![]() Vignarajah suggests a number of options for individuals or groups that want to help the evacuees. They will also make use of the housing assistance being offered by Air B&B and by individuals who have offered homes rent-free.Ībout a dozen families locally have been housed thanks to the line of credit that Air B&B donated. She said her organization has relationships with landlords, though some require six months of rent up-front. ![]() “These are very resilient people – they want jobs, they want to restart their lives – so we’re trying to help them with that as well.” “We’re doing everything from finding them affordable housing to furnishing it with modest furniture to stocking the refrigerator with culturally familiar foods,” Vignarajah said. ![]() “That stipend is what they will have to put toward rent, toward food, toward medical expenses and it’s obviously a fraction of what is needed to start a new life, to find a new home in this region,” Vignarajah said.Īid agencies are pushing Congress to appropriate funds to do more, but, in the meantime, trying to help while they can with basic necessities. Under a special 90-day program, they receive limited assistance and a one-time $1,250 stipend.īut they will not have the full range of medical, counseling and resettlement services available to immigrants who arrive through the traditional U.S. LIRS and other aid organizations point out that most of the 60,000 Afghan evacuees arrive not as “refugees,” but rather with “ humanitarian parole” status. “Imagine coming here as an Afghan with no nest egg, no credit history, no rental landlord references,” she said, noting that the Virginia-DC-Baltimore area where they have arrived is already struggling with high housing prices and bracing, amid the pandemic, for a wave of evictions.ĭonated bedding lines a hallway at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service headquarters in Baltimore. It starts with the challenge of finding them a place to live. hastily withdrew from Afghanistan, were asking for everything from diapers and toothbrushes to laptops and sim cards.īut now, she said, the hard work of helping them rebuild their lives is just beginning. The families she met shortly after their arrival at the Army’s Fort Lee base in central Virginia, brought there as part of an emergency evacuation last month as the U.S. “This group of new Afghan arrivals is coming with just the clothes on their back or maybe just a little knapsack they were allowed to bring,” Vignarajah said in an interview with The Brew. The public was so generous, including one person who drove four hours from Roanoke, Virginia to drop off donations, that “we had to say, ‘Please, stop,’” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, LIRS president and chief executive.Īs staff and volunteers catalogue and distribute the bounty, Vignarajah wants to thank the community for their generosity and talk about the continuing need. And a long conference table is laden with blankets, sheets, quilts and brightly colored children’s bedding.ĭonations for Afghan evacuees have been flooding into Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) national headquarters in Baltimore, which just wrapped up a two-week donation drive. A yellow Le Creuset casserole dish sits in another.ĭown coats, ladies shoes, packs of diapers and other personal items fill a storage room. There’s a mountain of boxes of kitchen items in the lobby: new dinner plates, bowls and silverware.
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