Part of The Verge‘s Homeland series, this feature by Makena Kelly on resettlement programs in the U.S. shows what Afghan families are facing from day to day, particularly in communities of the San Francisco Bay Area where the housing crisis is dire. Ongoing support and aid comes from local nonprofits, overworked volunteers, and generous families […]
refugee
Posted inEditor's Pick
False Passives
As she travels north through Ethiopia, Anna Badkhen speaks with people who are looking for a way to escape — to cross the Gulf of Aden toward Yemen — and ruminates on the plight of refugees and vulnerable populations around the world. When does a journey begin? When droughts parch the land, or mudslides take entire farms […]
Posted inCulture, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Reading List
’Names Have Power’: A Reading List on Names, Identity, and the Immigrant Experience
Whether adding a hyphen or changing one’s name completely, the process of naming can be complex.
Posted inEditor's Pick
What It’s Like to Travel When You Have a ‘Bad’ Passport
“I am always an immigrant, never an expatriate. As an immigrant, to even visit a country, you must prove not just your legality, but your worth.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Look After My Babies’: In Ethiopia, a Tigray Family’s Quest
War broke out in Ethiopia’s Tigray region at the worst possible time for Abraha Kinfe Gebremariam and his family: his wife was giving birth to twins amid a massacre.
Posted inBooks, Culture, Feature, Highlight, investigations, Story, Unapologetic Women, Writing
When Refugee Families are Separated, Women Carry the Burden
The story of a Somali family uprooted by war and separated by America’s broken refugee resettlement system — and the siblings who brought them back together.
Posted inEditor's Pick
I’ve Fled New York with My Wife, Kids and Dog – Just as my Ancestors Fled the 1918 Pandemic
After covering the plights of refugees around the world as a journalist, Bryan Mealer finds himself a refugee, fleeing New York City for his childhood home of west Texas — where his great-grandmother and her oldest daughter died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Leaving Aleppo: ‘A distant star / Exhausts its light on the sleep of the dead.’
Pauls Toutonghi lovingly recalls his grandfather, Philippe Elias Tütünji, a writer, poet, and translator from Aleppo, Syria. Tütünji immigrated to America during World War II and never gave up his dream to achieve success as a poet in his adopted homeland.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Garden of Refugees
The story of Eh Kaw Htoo, a Karen refugee from Myanmar — a man who “extolled the redneck’s work ethic” — helping to build a community of 150 Karens who sustain one another by living frugally and sharing the bounty of the land in the rural community of Comer, Georgia.