Local Organizations Provide Humanitarian Aid for Refugees

College students and religious organizations are getting involved.

Houston is home to many groups and nonprofits that offer humanitarian aid for refugees, some of which have been started by college students and religious organizations.

The University of Houston has numerous organizations that help underserved communities, but not many that target refugees specifically, which Refugee Advancement through Humanitarian Aid does.

RAHA Houston is a student-led organization founded by college seniors Ruqayyah Shaik and Hafsa Mushtaq. To Nadia Nasim, RAHA’s president, the organization is a “one-stop-shop for refugees” because it focuses on educating the public about international crises and providing aid to refugees by donating to organizations that work directly or sending them care packages.

Their most recent project called Beyond Nationalism gathered nearly 500 students, alumni, faculty, and even protestors. “The goal was to describe what was happening in Kashmir, the region’s history, and have all the presenters be Kashmiri themselves so we’re not claiming someone else’s narrative” said Nasim.

According to Shaik, although there are many refugee aid programs in the United States whose goals are to provide aid to refugees and allow them to stand on their own feet, refugees she’s interacted with have noticed the amount of aid provided has been decreasing substantially.

“Politicians are trying to say that if we decrease the amount of aid we give to refugees, they’ll be more motivated to get jobs but the thing they’re ignoring is, almost half the refugee population may have degrees, but they don’t know English. That affects employment so much. A lot of these refugees want to be educated but there aren’t enough resources that are meeting the needs of this huge number of refugees,” said Shaik.

Chatwara Suwannamai Duran has noticed a similar issue during her work with refugees. She is an associate English professor at UH. Prior to becoming a professor, she was a qualitative researcher who worked extensively with refugees and studied the social, cultural, and historical constructs of migration and multilingualism. She lived with and observed Karenni refugees while she was studying at Arizona State University.

“Even though teachers are trying to give fairness in education, a lot of the refugee students I talked to felt like it’s unfair that the teacher can’t speak the language they speak, but the teacher can speak Spanish to another group, so it’s kind of a barrier in delivering some information they need to have. There’s no way the teachers would know all the languages of their students, but there might be a way like using visual aids and structuring the lesson in a way that is available to everyone,” said Duran.

Solutions like this would help RAHA in their efforts to help students aside from their bi-annual school supply drives and college tours for prospective refugee students.

RAHA doesn’t directly interact with refugees often, but it works closely with organizations that do. Nasim mentioned a lot of refugees who come to Houston resettle in the U.S. 59 and Hillcroft area, among many other pockets of Greater Houston.

And that’s where the Maryam Islamic Center Refugee Services often goes to deliver food, clothing, hygiene kits and furniture to refugees. All of these items come from weekly donations from the community. The mosque’s program started nearly a decade ago by Rafiq Bhojwani, an active member of the Muslim community in Sugar Land. On Saturdays, their packing team meets in the morning to pack bags of meat, rice, sugar and flour in cartons, so they are ready to be delivered door to door the next day.

On Sunday mornings, the delivery team meets by its signature white truck in the mosque parking lot to load the cartons, after which they reconvene at the designated refugee neighborhood for that week. Once they arrive, Bhojwani refers to his pen-and-paper list, created mainly by trial-and error, which consists of apartment numbers where he knows refugees live. Refugees move often, so a family they may have helped numerous times before may not live there anymore.

{Left} In this picture taken on Sunday, Nov. 17, 2019 in Houston, TX, a volunteer with the Maryam Islamic Center Refugee Services program can be seen behind the playground pulling a stroller full of supplies. The Ashford Crescent Oaks Apartments is home to mostly refugees and this program aids them every Sunday morning. {Center} Two volunteers can be seen loading a shopping cart with packets of meat from an ice cooler next to their loading van. In 2018, the organization collected money from Muslims from Maryam Islamic Center to buy a new van to load heavy items like rice bags, meat and furniture. {Right} A volunteer holds a bag of over-the-counter medications to pass to refugees. Many refugees don’t have access to proper healthcare or they simply cannot afford basic medications like Tylenol.

{Left} A volunteer stands under a line of drying clothes as he waits for the delivery team to unload more items from the truck. They can distinguish which homes are occupied depending on where there are hanging clothes, a practice done mainly by Afghani and Urdu speaking refugees. {Center} An elderly man picks up the care package volunteers have dropped by his doorstep. Volunteers knock on nearly 70 doors each Sunday, delivering food and hygiene products. {Right} A refugee girl looks at the delivery team as they move around the neighborhood and coordinate which homes to visit. Majority of the refugees don’t speak English, but their children do so they tend to translate when there is a language barrier.

“We have a furniture drive twice a year where we collect donated furniture from the community throughout the year and we take it to the refugees’ homes. We mainly give preference to refugees who have newly arrived, so they can settle in,” said Salam Mahamad, who works with the delivery team.

The process of numerous men knocking on doors throughout this complex and carrying heavy bags can get loud, so families tend to come out either to see what’s going on, or because they’re expecting that time of the month.

When Bhojwani comes across a refugee he doesn’t recognize, he notes down the person’s name, apartment number, number of family members in the home, and how many people are working, to gauge how many supplies to bring them for future reference.

Maryam Islamic Center Refugee Services helps hundreds of families. Since RAHA was created three years ago, it has helped Syrian, Congolese, Venezuelan, Burmese, and Yemeni refugees. Although these local Houston organizations are serving the refugee community in different ways, both are making strides in assisting the group both directly and indirectly.