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"The prevalence of the negative narrative towards refugees is really damaging. No matter what your perspective is, I think people forget that we're also human. We came from different cultures, and we have traditions and customs that you might never have heard of or understand. I think the attitude toward refugees is very distanced and detached. Refugees and immigrants have uprooted their whole lives, usually not for a positive reason, because they're escaping some kind of war or persecution. For us, we're Christians who were being persecuted for our faith. I think people forget that narrative."
— Luna
Mrs. J, her daughter Luna, and their family are originally from Mosul, Iraq. Because of Mr. and Mrs. J’s affiliation with the US army as interpreters, they had to flee Iraq in 2006 and move to Syria. In 2009, Mrs. J and her three children resettled in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Mr. J joined them the following year. Now, they have purchased a home and obtained citizenship. Luna and her older brother have both studied at Davidson College.
The majority of this interview was conducted in 2020 for The Epilogues Project. The section about hospitality was conducted in 2021.
Mrs. J: My husband and I used to work with the American army as translators in Mosul, Iraq. Then we were threatened because we were working with Americans, with the enemy, so we had to flee the country. So we fled from Iraq to Syria, where we stayed for three years as refugees and legal residents until the UN could relocate us to another country. We left Iraq in 2006 and stayed in Syria until 2009.
Luna: The first place we came to in the US was New York. Then we took a flight from JFK to Charlotte. The last time we saw anyone from the UN was in JFK. Then when we were coming down the terminal in Charlotte, we saw the person who was responsible for us from Catholic Charities. So from then on, they're responsible for you and for getting you settled. They gave us a fully furnished apartment sponsored by the agency, and they got donations for furniture and food and things like that. So they were there for the whole process of applying for paperwork and your social security number, medication, and your immunizations, because you need to get a full list of immunizations when you come to the States. So they're there for you basically, every step of the way.
Mrs. J: They helped with registration for the kids, getting them connected to their schools, taking them to school on the first day — I didn’t know where the school was or anything like that. They literally did everything.
It is incredible. It is really incredible. They even took us to the stores… I remember the agent was with us for two hours with us to tell us things like “Don't buy this rice. This is very expensive, and this ride is the same thing but cheaper.” They were with us in literally every detail.
Most agencies have a representative stay with you for usually two to three months. But Catholic Charities helps you until you get your green card. They have their own lawyer to help you fill out the paperwork. After a year of residence in the US as an asylum seeker or refugee you can apply for a green card to be a permanent resident.
Mrs. J: Catholic Charities’ headquarters is in downtown Charlotte, by the Bank of America stadium. So they try to find an apartment that's close to them so they can go back and forth from the headquarters. So it's very convenient.
It's an old area in Charlotte, so there are a lot of convenience stores, Harris Teeter, Walmart, a bus stop, all these things that you can walk to, because when you come to the United States, you don't have a car or drivers license or even social security number, but you still need your food. So they have to find something that's convenient to you and to them. They found this complex that's close to Uptown Charlotte.
There were a lot of refugees in that area. They were from many different countries. But I was the first Iraqi who came to Charlotte through Catholic Charities. After me, when more Iraqis came, they tried to put us in the same complex. So we need each other, we know each other, we try to help each other, and that's what's happened.
Luna: I don’t know the logistics of how they do it, but it was convenient. It was a huge apartment complex with hundreds of apartments in a relatively low income area of Charlotte. Everything was close enough that you could get around and support yourself without having to rely on the agency so much, so they could target other more important things like paperwork and government issues, rather than daily grocery shopping.
It is also a community. So it was you and a bunch of other refugees who came from the same agency and relatively only knew the same things. We know people who come from Iraq, but then there's also people from Vietnam and different places in Asia. We met a lot of our Iraqi friends through that apartment complex because we were all relatively close together. And because we all spoke Arabic and some English, we could communicate in a way that we couldn't with other people.
Mrs. J: I was a translator. So I’m not saying my English is the best, but I could manage at the time. And I did well, I think. So I didn’t have much of a barrier, except that driver book. In 2009, Google Translate was not that big. So, I had to have my dictionary for every word.
Most of us speak English because English is the second language of my country. Most of the Iraqis who came through Catholic Charities speak English. Not very well, but they can learn enough to manage their daily life. There were one or two families with very poor English, and we try to help them.
One of the things that Catholic Charities provides is English classes, and they held the classes in two churches close to us so that we could walk to them. So the teachers came from CPCC (the community college in Charlotte) to teach us. They also gave us driver’s ed classes. I didn’t know how to drive because we used to have only one car, and my husband would drive it. I didn’t ever need to in my country. Here, you cannot live in the south without driving. So one of the most convenient things they gave us was free drivers ed. That is very important. All of us, literally all of us, learned to drive through this driver's ed.
An American accent is a little different from the British accent that we had learned. And you speak very fast. So I had to say things like, “Excuse me, would you please…” because people speak so fast. One of the things we learned before coming to the US was not to answer any question without first asking, “Will you help me understand it?” Because America is a multicultural country, and it’s not shameful to tell people, “I don’t understand you.”
It took me a while. Two years. After that, it wasn’t bad. I mean, a lot of learning the language is not easy. It’s not what you see in the books. You learn from your teacher, and it’s how you practice it and how many hours you practice it. You need to watch a lot of movies to learn the language.
I was in Iraq, and I used to be very good in English. My grades were perfect in English as a language because my teacher was Iraqi. In Iraq, we don’t know how to pronounce the difference between “box” and “books.” But when we say it, we call them “books,” not “box” because our Iraqi teachers did not know the difference.
Luna: I think in terms of language barrier, it was more colloquial than formal English that was challenging. At least in the Middle East, they do teach you english as a second language, so you’re brought up learning both languages. But a lot of the language barrier was colloquial, phrases that you hear in English but that don’t translate the same way backwards. Also, learning the southern accent…
Mrs. J: I remember Luna was very excited to go to school the first day. She didn’t even want to sleep because she wanted to go to school to see these American schools. Then she came back very sad. She said, “Mom, everyone in the school understands what the teachers say except me. When the teacher told us to go to recess, I didn’t know what she meant."
It took her a while to feel comfortable with English. She would cry every day because she couldn’t understand her teacher. I remember I would sit with her at night when she was crying. She didn’t want to go to school. And I said, “Luna, let's count how many words you know in English.” And we counted every word, 1, 2, 3. We counted maybe 300 words, but they were very simple words for a second grade child. So I said, “Luna, you're good at English. The English language is only 500 words, and you already know 300.” This made her more confident.
Luna: The irony of this situation is that all of the people in my school were immigrants, but they had been there many years before me, so they spoke English, or at least had more knowledge than I did. Even though I saw them in my neighborhood, there was no way we could communicate in or out of school because we didn't speak the same language. So that was really tough for the first few months.
I don't feel like I really began to learn English until I started going to Catholic school. Nothing against the teacher at the public school, but she was also completely overworked. She had so many students, and there's only so much you can do. But my teacher at the Catholic school had the time and the attention to focus on only me because I was the only one who needed help like that. So she pushed me to really learn, to read more books than everyone else was reading, to write more, and to do more spelling and grammar and rules and phonetics at a really rapid pace to catch me up with my classmates. And so by the end of — I started in third grade — by the end of third grade, I was speaking just like all my other classmates, and it was not a problem.
Mrs. J: And in the fifth grade, she got the presidential award.
Luna was — still is — a good reader. She would read all the time, so she learned the language fast. Every day, she’d bring five, six children’s books home from the library. She never watched TV — she was just reading. Then, I remember someone at Catholic Charity told us to watch cartoons because cartoon characters speak slowly so children can understand. Cartoons are much better than movies for learning English.
Luna: Do you know the PBS network? PBS kids? There’s the kids channel, and we would watch it with subtitles so we could learn the alphabet and words and things like that. It was entertaining, it was cute… So a lot of what I learned came from cartoons and a lot of reading.
Mrs. J: One of the things that Catholic Charity — and every organization — helps with is finding jobs, because they know we don’t have any relatives or network nearby. No one can hire someone who doesn’t know anything. We don’t have work history in the US. So they usually help us find jobs through recruiting companies.
But for me, it was a different story. I took ESL classes at the church and put my son in the daycare there. Then the director asked if I could work there. I like the job, and I am still a teacher. I went back to school, but now I’m a preschool teacher. But usually Catholic Charities helps refugees find a job in a factory or warehouse until they can manage on their own.
The government did not help me as a translator, no, but they helped us by giving us food stamps and Medicaid. Medicaid is very important because you cannot take your kids to school unless they have their full immunization. Although we have immunization in our country, we have to get American vaccines and have a record of our immunization.
The government usually gives every refugee around $1,000. In our time, it was $450 for each adult, but it goes to the agency to help the agency because they pay three months of your rent as charity.
Mrs. J: One of our American friends told us that every year as a refugee in the US is different. You are like a baby growing up. You start from the bottom, then you build up your life in the United States step by step. When you have a job, a steady job, you build your credit, you get your car, you move to another apartment, then you buy a house. When our credit was good, we bought a house.
It took five years, exactly five years, to have our own house, but through these five years, we learned the system of the country. And of course, every country has its own system, so it takes you a while to understand the differences.
So you build your credit to get a house, to get a car, to get a better, higher paying job. It’s a gradual process, but there’s success. And it happens to everybody, not just us. We are not a unique family. It’s been this way with almost every refugee I know. They get their finances sorted out, they go back to school, they graduate, they get a home, their children go to good schools… It takes a while, but most of the people who come to the US blend in with the community after a while. Iraqis especially adapt to the community well.
Luna: We moved into our first apartment for about a year, then the UN brought my dad to Charlotte. We came separately — first my mom and the three of us, then my dad. When he came, we moved to a bigger apartment in the same area. It was two buildings down. Then, finally, when we could hold our own, we moved to a townhome where we lived for two years. There were two floors. Then in 2013 we bought the house we’re currently in.
Mrs. J: I believe that God has a plan for your life. And we’ve tried — when we came to the United States, I tried, tried, tried to go to Michigan to be with my aunt and cousins who are there. But Michigan is very crowded, and only first-generation relatives (like your mother or brother) could bring you to a specific place. So when we came to Charlotte, we liked the area — it’s very clean, and the culture is most like ours. It’s a family based community. North Carolina’s weather is also similar to that of our country. It’s warm — hot in the summer, and cold — not too cold, good cold — in the winter. We have a lot of friends here, and we both work here. And my children got scholarships to Davidson. So I feel like God wants us to be here, and we are going through with his plan.
Luna: We assimilated really well. We have family and friends in Michigan, but it’s a completely different experience. It’s heavily Arab, and a lot of people there have never assimilated to US culture because they live in mostly Arab areas. So they don’t learn English, they don’t go to college often, or things like that. Whereas we assimilated really well. We all speak English, and we go to college, and we have a great life because we assimilated so well and have our own family and community. There was no reason to leave.
Luna: In the political sphere, it’s a very distant topic. For people like us who are refugees, who understand what refugees go through and what it feels like, the political dialogue around refugees makes us feel as if we do not matter; people speak about us in a very distant, inhumane way. Many people assume we come from uneducated backgrounds. But the people we know come from very educated backgrounds. We made a good life for ourselves. We’re honest people who work hard to be where we are.
The prevalence of the negative narrative towards refugees is really damaging. No matter what your perspective is, I think people forget that we're also human. We came from different cultures, and we have traditions and customs that you might never have heard of or understand. I think the attitude toward refugees is very distanced and detached. Refugees and immigrants have uprooted their whole lives, usually not for a positive reason, because they're escaping some kind of war or persecution. For us, we're Christians who were being persecuted for our faith. I think people forget that narrative
This section about Covid-19 was recorded in 2020 when the U.S. first shut down
Mrs. J: For us as Iraqis, this is so normal. I told my friend, “I've been in this situation four times in my life…” I feel like I'm lucky. I still have my kids here. We have Internet, we have a TV, we have light, electricity... In 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, we were completely shut down for 42 days without electricity, without running water, without Internet or TV or anything.Now we’re just sitting at home watching TV all the time. Yesterday, a friends said, “Oh my gosh, you are so positive.” I said, “Yeah, I have the internet. I can sit around and watch TV all day long. That’s a blessing.”
I feel blessed. Because we always work, work, work. Now, we have this with my children, we talk with my family, we have Internet, we can watch YouTube, and in 1990 there was no Internet. We didn’t have electricity for 42 days. So for us as Iraqis, we say, "Okay, we’ve experienced this before. It's okay.”
If you close your door now and you sit in your home, you will not get the virus. Hopefully. But in Iraq, we were sitting in our home, and there were bombs all around us. We didn’t know if we were going to be killed or not. It was a much more intense situation then.
Everyone should be thankful that they are living in the United States, in the best country in the world. You have your Internet, you have your water, you can go and buy whatever you want, Walmart is open, the hospitals are open — not taking a lot of patients, but still open. So you are blessed in this country. We are really, really blessed in this country. I'm so thankful. My children were away, and now because of the pandemic they are here with me.
Luna: The definition of hospitality, at least in our culture, is very different than it is here. Of course, there are similarities. But hospitality is how you are able to find your place in the community. And luckily, I feel like we were able to do that pretty well. And at least in our situation, people were really hospitable and really welcoming. I don't necessarily consider hospitality as a monetary value, but in attempting to help someone integrate, help them out when they need something, and just be a resource.
The people who made the biggest impact on our lives were those who were just available to answer questions or take us places when we couldn’t get anywhere.
Hospitality in Iraq is like opening your doors to someone, or actually, it’s more like always having your doors open. There are no barriers between you and the people around you because you’re a community. It was one of those things where if you wanted to go to a neighbor's house, you just walked right in.
How has your understanding of hospitality changed since you came to the US?
Here, hospitality is more like lending a hand because everyone's busy. Everyone works full time jobs. You're not always available. But hospitality here is taking the time out of your day to say, “Hey, how can I help you?” And even if it's a really small gesture, it means the world.
How have your experiences or practices of hospitality changed if at all?
We tried to integrate a lot of things from our culture here, especially with our Arabic community here. We do monthly or every other month meetups where we will gather at our house or someone else's house, and re-integrate ourselves with each other. We have potlucks, and that really keeps us all together. We integrated doing that with our American friends as well. Everyone can bring something of their own, and they want to share with everyone else. It's been a really nice tradition.
A big part of our culture is food. And so the familiarity of having food around is really nice and brings you back to that safe place. So it's always a great time to bond over food. And you just can't say no to that. So having that brings you back and allows you to get closer with others over the meal.
Were Americans hospitable towards you as you resettled in Charlotte?
Absolutely. I know it's not necessarily a common experience with everybody. But the way that it worked out for us, it was fantastic. Some of our closest family friends now were those who helped us find a way around when we first came here.
There was a lady who used to drive all the way from her house to our apartment to take us to church. She had no reason to do that. But it was an act of goodwill. The people who actually cared and extended a hand were the most valuable people to us.
We didn’t need them to be there every step of the way. There’s a learning curve, and you should be able to stand on your own, but in those days, the moments of true kindness, moments when people would reach out and say, “How can I help?” meant so much.
I feel like oftentimes refugees won't ask for everything. Rather than ask for a ride, we would just take the bus. It was only situations where there were no other options that we would ask for help. And more often than not, my mom would just be telling the story to someone, and they’d say, “Oh, I can totally take you that day.” The line was very clear, and we knew people would support us.
My mom worked two jobs, when we first came, including a night shift, so it was hard to have people around because of how busy she was. But again, offering a lending hand is super meaningful. It doesn’t have to mean, “I’m here every single second of the day,” because you do have to learn some things on your own. And most people do it right.
The culture shock is real. For most of us, people worked five hours a day with a break in the middle. People would go home for family lunches halfway through the day. Life was much more relaxed. I know that sounds weird, because we lived in a war torn country. But still, to some capacity, your day to day was a little bit more relaxed than it is here. Here you're working 10 hours a day. You don't have a break. It's completely different. So that was a big shock for us. How do you build a community when you can't see other people?
One of the ways my mom built community was in the mornings, we’d get up really early for school, and her friend would join her at the bus stop and they would chat until the bus arrived. That way they could maintain their friendship despite their busy lives.
Out of curiosity, what role did the church play in your resettlement experience? Did you experience hospitality from churches?
There were three main communities in our first few years. One was in our neighborhood, and it was a catholic church with nuns. They had an after school tutoring program. So my older brother and I would go after school there, and they would help us with our homework, which was huge, because we were still learning English. And they were people that we were familiar with — nuns are universally known. So that was a really nice thing. And there were other refugee children there from our community. It felt really welcoming.
Then there was the American church in Charlotte that we attended. They were great, always inclusive, always wanted to know about us. The priest there became one of our closest friends. And one of the best things was that he offered two positions at the Catholic school for my brother and I, which is huge because it's literally how I got here [to Davidson].
Then the third one was the Arabic church here in Charlotte which is no longer together. But the pastor would drive himself and his seven kids to pick us up from our apartment and take us to church with him.They lived in a different city, not even in Charlotte. And they did it every single Sunday, and then he would take us back to his house where they would host dinner for everybody. And that was really great, because we didn't have family here. So it was like we were part of their family. And that was a really foundational part of my childhood here.
I know that other churches do the Christmas Angel Tree. At least in the Catholic churches, they put up this tree, usually for refugees, and the families write what they want or need, whether clothes or a bike or toys. And one year, I didn’t even know we were on that tree, but a family adopted us and came over with gifts and clothes and all these nice things. That was our first Christmas there. It was really nice. My mom could not afford to get us gifts.
They have no reason to do this. They're spending a lot of money on a family they don't know. And there was no ulterior motive.
I don't know if people understand how appreciative we are of this kind of thing. Anything that says “We're here for you, in any kind of capacity,” or “Let us know what you need and we’ll be there for you” is really great.
Luna: Remember that there's so much underneath the surface that people don't know. When I tell friends our story, it's hard to really capture everything that happened because we've been in the States for 11 years. That's a long time. There's so much that we have learned and experienced, but a lot of the trauma doesn’t show. If you see me walking on campus at Davidson, you’d never know what we've been through, and I probably wouldn't have told you.
I think people need to consider the fact that not everyone's journey is written on their face. It's more of a personal thing. We're quite open about our story, but some people find it very hard to talk about it. But we are blessed to be able to talk about it in a positive manner and put the word out there for people to see that other people are experiencing something similar to them, or that there are people out there that go through things like this.
Mrs. J: As Luna said, we are very positive about it, but don't think it was easy for us. Especially the first year or two weren’t easy at all. Whenever we wanted to go anywhere, we would have to look up the bus schedule, and it would take us three hours to get there.
Once, Anmar was graduating from middle school, and we didn’t have a car, so we went by bus. The school was 15 miles away from our home, but to go by public transportation it took four hours. It wasn’t easy, but now it’s a story. I feel blessed. Yes, it was hard, but we got through it. I think a lot of refugees can say the same.
Luna: One thing I always consider is that had we still been in Iraq, I would not be where I am now. I probably would not be going to a great college pursuing computer science as a major. At most I might have been an engineer or a doctor, which is not bad by any means, but it's also not a US education. So we're very lucky and very blessed to be here and to be able to do the things that we're doing. We probably would never have been able to do these things otherwise.
How can I best honor your story in my project?
Luna: What I really want people to learn from this story is that every refugee is unique. Every story is different. I actually think about this question a lot — what do I really want people to get from our life story?
Our story doesn't pertain to anybody else. But I want to show that refugees are hard working people usually escaping some horrific background. But life changes; it’s not static, and therefore people can adapt and change and create new lives here.
I feel like too often there’s a negative view of immigrants and refugees, so I want that positive light shed on these experiences. I especially want to draw attention to how helpful American communities have been to us.
I don't like to generalize people, and of course, there have been bad experiences. But overall, it's been so positive that it outshines any negative experiences for us anyway.
Again, I can't say how grateful I am for the people that have been in our lives. Even those who were only in it for a short period of time have made a really huge impact. So I don't want people who work in these fields or volunteer their time to feel like it's going to waste. I want them to know that people are appreciative and I will be thinking about their assistance for the rest of my life.