How Does Muslim Community
Give Back to “New Home”?
Used to be a rich woman in Syria with a huge and fancy home and a private maid, it was not easy at all for the Syrian woman, Reem, to leave everything behind and start a new life. Her husband left 17 million Lira of business and they lost everything for the sake of saving themselves and their children. Reem arrived in Dallas, Texas in 2016 to start her life from below zero. Her start in the U.S. was not the best as she had to stay in a very miserable apartment in her first days and all she wished for was just a clean one.
In Syria, Reem did not need to work, however, surviving in a new country while having nothing was the motivation that made Reem, her husband, and her five kids decide to do something for themselves. They started immediately learning and working and with the help of the ICNA Relief USA organization that supported them through providing them with the basic things needed in life, they are back now to be way more above zero. After about five years in the U.S., this family managed to buy their own home, with a swimming pool, Reem works in one of the most high-end ateliers in Dallas, her husband works as a delivery man on his car, and their children are successfully continuing their education.
Reem is not the only one that ICNA Relief, a non-profit organization that supports and helps refugees and low-income people, made a difference in her life. The organization, which has dozens of offices in the U.S., helped millions of people in hundreds of American cities as the organization’s team believe that “charity begins at home,”
“This is my responsibility as a Muslim to give back. This is my home. This is my kids' home. So, we need to show the non-Muslim that we are producers, we are giving back, we are doing the work. This is our Islam. We are not consumers,” said Hala Halabi, the director for refugee services at ICNA Relief USA.
Months ago, an American man told me that the media is misrepresenting Muslims, and this has to be changed. People need to know that the Muslim community in the U.S. does its best to leave positive achievements in the country they consider home now. For this, I decided to highlight the work of ICNA Relief.
ICNA Relief has various major relief programs, such as providing women transition homes, having free and mobile clinics that go to mosques and churches to provide health care. When a disaster hits anywhere you will find the organization’s team there provides helping hands. If you need food, you can go to one of the ICNA’s 46 food pantries nationwide, which is part of the organization’s hunger prevention program that cares too about preparing meals and feeding the homeless wherever needed. For the organization, it does not matter if these needy people are Muslims or non-Muslims, all that matters is that they need the help and are eager to learn and improve their life.
While the organization has many different programs, still, refugees are the main focus of it. The organization does not focus just on providing food or furniture to the refugees, it focuses on preparing them from scratch to build their own life here. Besides all the material items that it provides, the organization cares about teaching them even the simplest things that you may not think about as important such as the public transportation systems in the US cities. It also provides a counseling program for the refugees where they can talk to psychiatrists about any problem they face or traumas after what they faced in their country.
Language is one of the two hardest problems when dealing with refugees. For this, ICNA Relief provides English lessons to the refugees and does its best to encourage them to participate in them, starting from sending buses to their homes to pick them up, holding the classes in the refugees’ apartment complexes, to giving women sewing machines as gifts if they finished the English lessons so they can start their businesses.
The second hardest problem the organization faces is traditions. As refugees come from all around the world, the organization has to deal with each refugee per his or her traditions. For example, the Rohingya people’s language is very rare and many of them lived their whole life in camps which made them unaware of the basic things in life such as a refrigerator. The organization works so hard to teach them all the basics that some people would take for granted because they grew up knowing all of this. On the other hand, Syrian refugees, for example, comes from good places and some of them were extremely rich in their country to the extent that they had maids. Because of the war, they had to leave everything behind and start from below zero in the U.S., so, dealing with them is always different.
The wrong stereotype that the refugees get permanent money from the American government makes it hard to convince people that they are in need. The reality is that the government gives the refugee $925 only one time when he/she arrives. Another challenge that faces the organization is that some donors ask for the refugees’ personal information to go to their homes and give them the donations by themselves. For ICNA Relief, keeping the privacy of these refugees is not negotiable.
When the COVID-19 pandemic started in the U.S., ICNA Relief faced a 400% increase in demand. The organization faced many challenges, and the food issue was the hardest one, as a lot of people lost their jobs and they do not have food stamps. The other problem about the food issues is that there was no food in the market so the organization had to do their best to find food that can be enough to feed the refugees the organization serves.
ICNA Relief did not only think about those people who would come to the food pantries but also the team thought about the elderly people who were not safe for them to come to the pantries, so the organization started the door delivery service.
Halabi believes that the organization’s team can be called “the frontline people” because they serve food and many of the organization’s staff got COVID at the beginning. Despite all the challenges it faced, ICNA Relief has served more than one million people nationwide since the beginning of the crisis by providing food, hot meals, cleaning supplies, counseling, telemedicine, and tons of online workshops and training to educate the community.
ICNA Relief is not an organization for Muslims only, as many non-Muslim employees and volunteers in the organization are doing their best to leave a mark in the life of the needed people. Not only this, but the organization also pays attention to Non-Muslims, low-income, and homeless people. Halabi mentioned the story of a non-Muslim woman who was homeless all her life. This woman started taking drugs since she was 12 years old because her parents used to take drugs. She was forty years old and still homeless, who was running from state to state because she had problems in every state. Then destiny brought her in front of Halabi who refused first to let her live in the ICNA Relief women shelter because she was addicted, but then she agreed to take her, as the woman was started seeking help and quitting drugs. Alongside providing her with a place to live, the organization helped her get a new driver's license, a car, and find a job for the first time in her life.
The woman then moved to live with a roommate, and she asked the organization to let her daughter, who was a dancer and a pregnant teenager, live in the shelter as she also wanted to start a new life. Halabi let the mother and her pregnant daughter move and live in an apartment together with the organization paying for their rent.
“They are doing amazing,” Halabi said.
“From you,” Halabi laughed and said when I asked from where donations come. ICNA Relief is not funded by the government or any other organization. It is completely funded by donations from the community. For this, Halabi believes that donations are the most important need for the organization. She explains, “every homeless person in my shelter costs me $600 per month.”
It is not just about donating money, you can also give in-kind donations as some refugees and low-income people will choose to buy food instead of buying a jacket, so do not think that your in-kind donation will not make a difference, it will. You cannot afford either donation or in-kind donation? No problem, you can volunteer your time if you live in one of the cities where the organization’s offices are located. ICNA Relief has over 75 offices in the U.S.
“We need to involve the youth in our community to see they are blessed with so many things that they don't even feel it is a blessing,” Halabi said while asking people to keep supporting them and support any relief work which is doing the genuine work of helping people.