International Rescue Committee: Charlottesville Plays Host to the World's Lost and Forgotten
Brian Wimer, C-Ville Weekly, July 9-15, 2002

"Where are you going," she asked.

"God willing," were the last words she heard.

"I didn't hear the rest," she says, "because he was running."

Today, Amari and her husband, Victor, live in an apartment on Michie Street. Behind her are the Ghana refugee camp, the sadness, the long days and nights of exile. She says, "I thank you Lord, you delivered us." Like hundreds of other refugees in Charlottesville, Amari has had a new beginning.

"Who are we going to rescue," asks Charlottesville's International Rescue Committee director, Susan Donovan. The task is daunting. Today, worldwide, 14.9 million people are forced to live outside their homelands, while 22 million people are internally displaced within their own countries. This year, potentially 70,000 will come to the United States. One hundred and fifty will end up in Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

"I've worked for IRC in L.A., Seattle and Thailand. ...Charlottesville is Nirvana compared to those places," says Donovan. "Here, you can put a refugee to work and enroll their kid in school, and that night at the grocery they could run into their employer and their child's teacher. It makes for an entirely different integration process."

In Charlottesville, the IRC has settled more than 400 refugees from Afghanistan, Burma, Bosnia, Congo, Croatia, Kosovo, Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Togo. "That's really a small number," says Donovan. Harrisonburg, a prime destination because of its poultry plants, hosts nearly 6,000 refugees.

Here, refugees find work at businesses like LA Lacy, a local plumbing contractor, the Omni Hotel, Farmington Country Club and the UVA hospital. "Once employers and landlords take a chance [on a refugee], they call us again," says Donovan. "Their work ethic is great."

Donovan says the refugees who settle here make the most of what they're given. "They value freedom and opportunity and the ability to live in peace in a way that we cannot even begin to understand or appreciate," she says. "When September 11 happened, it was so traumatizing for all of those folks. They've all been there, up close and personal."

One day, Donovan hopes Charlottesville will become the premier resettlement site for refugees in the United States. The exchange, she says, is reciprocal. "Charlottesville has everything to offer refugees, and refugees have everything to offer this community."

"The soccer team at Charlottesville High School has been revolutionized by our clients," she says with a laugh.

On a more serious note, Donovan points out that refugees are not victims, but survivors. "The people who are bagging your groceries might have been in a concentration camp," she says.

Here are some of their stories.

Sudan

"I haven't seen my mother for 18 years," says Mohamed Adam Yahya, looking very alone in his IRC apartment on Angus Road. He has been in Charlottesville just three weeks. "My parents there are suffering so much," he says. "Very sad. Sad times."

Yahya is Massaleit, a black Darfur Muslim of Western Sudan. He is one of 350,000 Massaleit who have fled the militias of Sudan's ruling National Islamic Front. "It is a war against our people," he says. The NIF, which came to power in a 1989 military coup, has increasingly used Arab militias to raze oil-rich areas inhabited by non-Arab groups.

When Yahya wrote to international organizations about their situation, he says his name was added to a blacklist. He is pursued, he says, by spies. His sister was raped, he claims, as punishment for his activism.

But that hasn't silenced him. In Cairo, where he studied Islamic philosophy and earned money to support his family, Mohamed and other Sudanese intellectuals dubbed themselves Spokesmen of the Representatives of the Massaleit Community in Exile. They sent open letters to whomever would listen, documenting "The Hidden Slaughter and Ethnic Cleansing in Western Sudan." Fourteen killed in one attack on a weekly market, here; 150 huts set ablaze, there. In the village of Kasia, he says, "They caught a woman who had given birth to twins. The two babies were removed from their mother...and lowered into boiling water with their heads down. These are the facts."

Yahya likes Charlottesville, but his heart remains in Sudan. "Maybe I could find friends here," he says. "But it is difficult to replace my family. I get feeling very sad when I think about my parents. It's been a very long time."