They moved to Jordan’s Zarqa province, where they registered with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). For months, her family moved from village to village in pursuit of safety, but when their house was burned to the ground in August 2012, they knew it was time to leave. “We withstood the fighter jets and the shelling, but then they started raiding people’s homes and killing them,” she said. Um Mohammad’s family comes from the southern Daraa province, where the Syrian protest movement was born. More than 5 million Syrians have fled their country since 2011, when President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime responded to an anti-government uprising with brute force, plunging the nation into a bloody conflict that has taken an estimated 400,000 lives. Department of State.īut unlike Um Mohammad, few make it to the United States. 31, 631 Syrians were resettled in the state and more than 10,000 nationwide during the current fiscal year, according to the U.S. About 90 of the 116 resettled Syrian families in the Chicago area arrived over the summer, Zarzour said. The number of Syrian refugees in Chicago has rapidly increased in recent months. You see it in their eyes – their eyes glow.” “The way they carry themselves when they understand changes. “We also see the difference in people’s body language,” the licensed mental health therapist said. While learning English is necessary to securing a good job, stable employment – especially for the often-male breadwinners – is essential to adjusting to a new life.īut perhaps more importantly than opening up doors for employment, learning English has a profound impact on refugees’ self-esteem, said Zarzour, The priority of learning English and finding work at the same time is a “chicken and egg” scenario, said Hadia Zarzour, vice president of the Syrian Community Network, a Chicago-based grassroots group that aims to bridge cultural and linguistic barriers for Syrian refugees. Once her kids were registered in schools and her family settled into its new West Ridge home, the mother of three was prepared to learn. Um Mohammad, 36, registered for English as a Second Language (ESL) classes about two months after her family’s arrival to Chicago in February 2015, she said. Without the English language, they would be lost.” “It’s key to survival,” she added, “but it’s also key to their successful integration. “Without knowledge of the English language, they can never get their way around the community, and they can’t acquire jobs that require a basic level of English skill,” said Ngoan Le, state refugee coordinator of the Illinois Bureau of Refugee and Immigrant Services. In a system designed to push refugees to economic self-sufficiency within three to six months of their arrival, developing English-language skills is critical to survival, say experts, who work closely with refugee communities. Once you come, no matter what your circumstances are, whether you’re educated or not, it’s important that you study English and try to connect with people to improve those skills.” “And to think of staying at home, that’s not an option. “In order to acclimate, you need to learn the language,” explained Um Mohammad, who asked not to be identified by name, fearing for relatives still in Syria. But when Um Mohammad, a Syrian refugee, arrived in the United States one-and-a-half years ago, her English-language capabilities were extremely limited. And the two years she spent helping her kids with their homework in Jordan had forced her to brush up on her skills. Her Syrian high school education had taught her the very basics. Or get around a city that felt daunting yet safe. Or communicate with her children’s teachers. She couldn’t visit a doctor’s office without a translator.
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