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Wednesday, September 05, 2001

By Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

In nearly every home Khadra Mohammed enters on her job, a charity-donated couch lines one wall, and five, six or seven children filter in to sit, leg along leg like thin little books on a sagging shelf. They are quiet and they smile demurely. Their parents nod like supplicants as Mohammed speaks to them -- in Arabic, in Somali, sometimes in English.

	Khadra Mohammed visits with the Ahmad family from Eritrea who are living in Whitehall. "These people are so vulnerable," she says of the refugees who have made it to the United States. (Franka Bruns, Post-Gazette Photos)

From house to house on her rounds of refugee families, she knows children who have been hit by stones, families whose loved ones have been gunned down before their eyes, children who cry in their sleep, mothers who suffer depression, fathers who feel downgraded in a wildly different culture.

"They are homesick and heartbroken," says Mohammed, a counselor for Family Resources Inc.

But they always smile for visitors.

Refugees are like refugee stories in the newspaper, they keep coming. They are the victims of a seemingly infinite source -- civil wars, terrorism, the torments of dictators and armed chaos. They have fled for their lives, running with the shirts on their backs and no passports, catching rides at night.

The International Rescue Committee claims that 35 million people are displaced around the world and that 80 percent are women and children. Most do not make it to the first world; many have lived in refugee camps for more than a decade.

From Sudan, Bosnia, Somalia, Pakistan, Ghana, Iraq, Liberia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Kenya, and others, the United States will admit 70,000 people this year. The banner year was 1980, when among 207,000 refugees, the largest number came from Vietnam.

Each year since 1996, between 70,000 and 85,000 refugees have settled in the United States, about 300 of them in the Pittsburgh area. This increase is tapping deeper into the well of money, time and know-how of social service agencies. Family Resources' International Outreach Project is the latest effort to fill the cracks. Mohammed staffs it alone, and could use more volunteers than her current four. Her goal is to serve 100 families by the end of her two-year grant. The project began in May and already she has 50 client families from 23 nations.

Catholic Charities Refugee Services Program and Jewish Family and Children's Service resettle refugees locally. The most intensive help comes in the first months, to find housing, jobs, access to social services, schools, English-language instruction and other essentials. When Catholic Charities' help begins to taper off, many families are managing well on their own, says Tony Turo, administrative director of the Catholic Charities program.

"The whole point is to help them acculturate into the Pittsburgh community," he said, "to use the services anyone else would."

In May, Family Resources launched the International Outreach Project, which aims to be one of those services, as a specialist in parent training and abuse prevention. The outreach project serves immigrants, the majority of them refugees. Mohammed said refugee families, who are automatically legal residents, are particularly vulnerable and are slower than other internationals to pull themselves out of distress.

"These people weren't prepared for this future," says Mohammed. "They don't know anything about civil rights, they had none. Kids sleeping on the floor is not a problem. Remember, they lived in refugee camps. Yet, this is third-world America."

Like lost campers, they still cannot find the trail-head of U.S. culture. They may take classes in English but they cannot go regularly without child care; they need English to negotiate child care, and they need English to read a bus schedule. In addition, a second language does not develop outside a classroom if you are isolated and afraid.

A Muslim who speaks several languages, Mohammed came to Pittsburgh to attend college. She was born in Yemen to Somali parents and was raised in the United Arab Emirates. She received a bachelor's degree in child development with a minor in religion and ethics from the University of Pittsburgh, and she, her Libyan husband and five children live in Carrick.

"I have always been interested in the disadvantaged," says Mohammed, who has previously counseled battered women. "These people are so vulnerable."

Mohammed visits client families several days a week, from three to six families each time, depending on the needs. Sometimes, she accompanies them to the hospital, to school, to a utility company.

She is most frustrated by these systems that are not prepared for dealing with new immigrants. Hospitals, courts, schools and social-service agencies should be providing interpreters or interpreted documents, she said.

One of her clients needs her teen-age sons to translate at the gynecologist's office, "and that's a terrible thing for a teen-age boy to have to do," says Mohammed. "Besides, they should have been in school.

"If you pay a fee for services, you should get the services, and part of that is knowing what you're getting. If people do not provide translation, they are not providing full service. People have to realize that as the world becomes more integrated, they are responsible for communicating with the people who come for service. You are slipping if you are not preparing for this."

Another client, Asraa Hamza, a new Iraqi mother, did not know she had to return to the hospital after her Caesarean to have the staples removed. No one told her in Arabic. A month after the baby was born, Mohammed visited the home, translated the letter from the hospital and had the woman en route for the procedure within the hour.

"People in the U.S. could not imagine being thrown to the winds by a government that would kill them," says Mohammed. "But if it were to happen, wouldn't they want to be treated with kindness and compassion in their new country?"

Troubles here, too

The Gulf War displaced 2 million people, but 10 years of terror in Iraq has followed. In a speech two years ago at the United Nations, David Scheffer, then ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, described Saddam Hussein's atrocities against political opponents, notably Kurds and people of the southern marshes, as war crimes. "The systematic criminal enterprise is undeniable and glares at anyone who cares to look closely at Iraq today," he said.

Scheffer's efforts "to corner Hussein and his regime within the rule of law" have dimmed with the Bush administration and its easing of sanctions against Iraq.

This would make Adil Algurairi's doe-eyed family of 12 lucky to be in Bloomfield, in a three-bedroom house where half the children sleep on pallets on the floor. Their home once was a store, with storefront windows now boarded up and almost no natural light entering the body of the house.

Adil was a taxi driver in Najaf, a holy city near the Euphrates River, when he fled with his wife and three children in 1991. Eighteen-year-old Hussein remembers getting up at night for the escape. He remembers the sounds of artillery. His father still speaks with bitterness of the tyrant who would have killed him for his resistance.

"I think if we stay there, someone get killed and that we cannot get much food," says Hussein, the oldest son who has been a surrogate adult for much of his childhood. "A friend says, 'Did you hear what's happening in Iraq?' and I say, 'I don't want to know, unless it's about my grandmother.' "

Like his 17-year-old brother, Adnan, he has repeated ninth grade twice. Adnan is repeating it for a third year, and Hussein is fighting to stay in school even though he is 18 and can be dismissed. Both boys say they are resented by some of their teachers. Both have missed many days of school over the years, often to shepherd small brothers and sisters, accompany their father on jobs and translate at doctor's appointments.

Adil, the only breadwinner, has been laid off from his pizza delivery job. He recently had surgery to remove kidney stones.

Khadra Mohammed wipes away a tear on Asraa Hamza's face after standing by as the Iraqi woman had staples removed after her Caesarean section. She did not know she needed the procedure until Mohammed translated a letter from the hospital.

Between 1991 and 1996 the family had lived in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, where five of the children were born. In 1997, Catholic Charities found them an apartment in Wilkinsburg. There, four boys beat up Adnan and threw rocks at Hussein. A rock was thrown through an upstairs window in the family's current home. Among his tormentors at Schenley High School, one threw a pizza at Adnan, a strapping boy who clenches his jaws as he says, "I don't know why, but I think they must not like Iraqi people."

Mohammed says the wheel-spinning life of this family is more worrisome than those of most of her clients, but they all have common needs. Paying bills, tending to educational schedules, even seeking solutions to inconveniences like a clogged drain do not come naturally, she says. "A lot of them not only don't know what a plunger is but wouldn't know where to get one."

The children are docile and formal in part because of past horrors. When Post-Gazette photographer Franka Bruns asked two of the Algurairi girls to stand for a photo, they backed up against a wall as if told they were going to be shot.

A brighter picture greets refugees who have settled in Prospect Park in Whitehall by the hundreds. They laud the Baldwin-Whitehall school system's response to them, and the collaborations, which include South Hills Interfaith Ministries, that are helping them on site, with day care and other services. But under the surface, beneath the good face that families put on, are appalling memories. Most households are led by women whose men either were killed or have been detained in camps.

Amina Hassan's husband was killed in Somalia in 1991. She took off walking two days and two nights, pregnant, with a 2-year-old and 1-year-old in tow. They made it to a refugee camp in Kenya, but not before she delivered her now-10-year-old son on the border. They lived in two camps before coming to Pittsburgh in April. She remarried in one of the camps and now awaits her husband's arrival; he was not on the list to leave with her.

While she and Mohammed talk, Fatuma, now 12, and Abdi, 11, watch "Teletubbies" on TV. The living room window is filled with stuffed animals, gifts from their arrival, but what they want is to go outside and roll on toys they have seen on TV.

"I love shoes that have wheels," says Fatuma, meaning Roller-blades.

"I like bike," says Abdi.

Not as hard as in Africa

Genevieve Taylor lives with the family fragments of many people killed. She fled Liberia with her niece, a nephew and several grandchildren after her husband and daughter were killed.

Taylor looks as if she has cried nonstop for years and has just stopped before we arrive at her home in Prospect Park, where one grandson is watching WQED Kids' Club.

At 55, Taylor has high blood pressure and needs work, but she says she wants to offer day care so she can be home when her grandchildren come from school.

Mohammed asks whether she refilled her medicine. Taylor hands her the little bottle and says she hasn't had a chance to go back to Mercy Hospital.

"You don't have to take these all the way to Mercy," Mohammed says, her voice filled with emotion. "You can take them to any pharmacy for refills."

"Oh," says Taylor. "I didn't know."

Mohammed grabs her hand and says, "That's OK!" She turns to Lincoln, 17, and asks, "How are you getting groceries?"

"Four buses," says Lincoln.

"There is one bus that can take you to the Foodland," she says. "And the same bus you take to Catholic Charities goes to the Strip District. It stops a few streets away, but you can get vegetables cheaper."

Taylor looks at Mohammed as if there are too many things to know.

"I know it's hard," says Mohammed. "But it's not as hard as it was in Africa."

"No," says Taylor emphatically.

Behind a rotating fan in the hot apartment, a plaque quotes from Psalm 91:4. On it is an outline of Africa: "He will cover you with his wings; you will be safe in his care; his faithfulness will protect and defend you."