Tariq’s detention was only the beginning of their months-long nightmare. But today is a beautiful spring day, the kids are at an Eid party, and the family is settling into a lovely new apartment. It’s the kind of day I wish I could project backward in time to say, like the man in Tariq’s dream, “Don’t worry. It will be OK.” There are many challenges still ahead, but let’s take a break to just breathe and be present in these better times with their relatively ordinary problems.
Tariq and Amna’s first American apartment was a good place to land on short notice, except for the heavy-metal-blaring, up-all-night neighbors downstairs. Between the head-banging neighbors and the kids climbing into their bed every night after bad dreams, Amna got little sleep. (Tariq would sleepwalk out of the room and crash on one of the kids’ beds.) A more serious issue was that the uneven walkway and steep, rickety outer stairs posed a hazard to their oldest son, Suleiman, who has a disability.
So a local volunteer, whom I’ll call Jane, helped them search for a new place. Over the past year and a half, Jane has become a devoted friend of and tireless advocate for the family. After weeks of searching, they found an immaculate duplex with a big, fenced backyard for the kids. Amna fell in love with the place. The only problem was that it was available right away, and their lease wouldn’t be up for months.
By coincidence, the owner of this new apartment turned out to be an old classmate of Jane’s. By what felt like more than coincidence, he and his wife have a son who was severely wounded in Iraq and is still recovering from a traumatic brain injury. The owners felt a connection to Tariq and Amna. They wanted the family as tenants so much that they held the apartment to allow time to work things out.
At first, the old property company showed little flexibility. We raised the issue of violations of the Disability Act in a stern email, which seemed to spark some alarm. Then Jane cornered the owner in person and gave him a piece of her mind. Poof! They found a new tenant to take over the lease, and the family was free to take the place that had been waiting for them.
Leases and moving may be ordinary problems, but everyone needs help with them. The refugee partnership has provided Tariq and Amna and so many other new Americans with vital financial and logistical support, the kind of help that is hard to find when you’re a stranger in a strange land. If you’d like to donate to this small, life-changing nonprofit, please reply to this email and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Happy spring from small-town America.