But surely the money will flow when Obamacare is in full swing—-right?
From The Huffington Post (emphasis mine):
Muntaha Flufel says on most days she sits alone at home watching TV, unable to interact with the community she lives in. She keeps her windows and doors locked, in fear that someone might break in and attack her like they did in Baghdad in 2004. Her scars are constant reminders — marks where the perpetrators dropped acid on her skin.
Although troops left Iraq nearly two years ago, hundreds of civilians are still being killed each month, leading many Iraqis to flee the continuing violence, which is contributing to an already dire refugee situation. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, since April of this year, 84, 902 Iraqis have been settled in the U.S., and new arrivals like Muntaha are reporting symptoms associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
We need to give some credit to this Huffington Post article by Erin Banco for even mentioning that these Chaldeans were tormented by Islamists!
According to health officials at ACCESS, a community organization dedicated to empowering and enabling individuals and families in the Detroit area, many of the new Iraqi Chaldean arrivals experienced primary and secondary trauma, having witnessed family members being killed, oftentimes persecuted at the hands of Islamist militias.
The trauma has caused what Husam Abdulkhaleq, the program manager of the psychosocial rehabilitation center, says includes nightmares, poor concentration, and extreme anger. The grueling process of integrating and assimilating in a new country only exacerbates the symptoms. [Reporter Banco even dares to use the word “assimilating” a term usually verboten by the professional resettlers!—-ed]
It will be “disastrous” when the Syrians come!
The ACCESS psychosocial rehabilitation program receives the majority of its funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an organization that provides refugees with the services needed to integrate into their new communities. ACCESS just recently received another three years of funding from the group, but Abdulkhaleq says the money is significantly less than what it received in previous years.
ACCESS is barely able to provide services for the most recent arrivals from Iraq with the money it has. The next area of concern is the possible wave of Syrian refugees it could see over the next five years. If the UN begins to resettle even a portion of the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the violence in the US, officials at ACCESS say the consequences could be “disastrous.”
ACCESS’s potential client load should be increasing even without the Syrians as we resettled 19,491 potentially traumatized Iraqis in FY2013 alone!
The photo is from this 2001 story about ACCESS in the wake of 9/11 (his clients were really stressed!), but I found another article from 2004 only as a ‘document’ in which he describes his “torture” for no reason at all at the hands of the wicked Israelis.
