Throwback Thursday: A refugee story
Throwback Thursday: A refugee story
Quad Cities area refugees embrace work ethic, grateful for a life of peace and freedom
Author’s Note: Immigrants have been in the new a lot these past two weeks, thanks to the barely veiled racist rumors created by J.D. Vance and amplified by presidential candidate Donald Trump about Haitian immigrants allegedly dining on pets in Ohio. What has frustrated me about so much of the conversation is that combatants on both sides of the political issue act as if this is a new story. In fact, immigrants fleeing war, poverty and social unrest in their home countries only to be castigated and vilified by opportunistic politicians here is a tale as old as the Republic. In this Throwback Thursday column, I share a story I wrote for the Quad City Times “Getting By, Getting Lost” series that profiled a number of newly arrived immigrants who came to the QC for a shot at a new life. I felt it would be a good time to remind people that the vast, vast majority of immigrants want one thing: a shot at the American Dream. This story first appeared in the April 24, 2005 issue of the Times.
By any conventional American measure, Eddie Lusenie is not a rich man.
He works long hours hand-grinding metal plates at a Bettendorf steel factory and returns home to the upstairs flat of a small house in Moline where nearly every household item once belonged to someone else.
His wife, Charity, back from a day scrubbing dishes in the kitchen of the Belgian Vilage, greets him most nights wearily.
Lusenie may perfectly fit the definition of “working poor” but he knows better than most how relative a term poor is.
“Real wealth, to me, is to live in good health, no trouble, no disturbances in my life,” he said. “When you have peace in your life, that is wealth. I can have money, but not have peace, and that is not wealth. I don’t just want to accumulate things to myself, I want to help people.”
One learns a little perspective when suddenly in an unfamiliar city in a country only seen on TV, with nothing but two suitcases, a wife and the contact name of a case worker assigned to help build a new life from scratch.
That’s where Lusenie was last October, a long six years after fleeing his native Sierra Leone. Several of the years were spent in an excruciating state of inactivity in a refugee camp in neighborhing Ghana.
“Living in the camp was very frustrating,” he said. “My goal was to come out and better my life. It wasn’t until my day of departure that I knew I was coming to Illinois.”
His story sounds extreme, but it’s quite typical of the nearly 200 refugees - most from Africa recently - whom the always inventive case workers at World Relief help resettle in the Illinois Quad Cities each year.
“They come here with nothing but desire for a better life and a safe life,” said Vicki Gehrke, the agency’s employment manager, who has the task of finding jobs for the newly arrived refugees, most with only a high school or less education and little English. “They don’t have any job leads, they don’t have any place to live. But a lot of them ask right away, the first day, ‘When can I go to work?’”
They find jobs packaging, grinding metal, cutting tubes, assembling work boots, making mattresses. Some clean hotel rooms, some clean dishes. And many do it with a dedication and enthusiasm unmatched by American peers.
“I’ve had refugees start with five other people in their group who aren’t refugees, and by the time they come to orientation, one person hasn’t filed their documents, another comes an hour late, and one leaves early,” Gehrke said. “Out of five people, three Americans have buzzed out and two weeks later, the fourth quits, and my person is still there because they want to work.”
Working Hard
Day by day, hour by hard hour, Deng Malual and wife Rosa from Sudan have seen that work pay off in the four years they’ve been in Moline.
They still live in a cramped apartment in the Springbrook Courts public housing project, where 4-month-old baby Ayen’s squalls bleed through the walls. But the furniture inside is now theirs - not the hand-me-downs provided by World Relief - and Malual has a nice color television and stereo.
“I came from a bad place,” he says of war-torn, ethnically and religiously divided Sudan. “All we had was some clothes, no money, nothing. It’s like being born, starting from the beginning. I just wanted to start a new life.”
He does piecework and machinery operation at Norcross Safety Products in Rock Island. He started out making $9 an hour and now makes a bit more. Rosa cleaned rooms at the Sheraton Four Points until shortly before the baby came.
The couple - whose primarly language is Arabic - know they must master English to move up the rungs of the working world. Both have regularly attended English as a Second Language classes at Black Hawk College, though Rosa is on a break now to care for Ayen.
The classes make for grueling days, Malual said. The classes meet four times a week from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. His workday at Norcorss generally runs from 5 a.m. to about 3 p.m.
“If you want something here and you work hard, you can get it,” Malual said. “But in Sudan, if you need something and you work hard, you can’t get it. They are just going to say ‘No, you cant get it.’ I plan on living in the United States. This is my home now.”
Though Lusenie plans to return to his native Sierra Leone, his views echo Malual’s.
“You have to work to make ends meet,” he said. “Although it’s difficult, you have to work to pay the bills and do other things. The wealth I see here, the difference between the poor and the rich, is not that much. The average man here can afford a car. In Africa, if you have a car, you are rich. One of my goals is to go to college. If I go back to my country later, I want to be able to help.”
Expanding Gap
Ann Grove, executive director of World Relief, appreciates Lusenie’s heart and drive. However, she sees a bit different picture when it comes to distribution of wealth in America than he does.
“It seems to me that the gap between the haves and have-nots in America is growing more extreme,” she said. “Unless the people who are intentional about learning what it’s like to live on the other side, it’s not going to change. When people understand that refugees have already had to do incredible things just to get here or to keep their children alive, it’s hard not to respect them.”
Gehrke, who not only helps find jobs, but coaches, trains and encourages the fragile new arrivals, is often stunned by their resiliency. Their gratitude for basics and appreciation for just a sliver of opportunity touch her.
“What is the American dream?” she asks. “For our families, it’s safety. One man, we asked him how he likes his apartment. He said, ‘It’s great. I haven’t heard any gunshots.’ For them, it’s being safe, being able to eat and being able to get up and go to work each day.”
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Great column!
Something I learned last year—refugees are provided three months of support from agencies once they are settled in the U.S. Occasionally, that can be extended to 9 months.
I want more people to consider what it'd be like to be forced from your country, to spend years in limbo in refugee camps having no clue where you will end up (or if you'll ever get to leave), come to a new country where you don't speak the common language and rarely understand how it operates, only have access to low-wage jobs, get your children started in a new school that is incredibly different from what they've known, often encounter hostile and racist people—only to have support for 3 months before you're on your own.