Airport is next-to-last stop for refugees coming
to DeKalb
by Gale Horton Gay
fastgale@hotmail.com
Nay Gay Htoo, far right, a refugee from Burma now living in Decatur, is reunited with family at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport recently. The Moo family, also refugees from Burma, are beginning new lives here.
Photo/Gale Horton Gay.
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As midnight nears and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is slipping into a sleep state, United Airlines flight 7642 is arriving from Chicago.
It’s about 30 minutes late and the disembarking passengers move quickly down the concourse. Five of the last travelers stepping off the aircraft are the Moo family, refugees from Burma who’ve just completed a 20-hour journey that’s taken them from Thailand to Japan to Chicago and now Atlanta, just miles away from their final destination in Decatur.
Refugees–people fleeing from their countries due to persecution, war or fear for their safety–have been steadily coming to DeKalb County for years. In fact, more refugees settle into new lives in DeKalb than in any other county in the state, according to officials at local refugee support agencies.
Data from the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Refugee Resettlement indicates that since 1980, 80,000 refugees have resettled in Georgia. And according to Ellen Beattie, regional director of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), 75 percent of the 2,000 refugees who are resettled in Georgia annually are brought to DeKalb County.
Memorial Drive in Decatur and Stone Mountain is a virtual refugee relief corridor with at least four agencies–World Relief, International Rescue Committee, Refugee Resettlement and Immigration Service of Atlanta and Refugee Family Services–helping the refugees who’ve fled countries such as Colombia, Somalia, Eritrea and Rwanda
Back at Gate 14 on the T concourse the Moo family is not difficult to spot. The father, mother and three teenage daughters huddle together as they quizzically look about. One of them is carrying a large blue-and-white plastic bag with the oversized letters I-O-M, standing for International Organization for Migration, which helps Kristine Van Noord, case manager and literacy teacher at World Relief’s Stone Mountain’s office, to identify them.
She immediately introduces herself to the family members, some of whom speak no English and others who know a little. She takes the time to say each person’s name with a smile and nod. She then escorts them down the concourse to where a relative who arrived five days prior is waiting. He waves and joins them walking toward baggage claim and speaking softly to them in Karen, one of several Burmese languages.
It’s not the kind of reunion one might expect among people who’ve traveled halfway around the world. Not big hugs, kissing, tears. That’s not the Burmese way, explained the case manager. The family of five will gather their luggage, which more closely resembles oversized tote bags in candy cane colors, and head to their new apartment home.
But before Van Noord can drive the travel-weary family to Decatur, she leaves them momentarily parked in baggage claim as she helps a worker from another refugee relief agency. He’s also there to meet a refugee from Burma but his man hasn’t arrived in the area where they were supposed to meet. Van Noord tells the worker that she spotted him in the T-concourse earlier and directed him to the baggage claim area. The two begin canvassing the terminal. In time, the man is located.
Meanwhile a police officer is trying to talk to another man in the baggage claim area who’s also carrying a blue-and-white IOM bag and seems lost. It’s clear that the man is having a difficult time expressing himself and probably doesn’t speak English. A bystander informs the officer that he might be a refugee and that the two other relief workers who are about to leave with their charges might be able to help.
A tall lanky man wearing the bright yellow and black International Rescue Committee T-shirt of his agency asks the man if he can look through his bag to see if paperwork identifies the agency that should be there to meet him. He then earnestly calls several phone numbers he has in a small notebook, but the refugee’s escort arrives shortly thereafter.
The three refugee relief workers depart from the terminal into the hot August air. If their agency’s process is like World Relief, they will escort the refugees to their new, sparsely furnished apartments as Van Noord does and give them the first of several tutorials in living in America.
Relying on the Moos’ relative as a translator, she walks them through their apartment and explains how to operate the stove, how to flush the toilet, what the smoke and fire alarm is for and what to do if it goes off as well as how to lock the door and use the peep hole.
In the days to follow, refugees like the Moos will get documentation for such things as food stamps, Medicaid, begin classes that provide a more thorough insight on adapting to their new home and any number of assessments for jobs and job training, English as a second language classes and attending school.
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