A HAVEN FOR NEW REFUGEES
“Refugees need to have a space when they arrive to process their trauma. Going to uncertainty is trauma itself. If not addressed early, their integration is more complex.”
— Armina Husic, associate director of the Center for Survivors of Torture
The call came with a sudden urgency. Armina Husic was told that if she wanted to escape she had to leave immediately.
Husic, a mother of two children, had just sat down to enjoy coffee in the living room of her Sarajevo home that morning in 1995. She wasn’t thinking about leaving her life in Bosnia and Herzegovina behind when the call came.
But the Siege of Sarajevo had reached almost four years by then. It would continue into the next year before the capital city was spared from the atrocities of a civil war that targeted the majority Muslim population.
Husic gathered her children, then 9 and 4 years old, a nephew, 8, and brother, 15, and began a life-altering journey that ultimately ended in the South Bay where she still feels painful stabs of emotion over fleeing her homeland.
Husic, 57, has spent the past quarter-century using the experience of her escape from Sarajevo to help refugees who come to California. She is associate director of the San Jose-based Center for Survivors of Torture that has assisted more than 4,000 refugees from 78 countries adjust to new lives in the Bay Area.
The center is part of the Asian Americans for Community Involvement, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to serve Santa Clara County’s marginalized and ethnic communities.
This summer’s chaotic images of desperate Afghans at Kabul’s airport seeking passage to the United States and elsewhere reinforced the need for such agencies as those uprooted try to re-establish their lives in a foreign land.
“Refugees need to have a space when they arrive to process their trauma,” Husic said. “Going to uncertainty is trauma itself. If not addressed early, their integration is more complex.”