How a refugee baby's Cheetos' dust melted my heart
“Is it free?”
The seven children are clustered at the end of a driveway in a suburb just outside Cincinnati. They spent the past 30 minutes putting on donated Halloween costumes for their first-ever trick-or-treat, but now, there’s some hesitancy.
A lot is new in America, but this just seems odd. Go door-to-door in costume, shout, “Trick or treat!” and strangers give you candy? For free?
Visual journalist Meg Vogel and I spent the past year reporting on Syrian refugees in Cincinnati. We focused on a family of nine: Marie and Ahlam Alhamoud and their seven children -- Hasan, Hussein, Dalal, Zina, Rimas, Ghalia and Yousif.
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READ THE FULL STORY
The Cincinnati Enquirer spent a year following a nine-member family driven away from their home in Syria. To read the series, go to FindingHome.Cincinnati.com or click on the following links.
Part 1: Finding home
Part 2: A house raised by knowledge
Part 3: Dreamer
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There are some obvious hurdles to two Midwesterners hanging out with a family of Middle Easterners. Language, for example. One day, I drove Marie, the father, from our offices downtown back to his house a dozen or so miles north. We were stuck in traffic and stuck in silence. “Traffic is bad, huh?” I said, in a voice that felt a little too high and a little too loud. And Marie said, “Yes.”
That was it. We had nothing more to say. There was nothing more, literally, we could say.
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But we learned to communicate, and we shared a lot with this family. We shared meals, stories and our lives. We watched a 5-year-old girl on her first day of school. We watched a 36-year-old mother drive a car for the first time. And we watched that same mother suffer when her father died. She came here, he stayed in a refugee camp 6,000 miles away, and they never saw each other again.
I was surprised by how difficult life is here. There’s this idea that once refugees resettle in America, the battle is fought and won, but that’s not true. A hard part is over, yes, but there are harder parts yet to come.
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They get bills they can’t read or pay. Marie works, but a refugee in the U.S. starts out in debt from plane tickets. It’s tough to climb out of that hole.
We watched them struggle to learn English, and we watched them grapple with homesickness. They didn’t want to come here, but now they are trying so hard to want to stay.
We first met the Alhamouds on Nov. 13, 2015, the day ISIS terrorists killed 130 people in Paris. One of the terrorists was found with a fake Syrian passport. In two months, Donald Trump – who has vowed to stop ISIS and called for a ban on Muslim immigration – will become president of the United States.
It’s a tough time, politically, to be an immigrant, to be Muslim, to be anything seen as “other.” But this family doesn’t dwell on that. Ahlam, the mother, said a few days after the election that she doesn’t think about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. She thinks instead about her children, their education and their futures. That is her only care.
When Meg looks at this family, she is overwhelmed by how much the parents sacrifice for their children. Marie says he owes it to them, as a father, to make sure they get an education. Ahlam spends every moment trying to make their lives happier and better.
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When I look at this family, I see a reflection of my own. I also grew up in a family of nine, so I know what it’s like to buy food in bulk, to wear weird hand-me-downs and to cram a lot of people into a little van.
This family of refugees feels familiar to me, and that’s comforting. But it’s also unsettling, because it is all too easy to imagine my family in their place. If they can get ripped from their home by war – forced to start completely over – it can happen to anyone.
I moved to Cincinnati about two years ago, and in a sense, it was starting over. A new job, a new city – at the time, it felt like everything was new. Now, watching the Alhamouds navigate Ohio, I realize how wrong I was.
Moving from one part of the state to another is something. Moving from one part of the world to another – a part of the world where you don’t know anyone and the language and culture are new – is something much, much bigger. It’s exciting. It’s hopeful. It’s scary. And to me, It’s a strong dose of perspective.
We are different. And yet we are so much the same.
When Meg and I walk through the Alhamouds’ door, the younger children immediately climb all over us. They grab Meg’s camera and shoot photos of their own. One of the girls, Zina, likes to take notes during interviews and compare them to mine.
It’s a little uncomfortable, as journalists, to be that close to our subjects, but it’s wonderful, as humans, to be that close to people.
We stopped by recently, and baby Yousif’s fingers were covered in Cheetos dust. That meant we also got covered in Cheetos dust.
It’s not a great look.
But it is a great feeling – to be so welcomed, so accepted, that no one worries about tiny, messy hands.
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READ THE FULL STORY
The Cincinnati Enquirer spent a year following a nine-member family driven away from their home in Syria. To read the series, go to FindingHome.Cincinnati.com or click on the following links.
Part 1: Finding home
Part 2: A house raised by knowledge
Part 3: Dreamer
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