.

Huda Zedya is working on her English. She takes classes and has a mentor who tutors her once a week. But it’s difficult to learn a new language at 54 years old, and she is shy about speaking. 

However, understanding and answering questions in a language other than her native tongue isn’t the most difficult thing about life in the United States for the Syrian refugee. The hardest part: having her three children and their families scattered far and wide with little hope of reuniting.

Huda and her husband, Majed Alsharaa, arrived in the United States in December 2015, after being selected by the United Nations for relocation from Jordan. They’d lived in Jordan since 2012, having left their home in Daraa, Syria.

The Temporary Becomes Permanent

According to Wikipedia, “Daraa became known as the ‘cradle of the revolution’ after protests at the arrest of 15 boys from prominent families for painting graffiti with anti-government slogans sparked the beginning of Syrian Uprising of 2011.” What that meant for Huda and Majed was difficulty accessing doctors — Huda has a heart condition; Majed has an eye problem. “We went to Jordan for medical care. Going to the hospital wasn’t easy in Syria. The hospitals were full of the wounded and injured,” Huda says. 

When Huda and Majed left Syria, they thought it would be only for a short while. However, within two months, their home in Daraa was bombed and destroyed. The former school teacher and contractor had no place to return to. Their son, Tamam, and his wife, Bothina, and their two children joined them in Jordan in 2013, after they themselves fled Syria and lived briefly in a refugee camp. (Read Bothina’s story.)

Life in Jordan wasn’t comfortable for Huda and Majed, who were unable to get jobs. “It was hard paying for the rent,” she says. “We spent our whole life savings, including my pension from teaching, just to live. We didn’t expect things to happen like they did.” 

The families were struggling to survive when someone at the United Nations contacted Majed and asked if he and Huda would like to move to the United States.

A Lifeline and a New Start

To this day, it is unclear why that happened, but Majed said yes to that surprise inquiry, on the condition that his son and his son’s family could also relocate. It was only after a rigorous screening process, involving multiple interviews with multiple government agencies, that the six were cleared to live in the United States.

Huda says it was a confusing time for her. On one hand, she felt “happy to go to America — that’s everybody’s dream” — but at the same time she knew she would be farther from her homeland and that it would be difficult to ever return.

Huda and Majed, along with their son and his family, arrived in Dallas in December 2015, after a few days in New York City, during the time when Governor Gregg Abbott was attempting to ban refugees from Texas. For the first six months, they all lived together in a single apartment. Now each couple lives in their own apartment, and Huda and Bothina both work at GAIA, sewing pouches and handbags.

Though her goals and dreams are simple — good health and a stable life — and Huda says she is happy, the heartbreak of the past and present is easy to see in her pretty face when she talks about her circumstances. She deeply wishes her family could all be together.

Her daughter lives in Turkey with her grandsons. Her other son lives in Germany, where he recently got married. She hasn’t seen any of them in five years, and she fears travel restrictions on Syrian refugees mean she may never see them in person again. 

We hope that’s not the case.

GAIA Refugee Artisans

Huda is currently one of eight refugee artisans whom we employ. We pay the women a living wage, and most work from home, where they are able to also care for their young children. These women are why we exist, and it is our honor and privilege to share their stories with you.

Please take the time to read about Feza and Catherin, and keep reading our blog in the months ahead for more of their stories.

Learn more about about refugee resettlement and how you can help at rescue.org.

Visit Catherin in her home and she will offer you a cold beverage, and either a big plate of fruit, or an exotic sugary sweet from her neighborhood market. She will sit and chat with you while her 16-month-old daughter, Juliana, bounces on her lap and drops seaweed chips at her feet. Nearby, in the corner of the living room, on a folding table, is her sewing machine and a stack of colorful fabric squares, which she will sew into Roundies for GAIA.

When Catherin talks about first arriving in Dallas, her pretty face lights up and she becomes animated. She will wave her hands when she tells you how scared she was to be in a country where she didn’t speak the language or know a single soul. She will tell you how sad she felt to be away from her mother and father. But she will do it with a smile on her face — because Catherin is almost always smiling.  

Catherin was the inspiration that led our founder, Paula, to create GAIA in the first place. A Burmese refugee who arrived in Dallas in April 2009 with two young children, Catherin became Paula’s mentee through the International Rescue Committee. She needed to learn English and find work, among other things. Paula wanted to help. And that’s how GAIA was born.

10+ Years in Refugee Camps

Catherin and her siblings first fled Burma for neighboring Thailand in 1995. (Burma is a republic in Southeast Asia also known as Myanmar. Civil war has raged there since the ’40s, and it is among the least developed countries in the world.) Catherin was just 16 years old. She spent more than a decade in various Thai refugee camps. During that time, she met and married her husband, and they had two children, Bambina, now 13, and Basolus, now 9.

She remembers the day an NGO group came to visit the camp where she was living. “They talked about families coming to the U.S. They said they could take a lot of people and asked us, ‘Do you want to come?’ They showed a movie, and we needed to sign a lot of papers before we could be considered,”  she says. From there, the process of immigrating to the United States took about a year. “We were interviewed three times,”  she says. “And there were lots of medical checks — X-rays and blood tests.”

A Tough Start in Texas

Catherin and her children arrived in Dallas separately from her husband, who came six months later. Sadly, he died from liver disease shortly thereafter, leaving Catherin as the sole provider for the family. She recalls that period of her life as very difficult. “We were scared, and we wanted to go back to the camps. We had to pay a lot for rent and electricity and a phone, and we had no money. The jobs available to us paid very little.”

She also recalls a time when a man broke into her home and she had to call the police. “I said all the time, ‘I want to go back.’ I wanted to be with my brothers and sisters. I really felt like I’d made a mistake.”

But under Paula’s wing, Catherin found stability and hope. Her work at GAIA — initially making cloth napkins — paid a living wage, and having someone she could turn to for help made all the difference, she says. “Paula gave me a good thing.”

Life Today

Since then, Catherin and her new partner have had two more children — baby Juliana and her brother Christopher, who is 5. She has also become a United States citizen, passing her citizenship test this past summer and voting for the first time in this past election. “Overjoyed”  is how she describes her feelings about that, and she laughs when she talks about the fact that Juliana or Christopher could some day be president of the United States.

That’s not something that ever could have been possible had the family stayed in Thailand. And though she misses her mother, whom she hasn’t seen since 1997 and who has never met any of her grandchildren, as well as her siblings, who are now scattered from Nebraska to Burma to Finland to Yemen, Catherin says she has found happiness.  

Feza Ramazani was just 10 years old when she and her sister went to live in an East Africa refugee camp. The year was 1997. The girls were living with their parents and brother in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when that country exploded into war. When their community was destroyed, the girls were sent to live in Zambia. Shortly thereafter, their brother and father were killed. 

After several years in Zambia, Feza and her sister moved to a camp in Tanzania. That’s where she met her husband, Aheyo, and where their oldest child was born. In time, they relocated back to a refugee camp in Zambia, where their middle and youngest children were born.

The camps weren’t scary, Feza says. She was safe and slept well at night, but there wasn’t work. They didn’t have any money, and her children were bored. There were schools, but they weren’t very good, she says. So when she and Aheyo were chosen by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to move to the United States, they said yes. 

  
In 2012, with help from the IRC and after undergoing a rigorous screening process, the family moved to Dallas. By then, Feza had spent 15 years — most of her life — in refugee camps.

Today, the family lives in East Dallas. The children — now ages 12, 10, and 6 — are in school. Aheyo works full-time at Dr. Kracker in Plano, and Feza works from home for GAIA, making our tassel necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and more.

Feza says that from day one, she loved living in the United States. “Everybody is free, and my children can go to good schools,” she says. She doesn’t miss Africa, though her mother and sister still live there, and Aheyo sometimes talks about making sure their children get to know his homeland. 

But Feza says just thinking about it makes her sad. “There are a lot of problems there,” she says. “I lost two people there. I don’t need to go back.”

  
There is no sadness in her face, however, when she talks about her life now — only joy. She shakes her braids and breaks into a huge, sweet smile when she talks about how her children tease her about her English and how they may someday go to college.

Learning a new language as an adult has been hard, and she says that at first making jewelry for GAIA was difficult. But now, she says with pride, “I’ve got it.”

Learn more about about refugee resettlement and how you can help at rescue.org.