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BY PRISCILLA GREEAR
Staff Writer
ATLANTA--Having only the clothes they were wearing, the Asllani family of
war-torn Kosovo arrived at Hartsfield International Airport July 7 as
parishioners from St. Ann’s Church, Marietta, and St. Jude the Apostle
Church, Atlanta, gathered to welcome them.
Both churches will help them begin new lives in America through the parish
refugee support project of Catholic Social Services. Four other archdiocesan
parishes are also now sponsoring Kosovar and other refugee families through the
CSS program that settles about 800 refugees yearly. These parishes are Church
of the Transfiguration, Marietta; Holy Trinity Church, Peachtree City; St.
Thomas Aquinas Church, Alpharetta; and Church of the Good Shepherd, Cumming.
About 60 volunteers from St. Jude’s began meeting several weeks before
the Asllani family’s arrival. St. Jude’s and St. Ann’s parishes
initially supported the Asllanis until two other families, the Latifis and
Ramadanis who are related to each other, arrived on July 29 without much
notice. St. Jude’s offered to sponsor these other Kosovar families for at
least three months. St. Ann’s is sponsoring the Asllanis through January.
St. Ann’s parochial vicar Father Raymond Cadran, MS, who is heading St.
Ann’s outreach, said sponsorship has enriched the parish community.
“I think that it has been a wonderful learning experience for all of us
in our parish community. Anybody who gets a chance to meet with them, to
interact with them, comes away a changed person. It’s just a great
thing,” he said.
As parishioners meet the family, Father Cadran said they “really fall
in love with them” and they offer to help them in various ways.
St. Ann’s and St. Jude’s organizing committees collected $27,000
for the Kosovar families. Both committees have worked through parish donations
and volunteers to help the families become independent. They’ve helped
secure food, housing, transportation, clothing, furniture and other household
items, low wage employment as they learn English, school registration and
required legal documents. They’ve also arranged for needed medical care
and English instruction.
Father Cadran said that at St. Ann’s an initial focus was meeting the
family’s health needs through two doctors, a chiropractor and a
dentist--all parishioners. He took them to a grocery store and showed them how
to use coupons, read weights and measures and make price comparisons. He took
them clothes shopping where they each bought three or four new outfits. The
parish is also trying to locate the wife’s uncle who is living in Atlanta.
“It’s a slow adjustment and they’re feeling more at home …I
think you get the sense that they’re actually trying to really do the
things that are needed for adjustment.”
The husband, a former high school teacher, began a job at a mattress factory
the same day his children began school. He is using an international drivers
license to get to work but Father Cadran said he and his wife need Georgia
licenses, as Marietta has a lack of public transportation. Georgia’s
Department of Motor Vehicles has the drivers’ test in the Bosnian language
but lacks a Bosnian study manual. A volunteer has translated it for the couple
so they can prepare for the test. “The big concern has been mobility --
making sure the husband and wife can get a drivers license -- but that’s
not an easy task.”
Father Cadran said that as the parish meets the material needs of the family
it also seeks to welcome the family members into the community. The
parishioners are developing relationships with them by doing things like having
the sons, ages 8 and 10, participate in a basketball camp, by inviting the
mother to the women’s club and the whole family to parish picnics. They
also held a breakfast fund-raiser in August in their honor.
“One of the things we are committed about is emphasizing that
we’re not just dealing with them functionally but we’re trying to get
them involved in meeting people,” he said. “We certainly want them to
be involved in anything the parish does that is community building.”
He added that he took the boys to a water park with parish altar boys and
that “even though they couldn’t speak each other’s language,
there’s a universal language kids speak when they get to a water park and
(they) had a wonderful time together,” he said. “They need some
playfulness in life.”
Father Cadran is unsure how long the refugees will stay in America, but he
said the Asllanis are glad to be here now. While they are quiet and rarely talk
about their past and aren’t ready to, he learned that their home and
belongings were all destroyed and they have nothing of material value to go
back to in Kosovo. Through working with St. Jude’s and other sponsoring
churches, Father Cadran also hopes to provide the Kosovars many opportunities
to socialize with one another. The Asllani family attended a pot-luck dinner
for the Kosovars sponsored by Dunwoody Methodist Church. Later that evening,
they visited St. Jude’s Kosovar families where they all discovered they
had lived near the same town in Kosovo. “It was nice to see how they lit
up. It was a first realization that there is some home away from home with
them.”
“They’re (Asllanis are) adjusting well. The more people they meet
the better they feel because they need to be around people. They’re a
gentle, generous, thankful people,” he said.
The Asllani family had another opportunity to meet fellow Albanians at a
pot-luck dinner held at St. Jude’s Aug. 25 for all Kosovar refugees in the
area. It attracted 135 people including 15 refugee families, some of whom were
sponsored by various Protestant churches. Two leaders from a local mosque also
attended.
St. Jude’s parish life coordinator Trish Johnston said that volunteer
response at St. Jude’s has been amazing and that hundreds of parishioners
have contributed through initiating the project, donating household and other
items and providing pro-bono translating, medical and other services.
“The response just bowled us over. It was so generous. This is known as
a generous parish. It’s just really been outstanding,” she said.
“The leaders in the committee—they have done sterling work. There
have just been loads and loads of people who have been continuously
involved.”
She noted the family members show a lot of initiative in resettlement. All
adult family members in the Latifi and Ramadani families, who live near each
other in apartments close to the church and a bus line, now have minimum wage
jobs. “They’re very motivated people and they’re practicing
Muslims too. They’re very self-starting people and had professional jobs
in Kosovo before. They’re motivated to learn and be employed,” she
said. “They’re just great people.”
St. Jude’s planning committee member Liz Oliver, who kept a family in
her home for the first week, said that St. Jude’s introduced the Muslim
families to a local mosque. “It’s their religion. It sustains them as
ours does us. We all worship the same God, not the same way,” she said.
“The people that are from the mosque are very impressed that a Catholic
church would contact a mosque.”
Oliver said all the Kosovars they’re sponsoring had extensive dental
needs and that dentists outside the parish have helped them. “Because
their teeth are so bad and there is so much work to be done, people
(parishioners) have asked their respective dentists to take care of them on a
pro-bono basis and four dentists have already agreed to do that,” she
said. “Everyone who finds out what is going on is just glad to make some
contribution.”
Oliver said the families are grateful to be in the United States. Family
member Jaldeze Latifi owned a boutique in Kosovo where she worked for 30 years
to build up. Serbians came in during the war and ordered the family to leave
before looting and torching it. The parish has arranged to bring to Atlanta one
of Jaldeze’s sons who had fled to Switzerland to escape death last year
when Serbians began killing young men.
Both families were forced at gunpoint to leave their homes, which were later
burned. They spent two months in a camp in Macedonia before coming to the
United States. “They just seem to be so resilient. They say, ‘thirty
years’ and move on,” Oliver said, referring to Jaldeze’s
boutique. “They don’t seem to be bitter. They’re grateful.”
Although one can’t really understand what they’ve been through,
Oliver added that sponsorship is a way for parishioners to directly help a
Kosovar family and see what good, loving and affectionate people they are,
after reading such horrible things in the news about the Kosovo conflict.
“They’re very generous and they really take care of each other.”
Father Cadran said that St. Ann’s plans to sponsor a third potluck
dinner for the refugees in October and provide other opportunities to unite
Kosovars in Atlanta. “We’re trying to match the families together.
Our concern is that the families don’t feel isolated while they’re
here,” he said. “It’s kind of a great networking opportunity
that’s beginning with that (refugee dinners.)”
For information on parishes sponsoring refugees through CSS call Amy
Antoniades at (404) 885-7239.
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