Making a Home in Cincinnati

It has now been a little more than two years since we formally moved from Spain to Cincinnati to call it home. Mostly it has been pleasant, but there have been a few rough spots. Nothing, however, as rough as the time the Alhamoud family has had since their home in Syria was leveled by bombs in 2011and they lived first with grandparents, and then in a refugee camp, before coming to the United States in October 2015.

In a three-part feature, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported this week on the first Syrian refugee family to find its way to Cincinnati to be resettled. They had received a call from the United Nations in July 2015, while they were in a camp in Jordan, asking whether they would come to the US. Yes, said the father, thinking primarily of the possibility of a peaceful future for his children. It took more than a year of vetting before they set foot on the plane that took them from Jordan to Rome to Miami and then to Greater Cincinnati International Airport, in northern Kentucky.

The Enquirer story talks about the life they had in Syria before the war, the loss of their home and numerous family members, and the effort that they have made over the past year to adjust to life in Cincinnati: for all to learn English; for the father to find a good employer; for the mother to learn to care for her family in a very different environment and help them and herself heal from the terrors from which they have tried to flee; for the children to go to school and make friends; for everyone to manage to live with an uncertain future.

My UU community has been working to be connected with a refugee family to "adopt" for the past year, and this week I thought that we were close to finding one. But after we gathered commitment from at least five members to be actively involved in providing English language tutoring, transportation to grocery stores and medical appointments, help with children's homework, assistance in preparing for job interviews, and providing a general welcoming presence and orientation to the community, we learned that we were too late for the two families coming in the next two weeks. It's a good thing, I suppose, that there are more people wanting to adopt refugee families than there are families, or is it? There is not a dearth of families needing resettlement; there just are few coming to the US and to Cincinnati. And we are entering an era in which there may be even fewer coming across the Atlantic than there have been.

Nevertheless I expect there will be some more refugees and some more chances. I recommended the article "Finding Home" to the refugee support group this morning for background reading, because of the illuminating picture it gives about the resilience of refugees and the many people and efforts required to help someone make a new home for themselves.