By David Cruz
Correspondent
After fleeing to Jordan from Syria in the middle of the night in 2012 and a two-year refugee screening process after that, the Al-Teibawi family finally found themselves in the United States — via South Paterson — in November. This morning they found themselves in the middle of a U.S. style press conference, slightly taken aback, but impressed. Their translator is Mahmoud Mahmoud, of Church World Service, which helped to resettle the family here.
“This is the first time that we’re sitting with this amount of journalists and sitting with people in positions of power,” noted Morad Al-Teibawi.
Congressman Bill Pascrell wanted to put a face to the issue that countries throughout Europe and North America are facing. Morad, wife Ola, eight months pregnant, and 3-year-old Rama fled southern Syria as the civil war intensified, walking three hours across the desert in the middle of the night. Their aim? Safety for their four children first, with a dream of landing in the United States, knowing that he might never see his homeland again.
“It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life,” recalls Morad. “It’s tough to take that decision to say you’re going to leave your home country for good and never look back, but it was a decision that I was forced to make. I had no choice. I did it for my children, for my family.”
“You live where I used to live,” Pascrell tells the family. “My sister still lives there in the house that I grew up in.”
Church World Service is a resettlement agency with 33 offices across the United States, helps settle refugees from around the world after they arrive in the U.S. Helping with the mountains of paperwork is just the beginning.
“They find an apartment for a family. They move the furniture into the apartment for the first time,” explains Mahmoud Mahmoud, who heads the Jersey City office of Church World Service. “They put food in the refrigerator. They pick up the family from the airport, bring them into their apartment, bring them into their new lives, hand over the keys, enroll their children into schools and day care, find jobs for the adults and getting their lives started for the first time so that they can become productive and active citizens.”
And not the terror threats that some have made them all out to be, including one of the most strident voices in the refugee debate. Asked what they thought of Donald Trump’s call for banning all refugees from Syria?
“It’s really unfortunate that these things are being said,” replied Ola. “People are fleeing from their country. They’re not looking to make problems in another country. They’re fleeing for a purpose, because they themselves were being terrorized and facing problems and persecution.”
And that’s a lot of diplomacy from someone whose very presence here has been the subject of such heated debate.
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