People who resettle refugees represent best of America

Take a moment this holiday season to express gratitude to the generous folks who are helping to receive and resettle Afghan refugees. They represent the very best of the American spirit: good-hearted and openminded, a spirit that might flicker and fade in Washington but that flourishes in communities across the country.

Images of desperate Afghans fleeing their homeland flooded TV and computer screens this summer. The images disappeared, but the real people behind those pictures remain — about 73,000 of them, now in the process of integrating into American life. They face some serious problems — mainly a lack of affordable housing — but the kindness and commitment of their new neighbors has been overwhelming.

“Throughout the United States, Americans across the political spectrum are stepping forward to welcome Afghans who aided the U.S. war effort in one of the largest mass mobilizations of volunteers since the end of the Vietnam War,” The New York Times reported.

“In rural Minnesota, an agricultural specialist has been working on visa applications and providing temporary housing for the newcomers, and she has set up an area for halal meat processing on her farm,” the Times said. “In California, a group of veterans has sent a welcoming committee to the Sacramento airport to greet every arriving family. In Arkansas, volunteers are signing up to buy groceries, do airport pickups and host families in their homes.”

“We have never seen anything like it,” added Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, chief executive of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Here are just a few of the folks who are making it happen:

Caroline Clarin, who lives in conservative northern Minnesota, has helped to relocate five Afghan families, sometimes paying for their passage and temporarily housing them, reports the Times. “I was concerned. I am in an absolutely fire-red area,” she said. But the community “has been extremely welcoming to them.”

Homes Not Borders, a nonprofit in suburban Washington, has set up nearly 40 homes for about 170 refugees since August. A Washington Post reporter observed volunteers cleaning and furnishing two apartments for one family of eight.

One worker in that effort, Manizha Azizi, had been a refugee from Afghanistan herself in 1985.

Perhaps 50,000 refugees are still housed in military bases; Camp Atterbury near Edinburgh, Ind., is hosting several thousand.

Vox interviewed one volunteer, Lori Joundi, who said many members of the local Muslim community were participating in the effort: “There’s been a lot of support, it’s just that because of the number of people and the enormity of all of their needs — I don’t want to call it a scarcity problem. But you’re basically taking care of an entire city, right? 6,000 is a small town.”

Khadija Wazeen, a physician before leaving Afghanistan, is still living at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. When her eyeglasses broke, she went to the nearby town to buy replacements. As Vox reports: “But the cheapest frames were $25. They didn’t have the money. Another customer overheard and offered to buy them. When the women went to pay, Wazeen cried.”

DePaul University in Chicago will take in 10 students from the Asian University for Women and cover all their costs. “We’re blessed to be able to support them,” GianMario Besana, the school’s associate provost, told the campus newspaper. “They’re coming to us after severe trauma. Once they get here, we want them to have some degree of normalcy.”

As you count your own blessings this season, remember the refugees — and your fellow Americans who are making them feel so welcome here.