Today's story was written by Amanda Patchin. Enjoy!

The lovely, lyrical memoir, Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams tells the story of wetlands on the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Marshy, salty, and home to unique plants and wildlife, this bit of landscape is endangered by natural processes and anthropocene causes. When I first read her book in a Western American Literature class I found the idea of a shifting ecosystem profoundly interesting. Change, of some type or speed or born of some cause, is inevitable. Of course it is. And yet, what Williams shows is how change can be both a loss and a gain. As one species retreats, another may advance. As one adapts, another may not.

As with fish and birds and bugs and grasses, so with individual humans. If home is untenable, a new place of refuge must be found but a new culture, a new language, a new climate is stressful mentally, physically, and emotionally.

A refuge is supposed to be a place of shelter, safety, security and a refugee is one who seeks the same. The modern technical definition of a refugee is one who has “fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and [has] crossed an international border to find safety in another country.”

In a world of climate change, environmentally displaced persons are now considered a significant component of the refugee question by the UN. Refugees who are fortunate enough to find another country to live in are often years in the process. From initial displacement, to temporary shelter in a camp, to guest status in an intermediate country, to final settlement in a permanent home can take as much as 10 or 12 years. Some, of course, never reach a permanent home and live out their lives in camps, living in makeshift shelters, marrying, having children, and feeling the despair of permanent impermanence.

Boise seems an unlikely place for displaced persons to end up, and yet Boise is the home of former refugees from Iraq, Syria, Bosnia, Rwanda, and a myriad of other places. Like a number of other small cities – large enough to offer services and small enough to be comfortable for newcomers – Boise was certified as a Welcoming City in 2019 by the organization Welcoming America. Unfortunately, that certification came just as Boise and the US were resettling fewer refugees than in the previous decades.

In 1980, the US welcomed more than 200,000 refugees. By the early 2000s that number had declined to under 100,000 and in 2019, it was under 30,000. Worse, that decline corresponds to an increasing global need as the number of displaced persons has steadily grown.

Among the thousands of formerly displaced persons that call our city home are Steve and Yvette. A middle aged couple, Steve from Congo and Yvette from Rwanda, have lived here for twenty years, raised their children here and gone from needing the help and assistance of refugee organizations and volunteers, to being Community Health Advocates who help newer arrivals navigate the complexities of hospitals and insurance forms.

When I talked with Steve, I was delighted to hear his enthusiasm for Boise and his sense of settledness in living here. When he arrived, two years after his wife and children did, he said, “Boise was the America I was thinking of. It was what I had imagined.” And, while it has changed considerably in the last few decades, Steve says, “Idaho is a great place to be. No complaints!”

Because Steve has been a refugee and now works with them, he was readily able to answer when I asked him what was most difficult about adjusting to life in Boise. He said that English was invariably the biggest challenge. While he had learned English in school, and many other refugees have had some exposure in their lives, many others had not only not learned any English, they had never been in school in their home countries. English classes were often overwhelming and difficult. However, he explained, work was a magical transformation. Not only was getting a job important, it made language acquisition much easier. “Your grammar might not be good, but you can talk!”

Today, as Steve and his wife help others, he says that the hardest thing is helping people deal with their medical challenges. Oftentimes refugees need to see a doctor for something fairly minor, but the complexities of their health history, especially trauma incurred during their displacement, makes ordinary medical practices very difficult to endure. For someone who has been arrested and tortured, rapid fire questions from medical staff can feel like an interrogation. For someone who has experienced physical traumas, examinations can feel like assault. Steve and Yvette work to help refugees understand the questions directed at them and the need for certain examinations, but they also work to educate medical professionals about the unique needs of these clients.

Steve’s narrative of his adjustment to life in Boise and the need for language help confirmed my own experiences as a volunteer English tutor. Back in 1999, through a convoluted series of decisions, I found myself working with refugees living up on the Bench. I ended up volunteering to do this after spending a year or so visiting another former refugee in Boise. In that scenario, I was the student and a middle-aged Russian woman was my teacher. I wanted to learn to read the Russian language in order to improve my understanding of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Chekov. Hearing her stories, eating the delicious piroshki she served, and grateful for the inexpensive language lessons she offered, I decided to try and help newer refugees. And so, each week, with the guidance of the local World Relief office (now closed), I would visit a small apartment complex as the designated English tutor for a young Bosnian mother. I was supposed to instruct her for one hour during each visit and to continue this for three months.

The first few lessons went according to script. I showed up with my books and worksheets and we got down to business, memorizing new words, practicing new phrases, and gesticulating wildly through our mutual incomprehension. After a month or so, everything started to shift. Suddenly, there were two, then three, then six other women at the lessons. Then I was practicing sentences and vocabulary with all of them. Next, it wasn’t enough to come for my hour. Before the lesson I had to have coffee with them – tiny cups of rich Turkish-style coffee with cheap little packaged cookies on the saucer. Then, it was lunch afterward. Then I was making phone calls and appointments for them. In no time, I was one of the family. Eventually my first student shyly showed me the family’s Quran, obviously sensitive about the religious beliefs that had led to their persecution and exile from Bosnia.

In clumsy, youthful, fashion, I extricated myself from the commitment after two years of weekly visits. My school work and jobs were taking too much of my time. I had learned that hospitality could be clothed in very simple food and drink, that very simple tasks were unbelievably difficult through a language barrier, and that integrating into a new culture was challenging. For the women in this group, it was taking longer and was more difficult than for their husbands and children. They all worked, but in order to maximize efficiency, they worked night shifts doing janitorial work, which left little time for contact with the people and customs of Boise. The men were working as mechanics with at least some customer service required and so their language skills were far ahead of their wives’. The children, naturally more adaptable, were in school and speaking passable, though accented, English after six months residency.

In the years since working directly with refugees I have been more alert to seeing their presence in Boise. Not a famously diverse place, Boise has a far more vibrant restaurant scene than it would without the cultures represented by former refugees. Tarbush Kitchen, TONAC food truck, Kibrom’s, and Sunshine Spice Cafe enliven our city’s flavor. Women wearing traditional African dresses walk down the sidewalks. Families work on small farms and bring fresh produce to farmer’s markets. And, most importantly, those who once lived in fear of violence and persecution, like Steve and Yvette, have found a place where they can grow.

Steve framed it as a recognition of “Maslow’s Pyramid”, referring to the hierarchy of needs for all humans. Once the basics are met, as it is much easier to do in America than in a war-torn and impoverished nation, a person can grow. Steve spoke gratefully of all the volunteers who helped him navigate those basic human needs and the early jobs he worked to provide them, but then he pointed out that even before Covid struck, there were fewer families willing to help host new refugees and fewer organizations trained and ready to assist with finding housing and that all-important first job.

In the last four years the landscape of refugee resettlement has changed dramatically in Boise and in the rest of the US. As the former president slashed the ceiling for admission to the US from 80,000 refugees per year to just 18,000, of which only 11,814 were admitted, many resettlement organizations – the non-profits that arrange for host families, tutoring, job training, and housing – were totally defunded. Without the necessary caseload to pay salaries, the trained specialists were laid off and had to find other work. If and when refugee numbers go back up, new organizations may need to be formed and new case managers will need to be found and trained.

And we Boiseans who have lived here, who know the landscape both literally and socially, will need to volunteer a little of our time to teach English, to show off our grocery stores, to help find meaningful and accessible work, to welcome our new neighbors in the city that we all get to call home.

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Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

- Amanda Patchin

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PS - Stronger Shines the Light Inside is a photography project that tells personal stories of refugees in the United States. It was created by photographer Angie Smith and began in 2015. Many people featured in this project are our friends and neighbors in Boise. I highly encourage you to check out the photos and stories within this incredible project.

For more reading: check out this Idaho Capital Sun story featuring three local former refugees on making Boise their home, and this Idaho Press story about a local couple recently reuniting at the Boise Airport <3