.For Once-Celebrated Iraqi, Life in U.S. One of Lost Hope
The walls of the little brick house in Fairfax County where Nazaar Joodi lives with his family are adorned with framed photos from his first visit to this country. Here he is shaking hands with Colin Powell. There he is embracing Paul D. Wolfowitz. And, clasping Joodi by the arm, a grinning George W. Bush offers his "Best Wishes."
In spring 2004, Joodi was celebrated on Capitol Hill, at the Pentagon and at the White House as a "living martyr" of the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, who had ordered Joodi's right hand chopped off and his forehead branded with an "X" for the crime of trading U.S. dollars. At a time when explosive photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib had just surfaced and public opinion had turned solidly against the war, Joodi was held out as proof that invading the country and ousting Hussein had been the right thing to do.
But now Joodi, who immigrated here on the possibility of a new life he saw in that visit, has more pressing matters on his mind: Should he swallow his pride and ask Fairfax County to move him, his wife and four children into a homeless shelter, or pack it in and return to Iraq?
As he considered the bleakness of his options, Joodi's $50,000 "bionic" arm, a gift from U.S. business executives on his first trip, lay at his feet. A wilted American flag hung outside the living room window. Joodi, a frail-looking man at 45, nervously rubbed the stump from his amputated right hand. "Coming here was a mistake," said his wife, Shaymaa Mohammad, 34. "Everyone says, 'You're Bush's friend. . . . What has he done for you?' How can I tell them that this friend sends me to a homeless shelter? There is no friendship here."
For months, Joodi has resisted making this call. To him, being homeless is a shameful sign of his failure to provide for his family, and being a one-handed dollar trader is not an easily transferable job skill. He's had no luck finding work. Joodi has begged his younger brother, a taxi driver in Switzerland, for help paying the $1,500-a-month rent and leaned on Iraqi friends at his mosque. But his brother is tapped out, and now Joodi is behind. He decided to call his social worker.
"Is there any other way?" he asked in Arabic. "I'm a friend of America. I met George Bush, Colin Powell, other people at the White House. Doesn't that matter?"
Unfortunately, the social worker said, it does not. She gave him a number to call to be put on a shelter waiting list.
Later in the day, Joodi absently sang to himself in Arabic. "I was a friend of America. Now I'm the trash of America."
The struggle of newly arrived refugees in the United States has always been difficult. But now, with a refugee system that hasn't changed in 30 years, a failing economy and an influx of thousands of Iraqi refugees, advocates say many Iraqis are being resettled into institutional poverty. In the past, a lone refugee with mental illness would wind up homeless every few years, they said. Now, a "staggering" number of recent refugees -- one-third of them Iraqi -- are at risk, like Joodi, of being evicted.
"We're actually giving orientation services to Iraqi refugees on how to access homeless services. I've been doing this work for over 25 years, and I've never seen a situation like this," said Robert Carey, a vice president at the International Rescue Committee.
Every year, Carey's agency helps about 4,000 refugees find work with the goal of becoming self-sufficient within six months of arriving. In recent years, almost three-fourths were. But in the last quarter of 2008, only half were self-sufficient.
For years, advocates argued that the United States had a moral obligation to accept more of the 2.2 million Iraqis who fled the country after the 2003 U.S. invasion. For the first four years of the war, the United States accepted fewer than 800 refugees; Sweden, in the same period, resettled 18,000.
Last year, Congress passed legislation to accept more Iraqi refugees, and the number climbed to more than 12,000, plus 800 others on special visas who had worked for the U.S. government. Now, these same refugees struggling in the economic downturn are at the center of another debate: Does the United States owe them something more?
"We have an obligation to Iraqi refugees, because many in the United States, if not most, were persecuted because of their associations with the United States. . . . So many of these people did put their lives in danger on behalf of America. I think there was an expectation that, as a result, they would be taken care of," Carey said.
Instead, they're given $450 from the U.S. State Department and help from a resettlement agency. The amount of aid varies by state and agency.
"Many Iraqi refugees are having a tough time now. And some have a feeling that because they're Iraqi, the U.S. government owes them more. But the U.S. program treats refugees all the same," said Pary Karadaghi, executive director of Kurdish Human Rights Watch, a Northern Virginia-based group that helps more than 1,000 Iraqi, Afghan and other refugees every year.
She said she knows Iraqi translators who worked for the U.S. government and can't find jobs. Middle-class professionals consider themselves lucky to be bagging groceries at Giant or working the night shift at McDonald's. A coroner works part time at T.J. Maxx. And the former Iraqi health minister has a job at Wegmans.
"The ones who don't think America owes them anything are the ones who do best," Karadaghi said.
Joodi thinks the United States does owe him more. Given his rock star treatment in 2004, it's not hard to see why.
In 2004, Joodi and six other dollar traders who had been imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s were granted emergency visas and flown to the United States; Continental Airlines donated tickets. Doctors in Texas donated services to repair the badly amputated arms, and businesses gifted each man a prosthetic arm.
They were featured in two documentary films, sat on panel discussions and were sought after by politicians. "The whole story became politicized," said Don North, a Virginia filmmaker who produced both documentaries. "Conservatives seized on their story as proof of what a terrible man Saddam was and that it justified our invasion." In subsequent campaign speeches, Bush repeatedly mentioned the handless Iraqi men who visited him in the White House.
Joodi went back to Baghdad and proudly hung his photo with Bush in his money exchange shop. Soon after, thieves broke in, twice, killed his security guard and stole a total of $150,000. His house was bombed, burying his infant son under a pile of rubble and leaving a visiting neighbor a pile of shredded flesh in the courtyard. His son survived.
He had only one thought: Life in America would be better.
"I thought that life would be different. . . . But every day since we came, every day has been difficult," he said.
It's not as though he has received no help. The family is enrolled in Medicaid and gets $935 a month in food stamps and $570 in welfare benefits. Fairfax County pays for a taxi to take Joodi to English-learning and job-training programs, although a teacher said he misses a lot of classes because his wife and son have been ill. He regularly sees a psychiatrist for post-traumatic stress disorder. "Crying spells," his psychiatrist noted last November. "Yelling and shouting at bedtime and during sleep."
What the family can't do, Joodi said, is pay rent.
"If we go back to Iraq," he said, "at least we'll have our dignity."
Joodi sat on his couch, staring at the phone number for the homeless shelter. He trudged out to the taxi waiting in the driveway to ferry him to his job-training session at Ross Dress for Less in Seven Corners.
He would already be one hour late. All afternoon, using the stub of his arm like a hanger, he loaded it with women's purses in his somewhat befuddled attempt to sort the disorganized racks of merchandise.
At the end of the day, he couldn't bring himself to call the homeless shelter.
By Friday, his choice was no clearer. He returned home from English class, where he has yet to progress beyond rudimentary greetings, and, staring at the photos of his famous friends, waited for his new life to somehow get better.
WaPo
In spring 2004, Joodi was celebrated on Capitol Hill, at the Pentagon and at the White House as a "living martyr" of the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, who had ordered Joodi's right hand chopped off and his forehead branded with an "X" for the crime of trading U.S. dollars. At a time when explosive photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib had just surfaced and public opinion had turned solidly against the war, Joodi was held out as proof that invading the country and ousting Hussein had been the right thing to do.
But now Joodi, who immigrated here on the possibility of a new life he saw in that visit, has more pressing matters on his mind: Should he swallow his pride and ask Fairfax County to move him, his wife and four children into a homeless shelter, or pack it in and return to Iraq?
As he considered the bleakness of his options, Joodi's $50,000 "bionic" arm, a gift from U.S. business executives on his first trip, lay at his feet. A wilted American flag hung outside the living room window. Joodi, a frail-looking man at 45, nervously rubbed the stump from his amputated right hand. "Coming here was a mistake," said his wife, Shaymaa Mohammad, 34. "Everyone says, 'You're Bush's friend. . . . What has he done for you?' How can I tell them that this friend sends me to a homeless shelter? There is no friendship here."
For months, Joodi has resisted making this call. To him, being homeless is a shameful sign of his failure to provide for his family, and being a one-handed dollar trader is not an easily transferable job skill. He's had no luck finding work. Joodi has begged his younger brother, a taxi driver in Switzerland, for help paying the $1,500-a-month rent and leaned on Iraqi friends at his mosque. But his brother is tapped out, and now Joodi is behind. He decided to call his social worker.
"Is there any other way?" he asked in Arabic. "I'm a friend of America. I met George Bush, Colin Powell, other people at the White House. Doesn't that matter?"
Unfortunately, the social worker said, it does not. She gave him a number to call to be put on a shelter waiting list.
Later in the day, Joodi absently sang to himself in Arabic. "I was a friend of America. Now I'm the trash of America."
The struggle of newly arrived refugees in the United States has always been difficult. But now, with a refugee system that hasn't changed in 30 years, a failing economy and an influx of thousands of Iraqi refugees, advocates say many Iraqis are being resettled into institutional poverty. In the past, a lone refugee with mental illness would wind up homeless every few years, they said. Now, a "staggering" number of recent refugees -- one-third of them Iraqi -- are at risk, like Joodi, of being evicted.
"We're actually giving orientation services to Iraqi refugees on how to access homeless services. I've been doing this work for over 25 years, and I've never seen a situation like this," said Robert Carey, a vice president at the International Rescue Committee.
Every year, Carey's agency helps about 4,000 refugees find work with the goal of becoming self-sufficient within six months of arriving. In recent years, almost three-fourths were. But in the last quarter of 2008, only half were self-sufficient.
For years, advocates argued that the United States had a moral obligation to accept more of the 2.2 million Iraqis who fled the country after the 2003 U.S. invasion. For the first four years of the war, the United States accepted fewer than 800 refugees; Sweden, in the same period, resettled 18,000.
Last year, Congress passed legislation to accept more Iraqi refugees, and the number climbed to more than 12,000, plus 800 others on special visas who had worked for the U.S. government. Now, these same refugees struggling in the economic downturn are at the center of another debate: Does the United States owe them something more?
"We have an obligation to Iraqi refugees, because many in the United States, if not most, were persecuted because of their associations with the United States. . . . So many of these people did put their lives in danger on behalf of America. I think there was an expectation that, as a result, they would be taken care of," Carey said.
Instead, they're given $450 from the U.S. State Department and help from a resettlement agency. The amount of aid varies by state and agency.
"Many Iraqi refugees are having a tough time now. And some have a feeling that because they're Iraqi, the U.S. government owes them more. But the U.S. program treats refugees all the same," said Pary Karadaghi, executive director of Kurdish Human Rights Watch, a Northern Virginia-based group that helps more than 1,000 Iraqi, Afghan and other refugees every year.
She said she knows Iraqi translators who worked for the U.S. government and can't find jobs. Middle-class professionals consider themselves lucky to be bagging groceries at Giant or working the night shift at McDonald's. A coroner works part time at T.J. Maxx. And the former Iraqi health minister has a job at Wegmans.
"The ones who don't think America owes them anything are the ones who do best," Karadaghi said.
Joodi thinks the United States does owe him more. Given his rock star treatment in 2004, it's not hard to see why.
In 2004, Joodi and six other dollar traders who had been imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s were granted emergency visas and flown to the United States; Continental Airlines donated tickets. Doctors in Texas donated services to repair the badly amputated arms, and businesses gifted each man a prosthetic arm.
They were featured in two documentary films, sat on panel discussions and were sought after by politicians. "The whole story became politicized," said Don North, a Virginia filmmaker who produced both documentaries. "Conservatives seized on their story as proof of what a terrible man Saddam was and that it justified our invasion." In subsequent campaign speeches, Bush repeatedly mentioned the handless Iraqi men who visited him in the White House.
Joodi went back to Baghdad and proudly hung his photo with Bush in his money exchange shop. Soon after, thieves broke in, twice, killed his security guard and stole a total of $150,000. His house was bombed, burying his infant son under a pile of rubble and leaving a visiting neighbor a pile of shredded flesh in the courtyard. His son survived.
He had only one thought: Life in America would be better.
"I thought that life would be different. . . . But every day since we came, every day has been difficult," he said.
It's not as though he has received no help. The family is enrolled in Medicaid and gets $935 a month in food stamps and $570 in welfare benefits. Fairfax County pays for a taxi to take Joodi to English-learning and job-training programs, although a teacher said he misses a lot of classes because his wife and son have been ill. He regularly sees a psychiatrist for post-traumatic stress disorder. "Crying spells," his psychiatrist noted last November. "Yelling and shouting at bedtime and during sleep."
What the family can't do, Joodi said, is pay rent.
"If we go back to Iraq," he said, "at least we'll have our dignity."
Joodi sat on his couch, staring at the phone number for the homeless shelter. He trudged out to the taxi waiting in the driveway to ferry him to his job-training session at Ross Dress for Less in Seven Corners.
He would already be one hour late. All afternoon, using the stub of his arm like a hanger, he loaded it with women's purses in his somewhat befuddled attempt to sort the disorganized racks of merchandise.
At the end of the day, he couldn't bring himself to call the homeless shelter.
By Friday, his choice was no clearer. He returned home from English class, where he has yet to progress beyond rudimentary greetings, and, staring at the photos of his famous friends, waited for his new life to somehow get better.
WaPo
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