by Helen Thorpe
Yasir immediately signed Ebtisam up for food stamps, Medicaid, and TANF. As a single parent with three dependents, the monthly assistance she got from food stamps was $649, and her income from TANF was $561. This was a problem; it was virtually impossible to find shelter in the Denver area for so small a sum. Yasir and Whitney spoke about Ebtisam’s situation to their colleague Eh Klo, a refugee from Burma who was Lutheran’s housing expert. She solved real estate riddles cheerfully, digging into each situation with relish as if the low-income-meets-no-affordable-housing equations were Sudoku puzzles. Within a few weeks, Eh Klo obtained for Ebtisam a lease on the two-bedroom apartment at Pine Creek, which was going to cost $825 per month, and she found a rare, hard-to-secure housing voucher from a nonprofit that ran an affordable housing program. The voucher would cover 70 percent of Ebtisam’s rent for two years. This would buy Ebtisam a critical window of time. She would earn more money after she landed a job, but in the meantime she could get by with TANF, thanks to the voucher. Collectively, the family’s “welcome money,” the cash stipend she and her daughters received from the federal government, amounted to $4,200. Yasir used most of that to cover their rent for September, October, and November. He also spent $110 on food, $50 on kitchen supplies, and $70 on furnishing the apartment, and the surplus was given to Ebtisam.
The employment specialists at Lutheran felt that Ebtisam should start working as soon as possible. Not only did her family need the income, but having a routine would also help combat her depression. Refugees entered the fast-paced American economy at the low end and worked their way up; the sooner Ebtisam started working, the higher her earnings would climb by the time the voucher expired, Yasir told her.
At times, as she attempted to look for a job and tried to learn English, and felt unsuccessful at both, Ebtisam grew disheartened. Once, she called Yasir and told him maybe coming to the United States had been a mistake. Maybe she should move back to Turkey. “Of course, your situation is really hard,” Yasir told her. “I’m not blaming you. To see you like this, it’s really hard for me, as a man. But here you can change your life, step by step. You have the most important thing, which is housing. You have time right now to learn English, and to watch your daughters. In the future, you can find a job and you can save money. We already pay the rent for you for two years—that’s really good.” Yasir talked with Ebtisam until she agreed that resettling in the United States was beneficial for her daughters, because she wanted them to obtain an education.
Yasir made several home visits, to ensure Ebtisam got established. And she did. It was just that things kept happening over and over again that proved unsettling, and then she decomposed emotionally. It was almost tidal, the way the flat beach of Ebtisam’s interior got scoured by fear, frightening memories from the past surfacing and getting strewn all over the smooth sand of her mind, anytime the waves got rough. That was the condition in which I found her on that day when Jakleen would not listen and the exterminators were saying she had to leave the house so that they could spray the cupboards.
* * *
When Nabiha and I returned one week later, we found Ebtisam back on her feet, standing at the stove in the small galley kitchen, cooking fresh spinach. I noticed that Ebtisam had taken a wooden hutch out of her bedroom and positioned it opposite the front door, and carefully arranged on the shelves a set of old rose-colored glasses, given to her by someone at her church. We told her the hutch looked nice there. I had brought her some potatoes, and we laughed about that, because it was a peculiar thing to bring. It turned out that “potatoes” is one of the words that Arabic, Spanish, and English have in common. In Arabic, potatoes is albtatis, but the way Ebtisam said it, she dropped the al, and it was just btatis, which sounds exactly like the (related) Spanish word, patatas. One day, when I was trying to explain Ireland to Ebtisam, I said in Spanish, “Patatas, patatas, patatas, patatas.” Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. We ate them at every meal whenever I visited the farmhouse where my mother grew up; feeding a large Irish family plus all the farmworkers always involved a big pile of potatoes.
That day, Ebtisam was wearing pink leggings and a black hoodie. She said that she had to wash the spinach well because it was organic and there was a lot of sand. Then she told us with pride that she had just moved up to a higher level in her English classes at a local technical college. Once she got all of the leafy greens into the saucepan, Ebtisam came over and said in English, “Last, next—I very tired.” Then she turned to Nabiha for the right words and apologized in Arabic for her dark mood on our previous visit. In a cheerful tone, she invited us to stay, saying she was making a traditional Iraqi meal, spinach soup with beef. I wanted to try the soup, so I accepted on the condition that some other evening she allow me to take her out for a meal. Nabiha and I crowded in at the round table, along with Ebtisam, Mariam, Jakleen, and Lulu. Then Anker, their Kurdish friend, turned up, and Ebtisam fed him as well.
“I’m glad to be having dinner with you,” I told Mariam. It was about 5 P.M.
“This is lunch!” Mariam said.
She explained that to them, dinner meant an even later meal, one they would have at 8 or 9 P.M. I remembered that we had done the same thing in Ireland, two evening meals, although we called the second one “tea.”
I tried asking Jakleen about why she wore the hijab, but she didn’t want to say. Then I asked the girls about religion. I knew that Ebtisam attended Christian services, and Jakleen had described herself to me as a Muslim. But I didn’t know what Mariam considered her faith to be.
“I like Mary, I like Jesus,” Mariam said.
“Are you Muslim or Christian?”
“Just normal,” Mariam replied. “I am okay, no matter what religion.”
Ebtisam handed us each a bowl of soup. She put out a tray of flatbread, which was a lot like pita, except triangular in shape. In the soup, I could taste the lighter flavors of lemon and cilantro, mixed with the hearty taste of beef. I said I loved the soup and Ebtisam wanted to know was I just saying that? I said no, I really loved it. Ebtisam told us this soup was one of the healthiest dishes we could eat; it was filled with iron and minerals. I could see she had been strengthened by the act of cooking. The tide had come back in and smoothed out the beach.
Previously, Ebtisam had recounted the family’s journey from Iraq to Syria. That evening, as we enjoyed the soup, she told us about their life in Turkey and their journey from that country to the United States. Anker had made the same pilgrimage. He was originally from the area around Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq that is home to large numbers of Kurds; as it turned out, Anker knew one of Nabiha’s cousins. Because he had worked with the U.S. Army, he had received threats and had fled to Turkey. Ebtisam and Anker reminisced about the years they had spent in that country, as part of the vast community of Iraqi expatriates who sought shelter there. First Iraqis had crowded into Turkey, then millions of Syrians had followed. Of all the countries in the world, Turkey was hosting the largest number of refugees from Syria—more than 2.7 million.
Turkey had felt much safer than Syria, Ebtisam told us. But it had been a hard transition, because Turkey was more expensive. Ebtisam had paid only $150 in rent in Jaramana; in Kırşehir, the Turkish city where she and the girls relocated, her rent jumped to $300. Like most refugees in Turkey, Ebtisam found herself stuck in the underground economy. Unable to work legally, she found informal jobs as a waitress and a cosmetician, which she explained by rubbing her hands in circles over various parts of her face, so that we could see what she meant (facials). Illegitimacy was costly: Anker estimated that Ebtisam earned perhaps half what a Turkish person with documents would make.
While Ebtisam struggled to master Turkish, her daughters conquered that language adeptly. Jakleen and Mariam spoke of the time they spent in Turkey as a golden period; whenever they had a hard day in America, they said they wanted to go back to Turkey. Later, when we drove around town in my car, Jakleen would play Turkish music from her cell phone on my ca
r stereo, and at other times, if Mariam started singing in her fluting soprano while she was cleaning the apartment, and I asked her what she was singing about, her answer was as often a Turkish ballad about loneliness as it was an Iraqi ballad about love.
In Kırşehir, the girls said, they were surrounded by people who respected them. Their neighbors understood why they were half-Muslim girls with Christian first names and Arabic surnames, who sometimes wore hijabs and sometimes did not. Why they loved Iraq but hated what had happened to their country, and loved Syria but hated what had happened there, too. Why their father had sided with the Americans, and what that sacrifice had meant. In Kırşehir, there had always been fun things to do—they heard live music, they frequented art galleries, and they saw movies that they could actually understand. After a while, however, both Jakleen and Mariam dropped out of school to work. Because college was out of reach, many school-age refugees saw no reason to continue their education. Like Ebtisam, however, neither Jakleen nor Mariam could work legally in Turkey. They had been consigned to the kind of life that an illegal immigrant lived in the United States.
Ebtisam aspired to live in a country where she could work legally, and where her children could go to college. When she had first arrived in Turkey, she had gone to an office in Istanbul to register with the United Nations as a refugee; she still carried the ID card that she and Fadi had been given in Syria, and the UN officials made note of the fact that she was now living in Kırşehir. In Syria, their case had languished, but once she arrived in Turkey, Ebtisam began receiving a series of emails and phone calls that suggested her case was moving through the system.
The United States was conducting an extra layer of vetting of refugees from the Middle East. Over the following year and a half, Ebtisam made multiple trips to Ankara and Istanbul to keep appointments with UN officials and with officials from various branches of the American government. Each trip required a lengthy bus ride with all of her girls. It took three hours by bus to reach Ankara; the trip to Istanbul took ten hours. After a series of background checks, conducted by employees of the Department of Homeland Security, Ebtisam and her daughters traveled to Istanbul again for a three-day-long, comprehensive medical screening. In May 2015, nine years after the family’s departure from Baghdad, Ebtisam received a phone call with the news that she had been accepted for resettlement by the United States.
“We had to jump up and down because we were so excited, me and my kids!” she told us, as we sat at her table eating spinach soup.
“I was very excited, but it was all mixed up—happiness, sadness—it was all mixed,” said Ebtisam. “Because I was leaving behind good people, nice friends. And I had a beautiful place to live. That was the sadness.
“And the happiness was, I saw a good future for my kids. I just decided to come here, to see our future. And I had to be strong. Because it was stressful, the decision. Hard decision, and stress for me. I left everything behind, and I looked forward to the future. The important thing is my three girls. If they are happy, I am happy.”
* * *
The trip from Turkey to the United States lasted three days. They took another ten-hour bus ride to Istanbul, and spent the night in that city. They flew from Istanbul to Chicago and slept there. Finally they boarded the plane that delivered them to Denver. The all-female group arrived in Denver with eight suitcases filled with shoes and clothing—their most prized possessions. Not one thing in those suitcases had come with them all the way from Iraq; most of their belongings had been acquired in Turkey. The airfare for four had cost $3,700, and Ebtisam was paying off the loan from the IOM in tiny installments, $35 each month. (This was standard, and Tchiza was doing the same.)
Anker wanted to make sure I knew how hard it was to resettle in the United States. He said that after moving here alone, with no family, he had cried every day for five months. He spoke Arabic, Kurdish, Russian, and Turkish, but the task of learning English had crushed him. It was just so different from the other languages he knew. Nabiha commiserated, saying that when she first arrived in the United States, she had been consigned to pushing passengers around Denver International Airport in wheelchairs, because it was the only kind of work she could do with the minimal English she possessed.
The girls finished eating and retreated to the living room, half glued to their cell phones, half listening to us talk. Jakleen and Mariam sat intertwined; Lulu sat by herself. One of the girls started playing songs on her phone. “Hello from the other s-i-i-i-de,” sang Adele. The grown-ups stayed at the table: three refugees, commiserating, and me, their witness. Sharing soup with Nabiha and Anker seemed to provide Ebtisam with a potent antidote to her sense of isolation. That evening, she created a warm, convivial atmosphere in her apartment, and I could see why her daughters did not want to leave that haven. Long ago, staying inside had become their primary way of battling feelings of insecurity, as well as actual threats.
* * *
Over the months that followed, most days that I visited I found Ebtisam capable and cooking and smiling; occasionally, I found her overwhelmed and unsmiling. If it were a bad day, she would list her problems, taking inventory of her trouble. A woman at a bus station punched her in the face one day for no reason; men at the apartment complex behaved in a threatening manner; she bought a used car for very little money, and it broke down. Each of these setbacks sent her into a tailspin. She counted her problems, lining them up for inspection. On the bad days, Ebtisam would cast about for an explanation, a grand theory to explain such a daunting list of calamities. “I am very unlucky woman,” she told me once. “Very unlucky!” On another occasion, she floated the theory that the apartment might be haunted; the source of her problems might be supernatural. I could see that the fluctuations in her moods disturbed her daughters. Once Mariam interrupted Ebtisam during a recital of disasters. “Mum, Mum!” Mariam said. “Stop!” Then I would return and find Ebtisam buoyant again. She would cook kebabs or I would take her and the girls out for shawarma or Nabiha would bring over dolmas, and we would enjoy one another’s company. I would leave feeling reassured.
Trying to comprehend Ebtisam’s struggles, I mentioned to Whitney Haruf that I had seen what looked like minor setbacks cause Ebtisam to slide into full despair. Things that seemed small to me could elicit a disproportionate response. Whitney said this was typical, in her experience, of a person who had witnessed armed conflict and lived through several major displacements. “I think that fits with the level of trauma,” she said, as we sat in her office. “Where she still responds that way, kind of going from zero to ten. Anything that triggers the sense of things not being okay or not being safe—it just causes a person to go to the extreme, to come into this hyperaroused state, and then you can’t really modulate your response.”
What I had imagined to be Ebtisam’s baseline personality, Whitney saw as an imprint of the Iraq War and the Syrian civil war upon her original persona. I was witnessing what war did to a person. In terms of her struggles with mental health, Ebtisam was representative of the Iraqi refugee population as a whole. Among Iraqi refugees who participated in the UNHCR survey, 89 percent reported depression, and 82 percent reported anxiety. “Every survey respondent reported experiencing at least one traumatic event,” wrote the authors of the survey. “And the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder was extremely high (67%).”
Whitney and Eh Klo stepped in at key junctures, seeking to stabilize Ebtisam, so that the disasters didn’t compound. After Yasir told Whitney that Ebtisam mentioned seeing demons in the apartment, and using a sofa to barricade the front door to make sure nobody could attack the girls while they were sleeping, Whitney paid Ebtisam a visit. She found Ebtisam in a good frame of mind that day, and no furniture blockaded the front door. Ebtisam denied believing that her home was haunted, although she admitted that she did feel unsafe at the apartment complex, because there were men who made inappropriate remarks.
In particular, one of the Arabic-speaking security guar
ds left them feeling hunted. Ebtisam described this man, who was originally from Iraq, as argumentative and bullying. He looked at her daughters in ways that made them uncomfortable; he made suggestive remarks. In Middle Eastern culture, single women were looked down upon and often became the targets of aggressive come-ons. Whitney discussed safety measures Ebtisam could put into place. Ebtisam confessed that she was afraid the security guard had keys to her apartment and might sneak in and assault them. Whitney went with Ebtisam to visit the front office to determine if this could be true. No, a woman there assured them, the security guards did not have access to keys. Ebtisam seemed greatly relieved.
Other dilemmas were not so easily resolved. Whitney, Yasir, and Eh Klo all feared that Ebtisam might be undone by the pressure to become economically self-sufficient despite the high cost of living in the United States. After Eh Klo had unearthed the hard-to-find housing voucher, they thought they had bought her some time. Then Eh Klo heard the awful news that the program was being defunded. Every person whom Eh Klo had stabilized with one of those vouchers now had to be told that the rent supplement had vanished. Most clients lost the rent money immediately, but Eh Klo managed to get Ebtisam an extension. In her case, the voucher would expire in December 2016. She needed to find a job right away, Yasir told Ebtisam. Once she lost the housing voucher, the household budget he had devised for her would fall apart. Her TANF money would no longer cover the rent payments. This made it critical that she secure a position that enabled her to swing the entire monthly rent bill as soon as possible.
Other staff at Lutheran had been trying to help Ebtisam find employment for several months. She had a high school degree and had previously worked as a beautician. Her long-term goal was to work in a hair salon or some kind of cosmetology position; her short-term goal was to find any kind of occupation. Yet Ebtisam had turned down a housekeeping job that would have required her to work at night, saying she was not comfortable leaving the girls on their own. Then she tried working as a home health care aide but quit after one day. Ebtisam could afford to reject jobs while she still had the housing voucher, but now she could no longer be so choosy. The big question facing Ebtisam, in Whitney Haruf’s mind, was how Ebtisam would cope with the transition to working full-time, most likely at a low-wage, menial position. Would she manage to summon the gritty strength that had gotten her all this way? Or, put under that much pressure, would she crumble?