I suppose this can happen from time to time, but the story of a Burmese refugee family arriving on a bus in Erie, PA in the middle of the night and not having anyone to meet them (required by the State Department) caught my eye because it occured in Erie, PA. It’s a while since we had any missteps by the International Institute (an USCRI affiliate) in Erie, but there was a time when they were embroiled in some funny money business and things were falling through the cracks. See my post of two years ago this month on the controversy, here.
From a blog called the Taungzalat:
A refugee family traveling from Myanmar to Erie on Thursday got an early introduction to some of the headaches Americans experience when flying.
Erie International Airport employees were surprised when the family of seven arrived on a bus with nowhere to go at about 2 a.m.
Tom Rivers, a night custodian at the airport, knew there was a problem when he looked at their identification tags.
“I saw where they were from, and I thought, holy smokes,” he said.
Airport staff assisted the family, who had no money and did not speak English.
[…..]
Representatives of the International Institute of Erie, who were to meet the family, were never notified that the Continental Airlines flight had been canceled.
With nowhere to go, the family wandered around the airport barefoot, as is the custom inside homes in Myanmar.
“They were dead tired when they got off the bus,” Rivers said.
A police officer and airport staff bought the exhausted family a gallon of milk and energy bars. The family members bundled up with blankets and slept on the floor before they were picked up later in the morning.
The mixup is being blamed on the International Organization for Migration. By the way, IOM gets over $300 million of your tax dollars every year to do their job of getting refugees ready to go to the US and to get them on flights.
I wonder, when this poor family has to repay its airfare do they get any breaks for the aggrevation they endured?