Refugee, American-Style

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | March 9th, 2009 | No Comments »

“I still have family who is scattered,” says Kirk Stevens over lunch at the iconic Little Dizzy’s in New Orleans, 3 ½ years after the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina blew his family throughout the South.

“My family is scattered,” said a 75-year-old woman in Amman, Jordan, half a world away, 5 years after the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq sent her family scrambling. Her husband died during the first Gulf War. Her 3 adult children fled to Sweden and Jordan, her youngest committed suicide. “I brought nothing (except) the death certificates for my husband and son.”

“Refugee” became a politically charged word to describe the displaced Louisianans and Mississippians strewn throughout the south. How could an American be a “refugee” in his or her own country? Yet, we don’t blink when we use the neutered term “internally displaced refugees” to describe the 2 million Iraqis who have been forced from their family homes but don’t have the funds or the desire to leave their home country.

Perhaps the image of lines of people carrying scant Read the rest of this entry »

Locked Out of the Lower Ninth

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | March 6th, 2009 | No Comments »

“People in the Lower Ninth Ward know more about climate change and what it can do than [people] anywhere,” said Pam Dashiell, fighting a cold, “and they know it on an intrinsic level.” The co-director of the Lower Ninth Ward Center for Engagement and Development said the communities of the Lower Ninth Ward have a goal of being carbon neutral by 2030.

“We have more solar here than in any other part of the City. There were 17,000 people here, pre-levee breaks. We are projecting 15,000 prosperous, environmentally conscious, forward-looking people [will return].”

It’s been proven that global warming contributes to the Gulf of Mexico’s increasingly aggressive and frequent hurricanes. New Orleans’ environmental vulnerability is compounded by the debris and toxics Read the rest of this entry »

Rocky Start for Schoolchildren

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | March 4th, 2009 | No Comments »

“I don’t think they expected kids from this community to go to high school,” said Oscar Brown, a graduate of Carver High School. When the City of New Orleans produced its “master plan” to raise the hurricane-razed city into the 21st century, it entirely ignored the Ninth Ward – the largest of the City’s 17 wards – precluding the devastated community from receiving any federal rebuilding funds.
When the school district prepared its “master plan,” it omitted rebuilding the one high school in the Ninth Ward – leaving 3,000 high school students languishing. “But they do that all the time,” said Brown matter-of-factly.

The community fought back and now the high school will be rebuilt – eventually. But today, three and a half years after the levees broke, children are still being taught in temporary trailers.

New Orleans was broken long before the levees collapsed. Seventy percent of adults in Orleans Parrish did not read at a high school level, Read the rest of this entry »

Stillness in the Ninth Ward – Still

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | March 3rd, 2009 | No Comments »

There was nothing alive but the mold that marbled the walls and ceilings. No rats or roaches, just the intimate remnants of people’s lives: An upturned tricycle, intact figurines, a porn DVD.

Standing outside, I could smell the mold. “Imagine an entire city smelling like that. That’s what it was like right after Katrina,” Oscar Brown turned from the abandoned housing project. Front porches were tattooed with spraypainted symbols indicating the date each home was searched and the initials of the unit of the national guard that conducted the search – and the number of bodies discovered inside.

Brown toured 19 masters’ students from the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University and me through New Orleans’ Ninth Ward in preparation for our week of assisting with home rebuilding.

He pointed out the former police station, now closed and abandoned, mentioning that the National Guard’s last day securing the Ninth Ward was three days ago. Louisiana can no longer afford their services, said Brown. We saw no patrolling police during our five-hour tour.

Gone are small stores owned by members of the community. “We need businesses. We need banks,” said Marcia Peterson of the Divine Street Ministries, for whom Brown also works. “There’s no internet here. This is the only part of the City that has not rebuilt its basic services. When I moved back, I had to rethink and replan my life around when services are available.”

Indeed, as we drive throughout the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward, we see no neighborhood restaurants or bars, no shoe repair shops or dry cleaners, no little convenience marts. Only one grocery store remains, although we hear reports of a second opening “soon.”

“My wife and I just had a daughter,” Brown says in response to a question about access to health care. “The nearest was 45 minutes away.” Mortality rates in the Ninth Ward have tripled since Katrina, says Peterson. “They had to create a whole new section of the newspaper to deal with the obituaries.”

Hurricane Katrina hit August 28, 2005, displacing tens of thousands of people. Three and a half years later, less than half have returned home.

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All That You Heard That It Was

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | January 22nd, 2009 | No Comments »

I’ve never played an instrument, but I imagine performing in a world class orchestra might be similar to the feeling of being in the crowd at the Mall on the morning of Pres. Obama’s Inauguration. It was nothing I’ve ever experienced and I’m still having trouble defining the feeling of being part of something larger than the sum of its parts. The feeling of being part of something more grand and more noble than I could possibly experience alone. The feeling of an electricity that charged me and everyone around me to be better, kinder, taller. The feeling that connected me to humanity and made me want to be connected.

The crowds were crushing, as you’ve heard, the weather was biting, the chaos was, well, chaotic. But I will never forget the feeling of being exalted, as I imagine musicians must feel when their orchestra crescendos, time after time during the small encounters with people who had come from all over America to be part of America.

Maybe this is what soldiers feel – that sense of being a small part of something so much larger than you could ever have imagined, of having pride well in your chest until you surprise yourself by being near tears.

Then, of course, there was the drag of the pure logistics: It was really friggin cold, Read the rest of this entry »

Mind the Gap

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | July 22nd, 2008 | 3 Comments »

There’s a poetic Spanish phrase that means “the space that is between” to describe those moments when one foot is uprooting from the past but the next foot is not quite planted in the future.

Intersticio.

The space that is between.

And so it is with the children I interview at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s summer camp outside Damascus, Syria. Summer is a magical intersticio for most children, but these children have wider gaps to mind. They are 10- and 11-year-old Iraqi refugees whose predominant childhood memories are of preparing for war, of escaping war. Of war itself.

They tell their stories in monosyllables, in monotones, through expressionless faces neither reluctant nor regretful. They answer every question patiently, offering nothing more than what is asked, usually with an indifferent shrug of their shoulders.

Suheila, a 10-year-old beauty who steals glances at me at every opportunity, breaks into a wide smile when I catch her staring at me. She seems to like my attention. Read the rest of this entry »

Submit Your Own Photo Caption!

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | July 14th, 2008 | 4 Comments »

OK, here I am on the back of a bouncy camel at 5:30 in the morning, cruising through Palmyra’s magical ruins, hugging for dear life the waist of a chain-smoking flirt, wondering if I will be able to walk a straight line again. Submit a caption for this photo!
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“No Way Are We Leaving Iraq”

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | July 14th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

“There’s an undercurrent of desperation,” says an articulate Ben Bascom, words spilling out faster than I can write. “As soon as [Iraqi refugees] learn I speak a little Arabic, they ask, ‘Can you sponsor me?’ ‘Can you find someone for me to marry?’ They’re not beggars, they’re not used to feeling this way. They’re just like you and me. How can they not ask?

“Every person, it breaks my heart.”

The 23-year-old linguistics major’s expressive eyes widen, reflecting his convictions. “The guy who’s cooking our food. I want to help him. He can’t afford to put food on his own family’s table, but he’s cooking all this food for us.

“I want to help these people.”

He fingers the prayer beads he was given 2 weeks ago for his birthday, celebrated with an international group of activists in Damascus for the summer to assist Iraqi refugees, study Arabic and immerse themselves in Syrian culture.

“One thing I learned,” he says of his month with the Middle East Fellowship (www.MiddleEastFellowship.org), “[I had been] opposed to the war in Iraq, but I’d started buying into the media line that America was losing the war.

“But, we’ve won. Read the rest of this entry »

Southern Californian Finds Iraqi Relatives in Damascus

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | July 14th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Sant Sanati had never been out of North American before coming to Syria to assist Iraqi refugees with the Middle East Fellowship (www.MiddleEastFellowship.org). The son of Iraqi parents who was born and raised in San Diego, he never expected to meet a distant cousin while volunteering at the Greek Orthodox Church’s Iraqi refugee program.

“It’s weird to be on a summer trip and run into someone related to you. The killings, death around them, bodies everywhere, not wanting their kids to through war…

“I don’t wish this on anyone, let alone my family.”

Milad Bassel Metti, a handsome, observant 25-year-old, fled Iraq two years ago this month. He works at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate assisting other refugees with food handouts, vocational training and school tutoring programs run by the church.

“God knows when he’ll leave,” Sant says of his cousin. “He wants to go. He can’t wait. He wants to go somewhere where he can settle down and get a form of stability.”

“My dad has been running a refugee service program for years. I never really approved because he didn’t bring in income. Now, I really realize what he does and why he does it. It’s like ‘wow!’

“I hope I can make a difference. I want to follow in my dad’s footsteps.

“We’ve heard a lot of stories. They did get to me. So many people, their lives were threatened. I mean, I’ve never met anyone whose daughter was kidnapped,” he says of an Iraqi artist who addressed our small group one evening. “She was a beautiful little girl when I saw her. I was like, wow, how could someone even think about putting a price on someone’s head like that?

“What are you going to say?

“What do you tell her?”

[For more information about the Middle East Fellowship’s Damascus Summer Encounter, visit www.MiddleEastFellowship.org. For fun blogs on this year’s Encounter, visit www.SyriaSummer.org/blog.]

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There’s No Place Like Home

By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | July 13th, 2008 | No Comments »

Her gold sparkly shoes remind me of Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

There’s no place like home keeps running through my mind as I attempt to interview the slight 10-year-old in her school principal’s claustrophobic office. In a valiant attempt to ease the heat, an overhead fan jerks as nervously as the fingers in the girl’s lap.

But there is no easing the tension. “They told her father, if you don’t leave the country, we will kill you. They cut his finger. The Americans cut his finger,” the translator, a psychologist at the school, repeats, somewhat confused.

“They cut off his finger?” I ask, hoping I’m equally confused.

The girl points to her right index finger, slicing across the bottom knuckle.

Where do you go from here in an interview? We’d already established she was forced out of the third grade 9 months ago when her family fled Kulkush in northern Iraq a week after her father was maimed and that she likes geography.

I look down at her sequined shoes, and learn they’d been given to her in Syria at a church giveaway program. I notice the bald spots where they’ve lost their luster and the worn threads that struggle to hold them together.
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