Chaldeans In America

Refugees are people who are forced to leave their home due to war, or natural disasters and try to start over by fleeing to a new country.Refugees are going through a lot, fleeing their homes, and having their lives turned inside out. For lots of families who are fleeing their country due to war or a natural disaster, it’s hard for them to adapt to their new lifestyle, learning a new language, new education, and bullies. Fleeing to America gives the refugees a fresh start in life, helps them to start over and more opportunities than they had in the country they fled from. “Children of War” “My graduation is next year, so I have to think about college...America is giving us a better future than we could have in Bosnia”(Brice-26).

When Muhammad died, Muslims faced the challenge of creating institutions to preserve the community. This is the Middle period of Islam. Muslims believe that the revelation was completed with the work of Muhammad, who is described as the seal of the prophets. The leaders after Muhammad were described only as caliphs, or successors to the Prophet, and not as prophets themselves. The first four caliphs were companions of the Prophet and their period of rule (632-661) is described by the majority of Muslims as the age of the Rightly Guided Caliphate. This was an era of expansion during which Muslims conquered the Sasanid (Persian) Empire and took control of the North African and Syrian territories of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. The Muslim community was transformed from a small city-state controlling much of the Arabian Peninsula into a major world empire, in this case the Umayyad empire, extending from northwest Africa to central Asia. The emphasis

    Around the years of 632-750 C.E., Islamic followers created an empire that reached across North Africa into Europe and dominated the Middle East. Due to several aspects leading up to expansion such as war, geography, and establishing an organized impressionable government, the Islamic empire grew rapidly.

Somebody that is forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster is a refugee. There are over 2.3 million Syrian refugees and of those, 45 of them made their home in the united states. In years to come the U.S. will be bringing in more refugees. Most of these refugees do not have any bad intentions when coming to the U.S., but are just looking for a home so they can start to rebuild their life. In order to be brought in, refugees must first go through a security screening.

In the battle of immigration, America is its own enemy. By abandoning and victimizing its refugee allies, America is no longer supporting its own. Anna Husarska has spent “two years of interviewing refugees"; with the notes that she gained through this process, her arguments concerning America’s ingratitude towards refugees are supported (90). In Husarska’s journal, “Exile Off Main Street: Refugees and America’s Ingratitude,” Husarska emphasizes how common America’s refugee abandonment is and the multiple temporary and rash reactions to the upset.

In a small town outside of metro Atlanta, each year, at least 1,500 refugees settle in the city of Clarkston to start a new beginning at life. Refugees from Bhutan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, and Vietnam come in waves from every corner of the globe. Lately there has been an increasingly number of refugees from the Congo, due to the civil war that has been ongoing for many years. Currently, there is a population of 13,000 individuals who have made Clarkston their home away from home. We ask, what brings the refugees to this little city? Many wonder how this has happened, how Clarkston has developed its own little cultural sense of identity? Refugees started settling in Clarkston back in the early 1990's, and it's been the resettlement hub ever since. The reason so many refugees settled in Clarkston, Georgia is due to the low- income based apartments, easy access to public transit and it’s near the interstate, which can take you to any part of Atlanta.

From its beginnings within the time of Muhammad around 610, the Islamic Civilization's conquests led to its expansion to Persia and Egypt by 656, and to Africa, Spain, and other parts of Persia by 750. Around the end of 750, the Islamic empire was spread from western Persia, down south, and all the way to Spain. Some major mainsprings that caused such a movement are the following: the conquests of the military and how those who were overcome had the new influence of a Muslim presence in their societies, the aid coming from the government of those nations conquered to help convert to Islam, and the spread of the Islam religion through merchants traveling along trade routes helped in doing so.

Bill Mehlinger shares how he learned to accept the refugees. His grocery store business was doing poorly. With help from one of his employees, Hong Diep Vo, Mehlinger got the idea of making his grocery store fit the needs of the refugees. He got all kinds of ethnic food and started selling them in his store. It was convenient for the refugees because they do not need to go very far to get their food. Then his business was doing better than before. This shows how something new can change your life forever. It proves how diversity serves the goals and interests of everyone. ‘ “If it wasn’t for the refugees knowing us and knowing we go out of our way for them, we’d be gone,’ Mehlinger said” ‘ (175). Furthermore, the old Clarkston Baptist church undergoed the same experience. ‘ “ We realized that what the Lord had in store for that old Clarkston Baptist Church was to transition into a truly international church and to help minister to all these ethnic groups moving into the country,’ he said” ‘(176). As the cliche, “what comes around goes around” greatly applies to this experience. The church was on the verge to becoming broke and there was less people going to church. Then the noticed that they needed to cater to all the refugees in Clarkston. And in turn, the church was filled with people. They believed that the church was a place for everybody and they embraced the new

‘Well, it's the truth. They ought to stay put in their own dirt, not come here taking up jobs" (Kingsolver 102). In Virgie Mae’s opinion, immigrants and refugees are aliens and foreigners who do not belong in the United States and should not take up space and jobs in the country that is her home. The book The Bean Trees sets up women like Virgie Mae as an example of bigotry and xenophobia, but opinions like hers are widespread throughout the United States. The Syrian refugee crisis is an extensive debate in the United States, where there are very mixed feelings. While some people feel that the US should allow Syrian refugees in, there are opposing opinions. According to one poll by Slate News, 53 percent of Americans disapprove of allowing them into the country while another 11 percent would admit only Syrians who are Christians.(Slate News) Similar to Virgie Mae a vast number of Americans feel immigrants get in the way and do not belong in America. Immigrants have to face this discrimination everyday. Even though many immigrants wish to be in the United States, but they are here it can be exasperating to be discriminated against

For the podcast, I interviewed Lina Abdulnoor, with the intention of exploring the intricacies of refugeehood by analyzing Lina’s refugee experience. Lina lived in Iraq with her family until they began receiving death threats due to their religious beliefs. Convinced that they needed to flee the country to survive, they left Iraq as refugees. After leaving Iraq, they settled in Jordan, where they waited two years until the U.N. to approve their request to move to the U.S. in 2012. Lina and her family initially settled in Virginia, where she experienced culture shock as she adapted to American culture and the English language. However, Lina did not feel accepted in Virginia; her experiences in the state led her to think that Americans treated her according to negative stereotypes of Iraqis. After living in Virginia for several months, Lina and her family chose to resettle in San Diego, California, which harbored a larger Iraqi population than Virginia did. Supported by San Diego’s Iraqi community and various refugee organizations, Lina flourished, and she currently studies at UCSD while holding a stable job.

The role of Catholic Charities in refugee and immigrant assistance is to prepare people for adaptation, self-sufficiency, education, and work. Some or the organization’s programs help teach English and other skills intended to help make the refugees and immigrants

In the middle east, there were 2 great powers, one was known as the Byzantine empire, and the other was the persian empire (or the Sassanid empire). One day, the persian empire’s forces started to take control of Babylonia. Once they had control, the Jews were exposed to zoroastrianism. The judaism religion also influenced the jews, introducing the idea of a devil into the religion. Then Muhammed had 650 revelations, which turned into the Koran, the holy book for

Elia Chaldean Catholic Church in Ankawa, northern Iraq. He ministers to hundreds of refugees living in flimsy tents around his parish. He recalls: “When the kids arrived here, they were completely lost for the first two weeks, angry and selfish. I remember the first time we offered them toys; within five minutes they destroyed them all”.

In the TheWorldPost article Syrian Refugees Living In Brazil Reflect On Their Hopes And Challenges, Gabriela Bazzo has captured the cultural challenges and hopes that many of the over 8,400 refugees have encountered while reestablishing their lives in Brazil. The Syrian refugees have faced many obstacles in acculturating to the Brazilian culture. Besides the obvious religious differences with Brazil being predominantly Catholic in comparison to the Muslim Syrians, the refugees are also forced to overcome economic challenges, religious bias, cultural differences, and language obstacles as the majority do not speak or understand Portuguese. Although Brazil is home to nearly 15 million people of Arab descent with three of those million being

An article about Iraqi Christians who fled is living in limbo while in exile, By Karen Laub. A year after tens of thousands have fled their communities that has been over ran by Islamic State militants, their lives have been put on hold as refugees they are forced to work in temporary asylum countries such as Jordan.