Nezir Jasarevic had been a prisoner of war during the Balkan conflict, had been pummeled by his guards, seen one of his fellow inmates beaten to death and had wandered aimlessly across battlefields as his weight shrunk from 100 to 61 kilos.
He eventually escaped the Balkan nightmare, but in some ways his arrival in the United States appeared at the time almost as traumatic as his wartime experiences. "I knew America only by the movies and Utica certainly wasn't the movies," he recalls. "God, get me out of this place. I want to go back home," was his first reaction to his new home.
He had thought he was moving to New York City, but when he arrived at the airport there his official greeter spoke only Russian, not Bosnian. Nezir did not speak any English. At his next stop at Syracuse airport near Utica, "A Vietnamese looking guy came up and grabbed my travel bag," he said. "I had been instructed never to surrender my bag. We had a tug of war right there. We fought. Then another man came and spoke to me in Bosnian."
If he had initially asked God to get him out of this place, now "I thanked God for this fellow Bosnian. Welcome to Utica."
Kaw Soe also thought he was going to New York City when he arrived in 1999. A member of the persecuted Karen ethnic minority in Myanmar, he had been involved for years in what he calls the democracy and nationalist struggle against the military regime in Rangoon.
He also flew on to the Syracuse airport rather than staying in 'The Big Apple' and en route by road to Utica he noticed lots of deer bounding and leaping across the highway. "I thought to myself that maybe they had decided to move us to this place because with so much wildlife it might remind us more of the jungle we had left behind," he recalled recently, chuckling slowly to himself.
"Awful, awful," said 41-year-old Pavel Brutsky about his own arrival in his newly adopted town. And he should know 'awful.'
Brutsky was born in Belarus in the former Soviet Union. Despite being persecuted because he was a member of the Pentecostal religious sect, he was nevertheless drafted into a top security military unit and sent to the Mongolian border where, throughout his tour, he was never allowed off base, never allowed leave or the chance to meet girlfriends and subsisted on the equivalent of a few dollars a month in pay.
He tried for 12 years to escape the country and the persistent religious persecution and when he finally received official permission to emigrate he had to surrender his national passport and pay a fine. "We had to give up everything, but we didn't mind where we ended up when we left," he said, "Canada, Australia, the United States. Still, when we got to Utica, it was a big shock."
A group known as the Somali Bantu are among the latest refugee arrivals in Utica and many of them are still in some shock. Cultural differences between their homeland and the U.S. are among the most extreme any refugee group has experienced and so is the weather. On the Horn of Africa, summer temperatures routinely top 40 degrees centigrade. In Utica there are also often 40 degree readings-but this time it is 40 degrees below freezing during the harsh regional winters.
Hassan Murithi walked for a week to reach Kenya and comparative safety. Like Hassan and his family, thousands of the Bantu fled to neighboring Kenya and after a fruitless search by UNHCR lasting for a decade to find them a new home, the United States finally agreed to relocate the bulk of them two years ago.
They are sturdy farm workers with few other skills, who have never turned on an electric light switch, used a flush toilet, crossed a busy street, ridden in a car or an elevator, seen snow or experienced air conditioning."
Since their arrival in America, they have tackled all of those problems reasonably successfully, but in the depths of what is the first winter for some of them, it is still the weather that can be overwhelming. "I never, never thought the climate could be as bad as this," Hassan Murithi said recently in his rented apartment as the central heating soared towards the height of an African summer's day. He put the situation into context: "In Africa we had to pay a lot of money for ice. Here, it is everywhere," pointing toward the snowbound streets.
"And it is free." Accompanied by a hearty laugh.
By: Ray Wilkinson
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| Utica residence |
