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The Other Side of Charlottesville: Invisible Stories of Refugees

Mehdy Elouassi
Abdullah Paracha
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The Other Side of Charlottesville Final Transcript [00:00:03] ABDULLAH Hi, my name is Abdullah Paracha, I am the son of Pakistani immigrants who came to the country in the late 90s and I am also a practicing Muslim. [00:00:15] ABDULLAH So I just graduated from UVA with a degree in history and most likely I'll be going into medicine. [00:00:23] MEHDY Hi, my name is Mehdy Elouassi. I see I am a rising third year at the University of Virginia, majoring in economics and history. [00:00:33] MEHDY Just like Abdullah, my parents came to the United States in the 90s. They came here from Morocco. And so I also identify with that diaspora. [00:00:43] ABDULLAH So UVA is in Charlottesville, Virginia. When I came in as a first year, it was August twenty seventeen. [00:00:50] ABDULLAH My move-in was right after the far right rally, which was around August 11th and 12. For me coming in, it was a crazy time to to be coming into Charlottesville because the images you were seeing on TV, the violence that was happening, the rhetoric surrounding this town where it seemed like it was becoming a hub for far right activity. So even though that was what I thought coming in when I actually got here and got involved with the local Sunday school through the local mosque, the ICB, I realized that this town is actually more diverse than even what what I'm used to in Northern Virginia. And there's actually a lot of refugees, which is very unique because Charlottesville is a small town in central Virginia. And at least to me, it didn't make a lot of sense. But my image of Charlotte will change very quickly. [00:01:46] MEHDY I came to UVA a year after Abdullah, and I was also kind of shocked to see the diversity that I encountered when I got here. I had a similar idea in my head of what it would be like, partially because of very old stereotypes of UVA and Charlottesville in general. And then just because of what we saw in the news, what made global headlines, the incidents of August twenty seventeen that took place in Charlottesville, I was very shocked to see what I saw in terms of diversity, what they had arrived, according to the I.R.C., which is the International Rescue Committee headquarters actually in Charlottesville, there's about three thousand refugees currently living in Charlottesville. [00:02:31] ABDULLAH So for reference, this past year under President Trump, the United States only allowed in about eighty thousand refugees into the entire United States. So clearly this city is a hub for refugees. And part of the reason is because there is a well-established infrastructure for refugees already in this town, partly through the I.R.S. being based here, partly just because of transportation, public schools. And in some ways, even UVA students play a role through the programs they have. So through the Religion, Race and Democracy Lab, which sponsored this podcast, Mehdy and I were told to do some type of research and our initial thought was trying to find something that related to us but that we could also do to benefit people in this town. And so we realized very quickly that we need to start talking to the refugees in this town and try to share their stories so more people know about what Charlottesville truly is. [00:03:40] MEHDY So in our conversations with these two refugees, they shared a lot of information with us, particularly about them coming to Charlottesville, their challenges and how their identity changed over time, especially after the far right rally in twenty seventeen. [00:03:57] ABDULLAH Like I said earlier, our first interview is with Habib. He owns a local grocery store. [00:04:04] ABDULLAH And essentially we kind of just walked in and started talking to him. And it's kind of crazy because he actually knew my family who work in a similar business. And we had always seen him at the mosque. He'd always be walking in with his father, who kind of needs help walking. So it was always kind of in the back of my head and we knew that he would be someone interesting to talk to. [00:04:28] ABDULLAH Habib's family came to Pakistan from Afghanistan many, many years ago because of the Soviet invasion. And for those of you who don't know, essentially what happened was that the Soviet Union decided to invade Afghanistan, encouraged by local communists and both the United States and Pakistan got involved with essentially supporting a rebellion against the Soviets in Afghanistan. And there was a massive war because of that. And that also resulted in the rise of the Taliban. So. Family, while they were accepted into Pakistan with open arms at first, later the Pakistani government tried to push for a lot of the refugees to return back to Afghanistan, mainly because they thought that it was safe to return, even though there was a very, very hostile group still in charge of that country. Habib and his family were able to come to the United States through his father in the late 2000s. [00:05:26] MEHDY So for our second interviewee, Majed, we actually got connected to him through a process that we had both taken place without ever before. And we actually kind of also knew Majed through his dad, who works at the mosque. [00:05:42] MAJED Salam guys, my name is Habib and I live in Charlottesville currently. [00:05:47] MAJED Um, I moved into the States right before September 11. Um, I was 12 at that time or 13. And, um, before moving in, I was born and raised in Pakistan. Uh, my parents are originally Afghans, and because of the war in Afghanistan, they had to migrate into Pakistan. And I was born and I would say it was a refugee camp, but I think it was a military base. So, um. The first where I was born was I think it was called Schiro Jangi in Pakistan, and then after a few years they had to move us and we moved into another military base called Warsick, which is in Peshawar. [00:06:47] MAJED And, um, that's where I kind of remember most of my childhood was in Warsick. And then we moved to some city. That's where we stayed for another three years before before moving into America. [00:07:05] MEHDY So Habib's experiences were actually quite similar. Habib's family had moved originally from Afghanistan to Pakistan. [00:07:16] MEHDY Likewise, Habib’s family had moved from Palestine to Iraq before they came to the United States. While they were accepted under Saddam Hussein, they faced hostility from the new government after the second U.S. invasion. [00:07:30] MAJED My background was Palestinian. So back in 1948 when the. [00:07:36] MAJED When this happened to Palestine, my my grandfather moved to south Iraq to the state of Basra that is very close to Kuwait. MEHDY Because of the dangerous conditions under warfare and the crippling infrastructure of Iraq, Martin's family was actually forced to leave everything behind and make a new home out of a refugee camp in the desert. [00:08:00] MEHDY They remained there for a number of years until eventually they received the opportunity to come to the United States in the late 2000. [00:08:09] MAJED Life is a very undescribable place, almost like a roller coaster in a matter of seconds, it can take up to the peak of your happiness. [00:08:19] MAJED Other it can take you down with no hope. The real question is, how can you maintain your strength? To cruise through any difficult situation. My name is Majid Ossorio, I was born in Iraq, Baghdad. I opened my eyes to the invasion of 2003. I was six years old at the time when the invasion took place. A couple of things that I have noticed during the invasion at a young age was airplane flew over our house as this guy was all wet from the gun exchange. Dead bodies were on the ground after struggling for four years living in the camp. [00:09:07] MAJED The United Nation has accepted us to come to the US. When they announced our name that day, all the sadness, the struggle and the hunger went away. Well, I remember that day was my family was so happy. You know, my brother were jumping and dancing around each other. [00:09:30] MAJED So much emotion in that moment, I felt like my heart was going out of my chest and was replaced with a new heart struggle can only make the human being stronger. [00:09:42] ABDULLAH So when Habib and his family came to the United States, they ended up in Northern Virginia where he went to middle school. [00:09:49] ABDULLAH However, through meeting a UVA professor out of all people, his father actually decided to move his entire family to Charlottesville because he thought that it would offer his children the best chance to succeed and essentially live the American dream. [00:10:07] HABIB He was a cab driver and then he used to drive one of the professor here, Yoovidhya, and he told them, you know, you have five kids. I think it's best if you move to Charlottesville because is the professor that he was driving, his focus was like, you know, get your kids education, worry about their education. And, you know, it's like a perfect place. Uh, they're young, you know, transportation. You can just take the bus. It's a small town. They can get around easily. [00:10:34] HABIB And then he decided to open a little grocery store here and everybody decided, well, we didn't decide. But like, you know what? We're going to move down. [00:10:48] HABIB So in middle school and high school, like a lot of refugees and even to some extent, Muslim Americans have faced a lot of challenges with this identity. [00:11:02] HABIB Absolutely. You know, I came right before 9/11. So, you know, middle school and high school was the toughest, you know, being a brown guy. [00:11:11] HABIB And, you know, the first thing they come on their minds like, oh, you know, the boogeyman or whatever. [00:11:20] HABIB But, you know, if you and that's the thing like we have a lot of students from private schools, they come in and attend. [00:11:28] HABIB The Friday sermon is completely you know, it's not what you hear on TV. [00:11:37] HABIB That's not I don't know what that is, you know, but that's not Islam. [00:11:43] HABIB And, you know, there are more, especially this town, um, people that live here, there are a lot more open minded. [00:11:54] MEHDY Majid’s family came directly from Iraq to Charlottesville. And like most immigrant families, they placed an enormous amount of emphasis on the importance of education. However, like heavy metal also faced a number of different challenges while trying to pursue his education. This includes the lack of knowing any English. [00:12:14] MEHDY He had trouble adjusting to the new culture that he encountered in the United States, as well as trying to balance between working and being a student. [00:12:25] MAJED Moving to the US was one of the most major changes in my life. Education was a priority to my family. The lack of knowing the English language was a little bit of a challenge at the time. [00:12:39] MAJED I remember getting mixed up between the word kitchen and chicken because they were both sound the same. The first couple of weeks I went to high school, I was too embarrassed to talk to people because I couldn't really, you know, made a full sentence. [00:12:55] A MAJED nd at that time it took me about six, six to seven months to kind of, you know, get get to talk to people and stuff, you know, just socializing. [00:13:08] ABDULLAH Habib graduated high school and went to VCU, where he was actually doing pretty good on the pretend tapas. [00:13:16] ABDULLAH He was doing fine in his classes and he started actually applying to dental schools and did go to school, not UVA. [00:13:24] HABIB I was in VCU, did my undergrad. [00:13:27] HABIB The plan was to get into dental school, I was a pretty much finished. I took the exam. I was on my way. I did apply to a few schools. [00:13:42] ABDULLAH However, because of a tragic, tragic accident with his father, he gave up on dentistry and decided to stay in Charlottesville and take care of his father while simultaneously running the store that their family owned. [00:14:01] HABIB So I got home, I don't live that far from the VA hospital, I got home by three thirty, went to bed and all of a sudden I just hear a loud noise as if, like, a tree fell on a house or something. So I'm in my bed sitting. I'm like, OK, what's going on? [00:14:20] HABIB You know, when you when you when you hear something, you're just like you're you're awake and you want to move and at the same time be like you're not sure whether you want to move or, you know, kind of scared. [00:14:33] HABIB And then I heard my mom and I was like, oh, something's not right. I went upstairs, like right by the stairs. [00:14:38] HABIB He fell. He was. Like, just trying really hard to breathe, like the fella kind of broke his teeth and some of his teeth were down, you know, in its trachea and like I was sure, like I thought he was gone for sure. [00:14:59] HABIB Called the cops. The ambulance came within 30 minutes. The doctor came and said he has to do a head surgery, have to, like, cut open his skull to come off because it was inflamed. [00:15:18] HABIB And so that was it. Um, spent the next year and a half in hospital trying to be there for him. And hopes of getting into dental school kind of faded away. [00:15:33] HABIB I thought it was more important to take care of my father than, you know, spend the next five, six years in school. [00:15:41] MEHDY Habib would spent the next year and a half at the hospital trying to help his father recover. Majid also started spending a lot of time at the hospital instead of tending to his family. He started tending to patients. He was actually training to become an E.R. nurse. [00:16:01] MAJED So, yeah, there was a lot of a lot of actually a lot of doctors here, Yuva, that go go to the mosque. [00:16:08] MAJED You know, I've seen I've seen a couple of of of doctors, surgeons, orthopedic surgeons here. They were at the mosque and they always, you know, motivated me. They always push the right direction. They always tell me, OK, you should do nursing. And then after after nursing, maybe, maybe should go to being in a stadium. And they always there was motivated me. [00:16:30] ABDULLAH So far we learned a lot about Majed and Habib things that Mehdy and I had no idea about. They're both big members of the local community. Majid is playing a huge, huge role in the local hospital, and Habib runs a pretty popular store that a lot of students and faculty and local residents of Charlottesville will go to. So, the biggest question at this point, actually, was that how did we, as Mehdy and I, students who live in Charlottesville and even see these people in the mosque almost every week never really talk to them. Why do Habib and Majed’s stories matter to Mehdy and I now? Why didn't we learn about these people our first year coming in? And why is it much more relevant that we and other people learn about refugees in Charlottesville? [00:17:24] MEHDY So it took us a long time to understand Charlottesville and our place in Charlottesville. [00:17:33] MEHDY We kind of existed in a bubble as UVA students who were very many ways systematically isolated from the rest of the community. [00:17:44] MEHDY In some ways, our interviews with Habib and Majed were more than just learning about their stories, but trying to understand how a group of people who have seemingly been invisible in this town matter now more than ever. [00:18:04] HABIB Charlottesville, Virginia, is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history. [00:18:10] HABIB Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there in August of twenty seventeen, we saw a Klansman and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open and they were met by a courageous group of Americans in a violent clash in Syria. And a brave young woman lost her life. [00:18:38] MAJED The Downtown area was just so busy, packed with police squads, soldiers, and they couldn't even save save that that girl who died. [00:18:49] MAJED Yeah, it was it was sad. It was it was really sad. I mean, it kind of changed everything about the city. [00:18:55] MAJED You know, it it was. Yeah, I was it was very different. You can call it terrorism. You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want. [00:19:05] MAJED You know, Charles, we went from one of the safest place in Virginia to a dangerous place, [00:19:13] HABIB and in a way you had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I'll say it right now, I think there's blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it. And you don't have any doubt about it either. [00:19:27] MAJED And it was it was all over the news. A lot of people heard, even even when I was working part time as a driver, I had to pick up people from the airport. They used to always tell me, hey, I was it was it safe people to see? It was on the news and they always believed us, was on the news. Yes. Yes. It was dangerous at that moment. And maybe for a little while. Yes, a lot of people felt unsafe, you know, just UVA student, Muslim people, just people going to work back and forth. Of course, they felt unsafe. [00:19:55] MAJED But this is really not not not a dangerous place like anymore. I mean, the police say they kept it, kept it well, well, well safe. [00:20:06] MAJED But after that, the the middle the people who works at the masjid (mosque) recommended that, hey, this has happened to this girl, maybe will have to one of us. So why don't we get a security role when we don't go? We are police from the city. Maybe they will like every event. I don't know if you guys know what it's like during Ramadan. So there was always a police car parked right in front of the door on the side just to kind of, you know, let people I mean, the fear is there. I can see it because, you know, after that it changed a lot of people's, you know, perspective on, hey, am I going to go to the mosque safely? Is there anything going to happen to us? And it can affect a lot of people life in a way, mentally, mentally. So, yeah. [00:20:58] MEHDY When we asked Habib about the tragic events of August 11th and 12th, he preferred not to speak on the matter because of the politics surrounding the situation, August 11th itself has become so politically charged. It's been so relevant that we consider almost every aspect of it, except for a very important aspect. And that's how it's affected the lives of the people that live in Charlottesville. We sort of taken the people of Charlottesville out of the equation in some ways. [00:21:30] ABDULLAH When Mehdy and I started this project, we thought that by showing the stories of refugees, we would almost counter the history we've had with essentially the far right after August 11th and 12th. [00:21:45] ABDULLAH But through our journey, I think both of us also realize that these people have been here for much longer than just twenty seventeen. They've been here much longer than Mehdy and I and most UVA students, and they're going to be here for a long time. [00:22:02] ABDULLAH There's a lot of people here who we've kind of forgotten about. [00:22:07] ABDULLAH And in some ways we wanted to just show that by talking to them, we can learn and re-examine how we look at Charlottesville. Habiba Madjid come from backgrounds that are very different from most people. They've grown up in very, very dangerous situations and war zones, and they've made it even though some tragic stuff has taken place in their original homes. And then in Charlottesville, they continue to stay positive and all they do is they encourage everyone to come. Just talk to them. [00:22:42] HABIB First of all, just go out and talk to people. [00:22:46] HABIB That's how you break barriers. You know, you can read a book or you can read thousands of books. [00:22:54] HABIB But this is never going to be the same as, you know, just getting to know a person talking. [00:23:03] ABDULLAH They want people to learn that by keeping a very open and in some ways a very optimistic mind, despite all these difficulties were handed. And believe me, the difficulties that were handed in some ways pale in comparison to some of the people in this town. [00:23:20] ABDULLAH And those difficulties are what shape Habib and Majed, and that's what keeps them going.

Charlottesville, Virginia; it’s probably not the first place that comes to mind when you think of refugees in the United States. However, much to our surprise we found this small city in central Virginia to be a hub for refugees from all over the world. You can find them wherever you go in the city, but you can also live in Charlottesville for an extended period of time and never interact with any of them. That’s the thing about being a refugee; it’s not spelled out on your forehead. Refugee status is not a race, religion, gender, nationality, or even a single unified community. It is nonetheless, for many refugees an important part of their identity. It’s a major part of their individual story which too often goes completely unnoticed. But what makes their experience(s) so invisible? And why do they matter (beyond the fact that these experiences often inform how refugees define themselves)?

In order to answer these questions, we went back to August 11, 2017. This was certainly no ordinary day for Charlottesville, nor the nation. The Unite the Right rally was a demonstration by far-right extremists and neo-Nazis in the heart of Charlottesville. A clash between demonstrators and locals opposed to their hateful rhetoric led to the loss of an innocent life and put this incident in national and even global headlines. The racist and xenophobic rhetoric from this incident made Charlottesville an internationally recognizable icon for neo-Nazism.

As Muslim students at the University of Virginia, who are also quite active with the local mosque we felt that this was not a very accurate characterization of Charlottesville. In this project we sought to explore and document the less visible side of Charlottesville by talking directly with community members from the local mosque that also happen to be refugees.

Additional Resources

Joe Biden For President: America Is An Idea. YouTube. Joe Biden, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbOU2fTg6cI&t=3s.

Trump’s Remarks on Charlottesville, in Less than Three Minutes. YouTube. The Washington Post, August 16, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21WkyA6fG9s.

Thomas, Claire. “The forgotten generations: Palestinian refugees in Iraq.” Al Jazeera, February 5, 2017. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2017/01/forgotten-generations-palestinian-refugees-iraq-170131083424241.html

 

Project Contributors

Mehdy Elouassi

Mehdy Elouassi

BA Candidate, History and Economics

Mehdy Elouassi is a third-year undergraduate student in the College of Arts and Sciences, in the History Distinguished Majors Program and also majoring in Economics with a concentration in International Economics. Since his first semester on Grounds, he has been involved in the Religion Politics and Conflict program and research lab, as well as the Forums Curriculum. Outside of class, he is active in Student Council, the Virginia Interfaith Coalition, and the Jefferson Literary & Debating Society. His intellectual interests include the interaction of Islam and modernity, post-colonial thought, and the intersection of democracy and capitalism.

Abdullah Paracha

Abdullah Paracha

BA, History

Abdullah Paracha received his BA in History, with a focus on the Middle East and South Asia from the University of Virginia in Spring 2020. As an undergraduate, he was involved with Madison House and the Islamic Society of Central Virginia, the local mosque. He is interested in the role that Charlottesville plays as a refugee hub, and hopes to bring more awareness to the community here.

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