and Sudanese refugees before them, some of the Iraqis are going through a difficult adjustment period, feeling disoriented, alone and even abandoned by the social service agency that is supposed to serve them. They do acknowledge that, whatever their travails, they would not trade them for the difficulties of life in Iraq itself.

"At least, now, we are not worried about the children," said Fawzi Khazraji, 42, who was a car dealer. "At least they'll have a bright future, and we'll have a normal life."

Before the U.S. invasion, Hasnawi, 37, a Shiite, worked as an upholsterer and lived with his wife and three children in Taji, a predominantly Sunni town north of Baghdad.

With the escalation of sectarian violence, he and his family decided to hide in their house, leaving it only for emergencies or at night. Even those precautions did not help. Late last year, an armed man sprayed bullets into their house -- a common death threat. Having nowhere else to go in Iraq, the family fled to Lebanon, where they applied for resettlement through the United Nations' refugee program, and eventually ended up in Tucson.

Sometimes, the refugees joke that Tucson is too similar to Baghdad: flat, with high temperatures, wide streets and the same kind of trees. "This is not America that I've seen in the movies," said Bushra Abdulatif, 32, who arrived with her husband and two sons. "I want lots of mountains and snow."

The refugees have not heard news from Iraq since they arrived here because they do not have access to Arabic-language satellite television channels and they do not have Internet access. Most of them have spoken to their relatives in Iraq only once or twice since they arrived here.

To cope, they are socializing as they did in Iraq: They gather every night at someone's apartment and exchange memories, over tea and pastry. Although the Iraqi refugees in Tucson met for the first time when they arrived, they have become fast friends. They swap displacement stories and listen to Iraqi music from the CDs they brought with them.

Abdulatif's eldest son, 7-year-old Abdullah, started school two weeks ago. On the first day, he came home crying. "I don't understand what they say," he told his mother, complaining that he had to mime to make himself understood. A while later, his classmates got tired of trying to communicate with him. But he is proud that he is trying to learn English by himself. The few words he knows now are: "What's your name? Thank you. Zoo. Yes. No. This is," he proudly said out loud.

Speaking English is not a criterion in the refugees' resettlement process, said Tim Irwin, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency. With an increasing number of Iraqis flowing into neighboring countries and applying for resettlement, "we look into the vulnerability criteria," he said. Families with urgent medical needs or those whose lives have been directly threatened and have nowhere to go are a priority, he said.

"No Iraqi refugee should go back to Iraq in this situation, of course," he said, "but the majority are able to stay where they are."

When the Iraqi refugees arrive in the United States, they are sent to cities where there are other Arab or Muslim populations. Social service organizations are assigned to help them resettle.

"Refugees, in general, endure a tremendous cultural shock," said Janell Mousseau, a program director at the Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest, an Arizona nonprofit organization that helped to resettle the 34 Iraqis here. "They have a lot of adjusting to do in a short time."

The organization was asked by the State Department to find proper housing for the Iraq families, providing them basic supplies and helping them acquire Social Security numbers and food stamps. The group is paying the refugees' rent for three months. After that, the families will have to pick up the cost themselves.

Before they arrived here, the refugees said they were told by U.N. representatives that they could get jobs based on their professional qualifications. But they said they have now been told that they should work as hotel housekeepers, an occupation many of them have refused because they deem it degrading.

To add to their frustration, when the families arrived, they said they found their apartments missing beds, kitchen supplies, bedspreads and blankets.

To help with the resettlement, two Tucson residents, Christy Voelkel and Erin Simpson, organized a community collection effort to provide supplies to the refugees. They sent e-mails to members of their church and friends asking for donations. Last Saturday, they visited the families and handed out kitchen equipment, clothes, pillows and children's toys.

"I think of this stuff as encouragement," said Voelkel, a middle-school teacher, "to tell them that they are welcome in the community, that we appreciate what they've been through."