Steve Duin: A new world, and a new crisis, for Syrian refugees

In early December, Mohammed was cutting 2x6s for a deck in Wilsonville when, rushed or distracted by a looming storm, he sliced off parts of two fingers and his thumb.

He reached the emergency room at Oregon Health & Science University at 3 p.m., and waited five hours with his bucket of ice for surgery. In all that time, he says, the ER staff three times rinsed his left hand to take photos of the maiming, but did little to stem the bleeding.

His work as a carpenter is over. And it's a measure of life among Syrian refugees that the traumatic injury is only the most visible of Mohammed's ordeals.

Further medical tests revealed a brain tumor. Mohammed has been buffeted by post-traumatic stress. Shatha, his wife, delivered their second child on July 7, meaning she, too, is limited in her ability to work.

For all the courage and resolve that brought this Muslim couple to Oregon, they may not secure a fresh start without our help.

Mohammed and Shatha reached Portland 15 months ago, two of the five million refugees who have fled Syria during its six-year civil war.

In the chaotic run-up to of their escape, they were turned away time and again at embassies and airports, and stranded in both Cairo and Beirut. Because only Mohammed had Syrian citizenship, he alone was finally allowed to board a plane for Istanbul.

"I didn't know if I would ever see him again," Shatha says. "It was a very bad moment."

She persisted. She found a coyote willing to smuggle her, her mother, three sisters and her 18-month-old son across the Syrian border into Turkey for $700 each.

"A very dangerous trip," Shatha says while Mohammed prepares Arabian coffee in their Clackamas County apartment. "We were just women. And the government always does bad things to women."

In the 24-hour odyssey across the border, the women dodged helicopters and motorcycles with searchlights. There were Turkish police shooting into the dark and a farmer Shatha only decided they could trust because he was married: "He will not kill someone near his wife and children."

And there was, finally, a fortuitous hole in the barbed wire stretched across the wasteland between Aleppo and Antakya.

Mohammed and Shatha, who asked that I only use their first names, waited 33 months in Turkey before the vetting process was complete, opening the door to America. Shatha has a sister in Oregon, and they were adjusting well in those first months. Mohammed would build custom cabinetry. Shatha, who has an advanced degree in engineering, hoped to bake and sell sumptuous cakes while she raised the two children.

Then a saw blade slipped, and a shadow appeared on an MRI.

Thanks to Wendy Sell at LifeWorks Northwest and another friend at Lutheran Community Services, news of the family eventually reached Clark Hale and Rebecca Lurie.

Hale launched Pizzeria Otto in Northeast Portland. Lurie owns Kush Rugs in the Pearl, and she has been traveling and doing business in Senegal, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries since she was 22.

They have long championed the Muslim community and they jumped at the chance to help Shatha and Mohammed. "She dragged her entire family out of Syria, through barbed wire, by herself and with a baby," Hale says.

Adds Lurie, "She's a force of nature. She is fierce, and she is brave. But she is terrified. For her family and her husband."

When Hale and Lurie realized that help from Oregon's Department of Human Services, in temporary assistance to needy families, and the local mosque wasn't enough to pay the apartment rent, they set up a GoFundMe campaign.

They want to give the couple room to breathe while Mohammed learns English, endures additional surgery, and works to reinvent himself.

And they want to believe this community's generosity is not yet exhausted by the growing frustration that so many problems - homelessness, opioids, mental health, the refugee crisis - overwhelm public agencies.

"If they could just reach a place where it isn't such a struggle to survive," Lurie says. "Get out of survival mode. There are so many people in survival mode."

And so many others who can welcome Mohammed and Shatha to Oregon in these divisive times. On the warm afternoon we spent with a newborn in their small apartment, reliving the escape from Syria, they would not stop setting food in front of me. I was their guest. There was nothing they would not share.

You can contribute to Mohammad and Shatha at https://www.gofundme.com/refugee-family-crisis.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com

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