Sonoma County refugees share journeys of hope

Among tens of millions of refugees who have been resettled across the world, including 3 million who have found homes in the United States since 1975, those in Sonoma County are but a tiny fraction.

Yet they are at the same time everywhere here, like the three profiled today: in Costco's meat department, behind the counter at Starbucks, in the pharmacy department at a local hospital. They are everyday footnotes to the furious argument about what the global community can and should do to address the plight of some 18 million people worldwide officially designated as refugees.

Somphet Pheauboonma [link], Milad Yusuf Ibrahim Al Najjar [link] and Girmai Araya [link] are among several thousand refugees resettled in Sonoma County, driven here almost exclusively by war or its aftermath.

Catholic Charities, the nonprofit agency that resettled the vast majority of local refugees, could not provide exact statistics, but the arrivals reflected the globe.

Many hundreds of Southeast Asians, mostly Vietnamese but also Cambodians and Laotians, arrived in the late 1970s into the mid-1980s. Large numbers of Eritreans came starting in the 1980s. Others came from the Balkans, the Indian subcontinent and, more recently, from the Middle East.

The numbers have slowed to a comparative trickle. According to the State Department, just 61 refugees have been resettled in Sonoma County since 2002.

Information by specific destination is unreliable before that year, according to the department. Countries of origin included Liberia, Bangladesh, Russia and Iran. The largest single group — 18 — were Eritrean.

Each refugee endured repeated interviews and security, health and document checks. The FBI and, since 2001, the Department of Homeland Security, vetted their applications. Many were in refugee camps or otherwise stateless for months, sometimes years, before finding their way to new homes in Santa Rosa and Petaluma, Rohnert Park and Sebastopol.

Most were destitute, and as they searched for work and housing, spoke no or little English.

'It's very hard,' said Ashley Patel, refugee resettlement director at Catholic Charities, which closed its resettlement operation last year, because of diminishing refugee cases and the cost of handling them.

'You came here with nothing, so you have to start from zero, this is what is hard about it,' Ibrahim Al Najjar said.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay.