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TwitThisNo Free Ride
Buth bought a home in Utica and gave his children a comfortable, middle-class American upbringing. Now retired, he also owns rental properties in Baltimore. Saramoroth -- the daughter born in the jungle -- last year married an American man in a traditional Cambodian ceremony. "I'm still Asian," Buth says, "but this is my country now. I'd do anything for it."<br><br>
The biggest wave of refugees to come to Utica has been the nearly 4,500 Bosnians who escaped civil war in the Balkans in the early 1990s. They have most radically changed the look of the city. "Somebody's garbage became our treasure," says Nezir Jasarevic, who arrived in 1993 after being imprisoned and tortured by the Serbs. The Bosnian refugees pooled their labor to make some astounding transformations of hundreds of homes, some bought for a song from the city's urban renewal agency. Says Utica mayor Timothy Julian, "They used their skill in stucco to make places that were about to collapse into houses that look like large stone castles."
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They've made it seem easy. But Peter Vogelaar, MVRCR's executive director, points out that the newcomers don't get a free ride. "Every refugee that our center resettles is allotted $425," Vogelaar says. "From that money, we give each person $50 cash. With what remains, we have to get them an apartment, paying the first month's rent and security deposit."
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At MVRCR, refugees can get free English classes and, for up to five years, job placement services. Beyond that, says Vogelaar, "they get nothing more than any other low-income people in the community." In fact, refugees begin their life in America in debt: They're required to repay the government, interest-free, the price of their plane fare from their home countries.
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"We know very well nothing is given," says Jasarevic, sitting in his remodeled two-story home with his ten-year-old son, Danny, who is web-surfing on a laptop. "You have to make it with your hands." Jasarevic was a student of architecture when he fled Bosnia. After arriving in Utica, he took a menial job in a greenhouse, gradually trading up to his current white-collar position with a health insurance nonprofit. He and his wife, Azira, are raising their two children with all the trappings of the American lifestyle. Jasarevic is forever grateful to Utica for that. "When your whole world is turned upside down," he says, "the opportunity to start a normal life is like one tiny dot of light in a dark room."
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Murithi Hassan Mudey carried one of his children on each shoulder and led the rest by hand when he fled from Somalia to Kenya to escape civil war in 1992. After more than a decade in refugee camps, he has landed in Utica, where he lives with eight family members in a small apartment unit across from a National Guard armory.
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In an otherwise empty room, its walls and floors lined with colorful African mats, Mudey sits in one of the family's two wooden chairs and recounts his life journey. His 21-year-old daughter, Bisharo, settles on the floor to interpret, a toddler playing in her lap. Despite the sensational subject matter -- a dangerous evacuation, hyenas eating people alive, babies lying on the road beside their dead mothers -- Mudey speaks dispassionately until talk turns to the future, when his face brightens. "I want to buy a house," he says. "I want my kids to go to college."
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