#the shawarma I made with it last year like still haunts me it was so so so fucking good

[tomatoluvr69]

When I was a kid there was absolutely zero indication I’d be into the hobbies I’m into like I would probably think I was lame as fuck for not having some highbrow nyc literary career. But it’s actually crazy how grounded and well I feel after spending a day doing some foraging, pickling, gardening tasks, and prepping ferments like it’s fucking insane. And I miss the city lifestyle but like…damn this stuff will really have you feeling like an actual organism

[shadowturtlesstuff]

again but better thoughts while reading

@polandbananas20

 so my spelling is terrible in this but you know i was more focused on the book than how to spell. 

Chapter 1) good intro and good starting tone. The lady next to her sucks. Good small establishment of shane.

chapter2)shane characterisation is still consistent. I like her two new roommates (will be best friends) . My guess is the boy in the kitchen will be pilot. Family means but not intentional. Has no confidence. I was right about the boy

Chapter 3) intro of pilot properly. He's good. I love the inner monologue of shane. Trying to keep eye contact, the surprise of having a normal conversation. It sets her character well. Intro to her blog which i would love to actually read (i hope there's at least one entry we can read) pilot is a musician but not. Business major. What crap. 

Chapter 4) i really feel like shane, she is just typical fangirl/ dork and i love it. Its weird being english and reading about the things that shock them like pasta in bags.i understand the watermelon.we do get to read ‘shanes writing’ but its her personal jornal not her blog.

Chapter 5) fun chapter. Intro to rome. Love the idea that shane is heavy handed and violent. Short, not alot happened other than small character establishment.

Chapter 6)intro to creative writing class which i want/need in my life.more beatles. Woman on plane works at starbucks, will she make more appearances? 

Chapter 7) the drama???or at least wht will be the drama. Pilot has a gf, called amy (wish it was me) (wait no, bc i know that plot doesnt actually like amy anymore bc he obviously likes shane. So i take it back. I want to be shane, i mean i basically am like her but oh well.)

Chapter 8) parents. Overprotective, think they know best. Urgh. guarantee one of shanes new friends fight back to her parents to support her life choices, that do not include doctor.

Chapter 9)gets an internship at travel mag company. Thats it…..

Chapter 10)rome. Looses purse. Pilot to the anxiety riddled rescue by telling his own life story about his wallet to help calm her nerves.distracts her. Basially he would do anything for shane already.re count of rome trip from her jornal again which is a good touch to further the plot. This is making me want to read dan brown (ish) all of two books i own of him

Chapter 11) the postcards are a nice touch that i hope someone reads???? Travel buddies..just saying.chad..hmmm,im like shane,well see if he is good enough for babe. Her GODDAM stupdi mean cousins being mean on her facebook, and babe seeing (best friend moment) about pilot and the whole teasing about having a boyfriend.

Chapter 12) he didnt see (but i think he did but istn sayin anything) paris i shappening. Babe is bff confirmed and i want her as my friend 

Chapter 13)angry birds addiction starts. Level three, weak, shoulder touching it romance confirmed.awwww pilot 100% waited to sleep so he could see shane safe in bed

Chapter 14) pilot with a french accent, enough  said. The flirtinggggg.  The plane woman  is back??in paris with them????

Chapter 15)pilots choices of the back in time thing are both wit shane. Its so obvious and i love it. Pilot as a fake fangirl about the eiffel tower. More flirting,kind of. Oh god chad no.he did it. Goddammit.nooo he wull run babe and shanes friendship and maybe her and pilot. ‘Assbucket’ indeed. Her an pilot are fine and i really believe her and babe will be because when she nearly gets robbed babe giver her a sympathetic smile. Not much to go on but i have hope.

Chapter 16)okay so, fav chapter, she finally spills her guts that she has anxiety basically, that she is premed with strict parents and this is scary whilst pilots lies in bed with her to relax her bc he heard her crying. He only ecoureges her slightly before going back to his bed and sleeping. My heart, i swear, soon the roles reverse and pilot will say why he is in london and all that.

Chapter 17)babe and shane bffs confired. Chad is the worst confirmed. Of course it wasnt  break up call. Of course she wants to vist. Of course pilot is to cowardly to break up and just accepts them going to paris together. Of freaking course.

Chapter 18) do not get over pilot, it wont work. Rugby guy nooooo!im team pilot how dare you kiss shane! Wow, city of glass mention. I want to make a list of every bookmentioned.

Chapter 19) pilot is not himself (obviouls) shane is worried. She is still lying to her parents an feeling bad about. Rugby guy is thankfully a no go. Pilot finds out about the kiss and guy and is clearly silently jealous. 

Chapter 20)aww shane! Im sorry pilot sucks currently. And a stupid guys trip with flat four. No. and devil chairs. 

Chapter 21)1)love the book talk.  The loneliness is kicking in, pilot man up for gods sake

Chapter 22)this red-head plain weirdo is back and going through her list like some sort of mentore. Omg!!! No. amy is here, i dont hatte her but can she not. Also, her dad…. No! (this is the stand up moment i was on about, i hope)

Chapter 23) i do not like her dad. At all. Nooo shane...no. they found out. And acted like assholes.

Chapter 24) n1!ahhhh no! Amy has her notebook. The end is nigh.im going to cry i feel like shane. 

Chapter 25) the family dinner-family outing. Niether of them manuped and shane is depressed

Chapter 26)back in america. Still hasn’t told pilot but you know it is a slow burn

Chapter 27) I, wait? Marry, some guy? Like no. I know it’s been what six years but no. I refuse.i don’t like this so called Melvin. It’s okay she doesn’t want to marry him. She goes to see pilot and finally mans up and tells him and asks if she made it and and pilot finally man’s up and tells her no she didn’t. They get stuck in an elevator

Chapter 28) the elevators doing something. Shane wants to re do London cuz she hates life

Chapter 1?) they are both back in London? Both having the same what ever is happening? 

  Chapter 2) omg. Plane lady took them back to staRt over and pilots mad about it (obv)

Chapter 3)so… they got mad but started over and I’m excited. 100%they won’t press the restart button. I’m calling it now. Cuz pilot knows he now has a chance to do the what if’s/

Chapter 4) they keep there distance but we all know it won’t last

Chapter 5) tipsy Shane? Shawarma

Chapter 6) babe thinksthere is something going on with them( again)

Chapter7)the story about fake pilot, and the kiss. Ahhhhhhg

Chapter 8)they found the button. Shane doesn’t want to go back. I do t want them to go back. They don’t go back thank god

Chapter 9) da Vinci code flirting somehow.. Shane tells him it won’t happen u less he breaks up with last Amy.

 Chapter 10) he will break up with Amy and laris is gonna happen. 

Chapter 11) so Shane is happy again, pilot broke up with amy. Shane tried to make peace with the devil chair.

Chapter 11) they are so adorable. Aswwwwewhwhehruysnwjw

 Chapter 12) Uwuwnfhueia we get more Shane and pilot flirting, 

Chapter 13) the opposite game is adorable. I like that they get to be themselves together without the awkwardness. The start of the move game. Thats my fav. 

Chapter 14) they still have the angry birds obssesion but unlike me and supercard they know when to stop.the dance ‘move’ ahh i love. The line ‘but you do.’ just shows how much they know each other and how pilot would do anything to make her smile. And the lost move (not really a move but totally a move.) once again proves their love. Also we had that plot moment where he talks about why h chose to go to london. I adore shanes rant (?) about the things she loves. And then pilot doing the same thing. Shane vs chair is my life, like i battle chairs too. 

Chapter 15) what is tfios? Ooohhh. Fault in our stars. (i googled it)i probably shouldve known by the whole always part. The dance move came back to bite pilot in the ass and now they are dancing together. Ew chad. Yes shane! That is what chad deserves. 

Chapter 16) they get intimate and gigly and happy and aaaawwwhww

Chapter 17) im glad shane still rememebers to be friends with babe and not forget her in her lovestick state currently.

Chapter 18) her postcard….the questions that haunt her so much. Sort of accepting them herself too. She finally got to do wrecking ball, they miss internship , oh no…. Start if a downall?? 

Chapter 19) shane and pilot have fallen HARD

Chapter 20) the article is off the table. Amy is there. What the hell. No. omg pilot no, you moron. THEY BROKE UP!!! Which is fair, a break is needed. They both get back on track and then try and find a balance. Hopefully. Oh her laptop….shit...the feels when all your work is just gone. Tries to reset bc she is so depressed bc she thinks she failed again. 

Chapter 21) she cant go back (thankfully) a bookstore is always a good haven to go to when your breaking down.

Chapter 22)the redemtion (?) time to try and fix everything and get back on track.the determination and the readiness to try and make everything better for herswelf, herself, and no one else is good. She makes friends with the people in her office and works harder than befire, try to get herself out of her comfort zone and experience things

Chapter 23) the confrontation with her parents. Oh god. I hope this goes well. Its going as well as it can go. Im happy shane is sticking up for her dream so she can be happy, uugh the whole dad speech of ‘i do everything for you, i know best because im older,’ i hate it. Ooohh she is making up with leo, talking ot him this time. Im happy. Leo is gay. Cool. i hate how he got broken up with becuase of his stupid family, it sucks. ‘There is no normal.’ perfect words. 

Chapter 24) her thing is in the thing!!!( also good job me with words.) her article got published (there we go)this is where she learns she can be with pilot and be successful because tracy is with a famous author and they make it work with harder schedules. Trys to talk to her parents. This time she will make there relationship work.

Chapter 25)urgh ‘you live under my roof,on my dime…’ blah blah blah. We hate controlling parents that dont see that overprotecting and controlling their childs life does more damage than good. Babe suggest self discovery trip. Babe is a grat friends. 

Chapter 26)the button thing will work…’im mad at pilot. Or am i mad at me.’ she cracked the code. She loathed herself because of her fear of failing, but because this time she worked on herself to make herself happy she no longer hates herself. Yet she still feels the same (ish) feeling that even though she worked harder and got further that she has no summer job when she gets back to the states, her parents still wont allow her choice of work.PILOTS BACK!!!!!!! She was about to press the button and he swooped in with his music.

Chapter 27) he still follows her blog and got help from babe. His speech, finished with lamppost. Where can i get a pilot?he uploaded their song. Working through the divorce thing again but it will be better because he has shane to talk to about it. Ahhh she got a job!!! Happy ending!!! My heart!!!eeeee…

epilogoue) she becomes a successful author. Her parents have accepted her and support her. Pilots a musician. He takes her to the weird plane lady and they gobe the locket back, then he makes the ultimate move. With pictures of where they fell in love he uses the beatles russain doll things to hide a ring and when she finds it she obviously says yes. And that its unfair cuz she cant top that move. 

sooo...thats it.

i really enjoyed this book. i cannot wait for her next book. this post is longwinded i apologize but oh well? again i will link my website and review as soon as its done. so far in about five hours all i have is a paragraph so it may not be as soon as i want it to be

[konstantinwrites]

Treasures from the Roof of the Insurmountable, Part 3

Noonday Rest in New England (Julian Alden Weir)

32: Breathlessly by Claudia Faniello (Malta)

A gratifying melody, which ballad ultras will need just a few listens to remember. Anyone else looking to memorize this, however, will have to mainline it in the same way that we bludgeon-repeat newly loved songs for a seemingly mathematically impossible number of times over two hours.

Claudia surfs up and down her notes pleasingly. The ambient country-music noises in the first verse set a fine ensorcelled mood, and the horns are fun. Uncreative is the light rock that builds up the second verse and chorus, and at one point I wrote that the percussion is “utilized appallingly”. That’s a bit overkill, but it pales to the degree that “Breathlessly” is underkill.

Girl's got some pipes, and I dig the video. A little sappy, but it's that kind of contest. 6/10.

Philip Piatt

31: Never Give Up On You by Lucie Jones (United Kingdom)

Somewhere around 9th grade, when my brain progressed and regressed 50 times a day, this is the kind of deathly-earnest driving ballad I’d put on while looking over box scores of sports games on espn.com. This is oomph-ous. Sports leagues do make their own compilations that you can binge on - “Five for Fighting NHL” is a playlist - but venturing out on your own, combining the Eastern conference semifinals with an aria like “Never Give Up On You”, is the sign of a promising young adult. Try it when the playoff round of whatever you care about comes along.

I have no feelings about this song.

Hannah Fulmer

30: Don’t Come Easy by Isaiah (Australia)

Australia participates in Eurovision; it is their third year now. Those who disagree that Australia should be here are, as far as I remember, very very valuable humans and must hide and never opinionate again, or else a newly spawned horror organism will sniff them out and destroy the Earth just to eat all their good thoughts up. I think that’s the latest revision of this European Broadcasting Union law.

“Don’t Come Easy” is all second fiddle to the fact that on most days Isaiah looks like a hangry Sanjaya, and on other days a particularly melodramatic Lib Dem youth activist profiled for GQ. Sinfully not performing as “Isaiah Firebrace”, his given name, Isaiah Nothing Else enthusiastically serenades through the provided piano pop, splashing all of our usual daily phrases – “in my mind”, “no, I don’t”, and “it don’t come cheap” – with vibrating, emotive grandeur.

It’s surprisingly palatable, and I’m not really sure what works. "Don’t Come Easy” benefits most from a kind of moody absence of sound, with its weakest minute the last, as it brutishly crescendoes into itself. For the most part, however, Isaiah delivers expressively and addictively. He ate a big lunch.

Isaiah's song really helped me to feel the struggle of wanting more in a relationship. Poor him for being burned too many times easily - I hope can break through the stone and find love. His voice is lovely, though. He really has mastered those runs and can hit those high notes. I thought the melody and key of the song suited his voice really well. Other than that, I hated the music video and I think he could've been way more creative with it. 7/10.

Kate Sullivan

29: Fly With Me by Artsvik (Armenia)

To their unfortunate state of affairs, I often hammer friends with the tired old line that today the definitions of “modern music” and “Eurovision” are interchangeable. Songs here can be fresh. It’s a ModernVision for you in 2017, like an inaugural tagline for an instantly doomed centrist party, but instead about thriving centrist music. And when architecture of the kind in “Fly With Me”, replete with moreish subtlety, qualifies to be part of the show and with luck could be on the radio everywhere, it’s clear that Eurovision does lack a repertoire of understated stuff. Pop that doesn’t pop is still a rareish bird here.

The other morning I was pulled into an 11th grade class at the last minute with no explanation. With nothing planned, and knowing I couldn’t get a group of unruly teens to do anything on my own, I just sat patiently in the front of the class and we all agreed to be quiet and do our own thing. Remembering that I promised to write this review, I brought out my laptop and started playing “Fly With Me” on low volume. Suddenly the students went quiet and stared at me. I looked up, smiled, and raised the volume. They smiled back in approval and started dancing in their seats and bobbing their heads to the beat. It was a great moment. Their response made me feel cool and hip in the way that only nonchalant teens can.

That feeling of young, modern coolness permeates this song, but there’s more to it than that. It has a sense of gravitas that makes you want to keep listening. The song combines electronic elements, like the pulsing beat of the bass guitar, with traditional drums, to form a compelling base for Artsvik’s engaging melody. Overall, I like it a lot. It’s catchy and fun, and unlike Spain’s entry for this year, I don’t mind it getting stuck in my head.

Hannah Fulmer

28: Blackbird by Norma John (Finland)

My choice of songs that I think are better than this mesmeric ballad will render me deranged in your eyes, totally porangi. It won’t be one of those “shawarma over haute cuisine at 1 a.m.” arguments, in which you kind of see the point for either. When you hear the shawarma ahead, I know that it will be 12-15 years before you’ll make me eligible to apply for parole.

But it’s rather difficult to remember more about this than the water vapor on stage and being cheated of the song’s bathyspheric immersion with a last-minute switch to red, like Vincent Tan and Cardiff City, so maybe I will escape your sentence. Oppressively somnolent and not too bothered about containing things that can be heard and not just surmised, it’s a surprise that the showrunners cued its instrumental recording on time with the vocals.

Putting aside that “Blackbird” sounds like an outro to a Kickstarter’d baroque pop album that didn’t reach six of its stretch goals (not putting this aside at all), it’s kind of beautiful and the cascading faint electronic pulsations are real cool. This song will be bent in every direction forever, like space, or the dark web, and one day Leonard Susskind will rush over to smack it in the forehead with a candlestick and finally put some damn entropy on it.

“Blackbird” is certainly one of the most downtempo songs in this year’s contest. Sung in the form of a distraught ballad, the story is simple: a woman is tortured by her former lover’s memory in the form of an omnipresent blackbird. The imagery of a forlorn lover haunted in this way has a folklorish appeal that is very unusual (she pleads with the bird to “somewhere else go make your home/don’t nestle here, go find lovers of your own”). Lyrically very simple and repetitive, consisting of only 40 different words, the song is carried by Leena Tirronen’s ethereal vocals.

With its delicate, unrestrained piano, the bridge promises a major tonal shift of some sort. Unfortunately, though, it only brings a louder repetition of the chorus to the end of the song. Overall, “Blackbird” is a beautiful song about the pain of nostalgia. That said, it ends up feeling somehow incomplete and leaves me wanting just a bit more substance. 7/10.

Richard Hansen

[repwinpril9y0a1]

They Fled Iraq For America. Now, They Cope With Life Under Trump.

PHOENIX ― Shortly after the car bomb killed her family, hitting their vehicle as her mother and brother rushed their ailing father to a nearby hospital, Hanan Hassan decided to leave Iraq.

It was 2007, four years into the war, and tragedy still came with regularity. But you can’t understand how it feels to suddenly lose your loved ones until it actually happens. In one moment, the foundations of Hassan’s life had been shattered, leaving behind only one inescapable reality: Her future was not in Baghdad.

She went to a United Nations office and pleaded with them to help her leave, to send her to a place where opportunities were plentiful and tragedies remote. She went to Lebanon first. Five months later, she was on a plane to the United States, penniless, with no family to help her assimilate and barely any English in her vocabulary. She was 28 years old.

She landed first in Michigan, but her final destination was Austin, Texas. She’d heard about Texas ― from the movies, naturally ― and envisioned it filled with cowboy hats and desert. When she landed, a man from the International Organization for Migration met her and drove her to her new apartment. It had a mattress, bed frame, table and refrigerator, but not much else.

The man didn’t stay long. It wasn’t his job to be her friend or translator or confidant. That first night in a new country, Hassan was alone and unable to sleep.

“I spent all of the night on the balcony just looking,” she said. “Just looking.”

Nine years and various chapters of her life have passed since then. Hassan found work and made friends. She fell in and out of love. She traveled the country, developing a soft spot for city life, and recently settled in Phoenix.

She now works for the Arizona Allnation Refugee Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps assimilate newly arrived refugees. Some of them remind her of the petrified young woman she was when she first set foot in Austin. Others are more religious or from different parts of the world or have more resources at their disposal.

The more recent ones have arrived in a fundamentally different America than the country Hassan confronted on that balcony in January 2008. It is a place more scared and skeptical than back then, more willing to close its doors to those eager to come in.

It’s a place where the newly elected president, just days after taking office, signed an executive order to block resettlement of all refugees for 120 days, ban Syrian refugees indefinitely and bar more than 200 million people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days.

“It has affected the refugees emotionally,” Hassan said of that ban, which is currently under a temporary restraining order. “A lot of people think they will be sent back home. I get phone calls almost every day from people saying: ‘Hey, are we going to be OK here? I don’t want to be sent back home because if they did, they will kill me there.’”  

When politicians and lawyers and cable prognosticators debate Donald Trump’s plan to temporarily suspend immigration, they speak in broad terms about constitutional constraints, political ripple effects and the nuance of counter-terrorism policy. But the real-world impact of the ban is felt in remote corners of America’s towns and cities, by people you won’t see on TV or arguing in front of a judge or casting votes in Congress.  

Hassan’s office is in a downtrodden strip mall in downtown Phoenix, obscured from the road by JB’s Restaurant, a 1-800-Flowers retail store and an abandoned building. If you don’t know where to look, you’ll have a hard time finding it. There is no sign on the street. The only hint is the Arabic script dotting the windows of storefronts in the strip mall: a “Baghdidi Hookah Lounge and Coffee Shop” that is in the process of being built, a Mediterranean grocery store that is also coming soon, and the words “Refugee Center” written faintly on a nearby glass door.

But refugees in Phoenix know where to look. Word of mouth leads them here, as do social media posts about the various services the center provides: language classes, drivers education, legal help and community events. On any given day, Hassan says, dozens of new immigrants come seeking help to pay rent or fill out citizenship or green card forms. Others come to learn English, cramming around plastic tables in a windowless room with badly stained carpet lining the floor. The room is not the most conducive to learning, but it’s what they have.  

Many, however, come just to talk with people who can empathize. In recent weeks, those talks have grown darker and more panicked. People wonder whether the current ban is just a starting point, whether their lives will soon be uprooted, whether they made a horrible mistake in coming to America.

Florida Al Amery teaches citizenship classes in that makeshift classroom. She says she got a legal degree in Iraq and worked with a U.S. company as an adviser. In 2006, her son was kidnapped. She suspected it was because of her ties to the American company. She paid a $30,000 ransom and sent him to Jordan, joining him there later after an envelope appeared in her car warning her she had to leave Iraq within three days.

By 2008, Amery had made her way to Phoenix. Now 60, she jokes that she chose the city because its climate is about as close an approximation to Baghdad as one could find in the United States. In reality, her sister was already here. That made her assimilation easier, but it wasn’t without its psychological toll. She left behind her legal career, figuring it would be too hard to earn another degree at that point in her life. There is a sense of longing in how she discusses her old life too ― the friends left behind and those no longer alive.

She��s also now haunted by the notion that she’s helping usher the students in her citizenship classes into an unwelcoming world.

“I am a teacher of citizenship,” she said. “And I am thinking of stopping because I can’t teach students or clients to follow the Constitution when the president breaks the Constitution.”

Over the past decade, Arizona has become, somewhat unexpectedly, a popular landing place for refugees. According to state data, 4,138 refugees settled in the state from the fall of 2014 through the fall of 2015. The subsequent year, more Syrian refugees came to Arizona than all but three other states. And, according to the State Department, in the past four months, another 1,539 refugees from around the globe have arrived there ― including 223 from Iraq, 208 from Syria, 24 from Iran, 12 from Sudan and 250 from Somalia (all states on Trump’s banned list). Only six states have welcomed more refugees in that time period.

There are various theories about why Arizona is such a magnet for refugees ― the hot climate being one, the cheap real estate being another. None of those theories involves the generosity of the state’s politicians.

Arizona is a haven for anti-immigrant political sentiment. Lawmakers there have called for a suspension of refugee resettlement programs, while some have gone so far as to propose fining charities $1,000 a day for each refugee they help resettle. Catholic Charities of Arizona, an organization that helps with resettlement in the state, declined to put me in touch with a refugee it had helped, citing the possibility that the person could become a target in the current political climate.

This, among other things, has caused the refugees already settled in Arizona to wonder just how public they should be in pushing back on Trump’s executive order, or whether it is worth fighting at all.

Mustafa, the proprietor of Moonlight, an Iraqi restaurant down the road from the refugee center, is one of those torn by the politics.

From the outside, his restaurant doesn’t look like much, tucked away as in a small storefront in another nondescript strip mall. But inside, he has nobly tried to conjure up scenes of old Baghdad. Arabic music videos play on the TV, and the walls are covered in paintings of Arab street murals. Middle Eastern artifacts and antique plates are scattered throughout. Unlit lamps hang from the ceiling, and trays of glass teacups and kettles sit on a table in the entryway.

Mustafa, who declined to give his last name, opened Moonlight when he came to Phoenix in 2014. Like Hassan, he left behind tragedy in Iraq. He and a brother both worked as interpreters for the U.S. Army. When his brother was murdered for that work, Mustafa fled, fearing he was next. A green card holder, he now spends his days cooking up shawarma, lamb shanks and kebabs, as well as giant platters of fresh cut vegetables, baba ghanoush and oily hummus.

The restaurant has become a hub for fellow Iraqis and, at least on a recent Wednesday, some non-Middle Easterners too. “It’s good,” he said of business. “When you start a new life, everything is new here. We have nice people here.”

Gregarious and playful, Mustafa took the tape recorder from my hand and placed it directly under his mouth to make sure his every word was properly recorded. But when I pointed out he could still be stuck in Iraq had Trump’s travel ban been in place three years ago, he grew recalcitrant and handed the recorder back. He said he supported the ban, but refused to elaborate. “I don’t have time now,” he said, darting back to his kitchen. 

Hassan, who sat nearby, couldn’t quite explain why Mustafa felt this way, other than to note that every refugee has his or her own stories, fears, hopes and experiences. Some are content with their corner of a Phoenix strip mall. Others fret over the possibility that their new lives might be ripped away from them. Still others feel that the only way to find stability is by showing those around them that they’re human, too.

Hassan is firmly in the latter category. She is a whirlwind of activity and adopted American tastes. She wrote an ebook on healthy living, goes to rock concerts ― Nine Inch Nails is a favorite ― and dreams of one day working at a fashion magazine in New York City. She is also proudly Muslim ― though not particularly observant ― and operates under the belief ― naive, perhaps ― that the more the rest of America sees people like her, the harder it will be for them to ban people like her.

“I’m lucky,” she said, an odd description for someone who’s lost so much. “Some people, when they lose family they will end up with mental issues or homeless or doing bad things. With me, that made me stronger. It made me appreciate life.”

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from DIYS http://ift.tt/2kAtO7L

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

They Fled Iraq For America. Now, They Cope With Life Under Trump.

PHOENIX ― Shortly after the car bomb killed her family, hitting their vehicle as her mother and brother rushed their ailing father to a nearby hospital, Hanan Hassan decided to leave Iraq.

It was 2007, four years into the war, and tragedy still came with regularity. But you can’t understand how it feels to suddenly lose your loved ones until it actually happens. In one moment, the foundations of Hassan’s life had been shattered, leaving behind only one inescapable reality: Her future was not in Baghdad.

She went to a United Nations office and pleaded with them to help her leave, to send her to a place where opportunities were plentiful and tragedies remote. She went to Lebanon first. Five months later, she was on a plane to the United States, penniless, with no family to help her assimilate and barely any English in her vocabulary. She was 28 years old.

She landed first in Michigan, but her final destination was Austin, Texas. She’d heard about Texas ― from the movies, naturally ― and envisioned it filled with cowboy hats and desert. When she landed, a man from the International Organization for Migration met her and drove her to her new apartment. It had a mattress, bed frame, table and refrigerator, but not much else.

The man didn’t stay long. It wasn’t his job to be her friend or translator or confidant. That first night in a new country, Hassan was alone and unable to sleep.

“I spent all of the night on the balcony just looking,” she said. “Just looking.”

Nine years and various chapters of her life have passed since then. Hassan found work and made friends. She fell in and out of love. She traveled the country, developing a soft spot for city life, and recently settled in Phoenix.

She now works for the Arizona Allnation Refugee Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps assimilate newly arrived refugees. Some of them remind her of the petrified young woman she was when she first set foot in Austin. Others are more religious or from different parts of the world or have more resources at their disposal.

The more recent ones have arrived in a fundamentally different America than the country Hassan confronted on that balcony in January 2008. It is a place more scared and skeptical than back then, more willing to close its doors to those eager to come in.

It’s a place where the newly elected president, just days after taking office, signed an executive order to block resettlement of all refugees for 120 days, ban Syrian refugees indefinitely and bar more than 200 million people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days.

“It has affected the refugees emotionally,” Hassan said of that ban, which is currently under a temporary restraining order. “A lot of people think they will be sent back home. I get phone calls almost every day from people saying: ‘Hey, are we going to be OK here? I don’t want to be sent back home because if they did, they will kill me there.’”  

When politicians and lawyers and cable prognosticators debate Donald Trump’s plan to temporarily suspend immigration, they speak in broad terms about constitutional constraints, political ripple effects and the nuance of counter-terrorism policy. But the real-world impact of the ban is felt in remote corners of America’s towns and cities, by people you won’t see on TV or arguing in front of a judge or casting votes in Congress.  

Hassan’s office is in a downtrodden strip mall in downtown Phoenix, obscured from the road by JB’s Restaurant, a 1-800-Flowers retail store and an abandoned building. If you don’t know where to look, you’ll have a hard time finding it. There is no sign on the street. The only hint is the Arabic script dotting the windows of storefronts in the strip mall: a “Baghdidi Hookah Lounge and Coffee Shop” that is in the process of being built, a Mediterranean grocery store that is also coming soon, and the words “Refugee Center” written faintly on a nearby glass door.

But refugees in Phoenix know where to look. Word of mouth leads them here, as do social media posts about the various services the center provides: language classes, drivers education, legal help and community events. On any given day, Hassan says, dozens of new immigrants come seeking help to pay rent or fill out citizenship or green card forms. Others come to learn English, cramming around plastic tables in a windowless room with badly stained carpet lining the floor. The room is not the most conducive to learning, but it’s what they have.  

Many, however, come just to talk with people who can empathize. In recent weeks, those talks have grown darker and more panicked. People wonder whether the current ban is just a starting point, whether their lives will soon be uprooted, whether they made a horrible mistake in coming to America.

Florida Al Amery teaches citizenship classes in that makeshift classroom. She says she got a legal degree in Iraq and worked with a U.S. company as an adviser. In 2006, her son was kidnapped. She suspected it was because of her ties to the American company. She paid a $30,000 ransom and sent him to Jordan, joining him there later after an envelope appeared in her car warning her she had to leave Iraq within three days.

By 2008, Amery had made her way to Phoenix. Now 60, she jokes that she chose the city because its climate is about as close an approximation to Baghdad as one could find in the United States. In reality, her sister was already here. That made her assimilation easier, but it wasn’t without its psychological toll. She left behind her legal career, figuring it would be too hard to earn another degree at that point in her life. There is a sense of longing in how she discusses her old life too ― the friends left behind and those no longer alive.

She’s also now haunted by the notion that she’s helping usher the students in her citizenship classes into an unwelcoming world.

“I am a teacher of citizenship,” she said. “And I am thinking of stopping because I can’t teach students or clients to follow the Constitution when the president breaks the Constitution.”

Over the past decade, Arizona has become, somewhat unexpectedly, a popular landing place for refugees. According to state data, 4,138 refugees settled in the state from the fall of 2014 through the fall of 2015. The subsequent year, more Syrian refugees came to Arizona than all but three other states. And, according to the State Department, in the past four months, another 1,539 refugees from around the globe have arrived there ― including 223 from Iraq, 208 from Syria, 24 from Iran, 12 from Sudan and 250 from Somalia (all states on Trump’s banned list). Only six states have welcomed more refugees in that time period.

There are various theories about why Arizona is such a magnet for refugees ― the hot climate being one, the cheap real estate being another. None of those theories involves the generosity of the state’s politicians.

Arizona is a haven for anti-immigrant political sentiment. Lawmakers there have called for a suspension of refugee resettlement programs, while some have gone so far as to propose fining charities $1,000 a day for each refugee they help resettle. Catholic Charities of Arizona, an organization that helps with resettlement in the state, declined to put me in touch with a refugee it had helped, citing the possibility that the person could become a target in the current political climate.

This, among other things, has caused the refugees already settled in Arizona to wonder just how public they should be in pushing back on Trump’s executive order, or whether it is worth fighting at all.

Mustafa, the proprietor of Moonlight, an Iraqi restaurant down the road from the refugee center, is one of those torn by the politics.

From the outside, his restaurant doesn’t look like much, tucked away as in a small storefront in another nondescript strip mall. But inside, he has nobly tried to conjure up scenes of old Baghdad. Arabic music videos play on the TV, and the walls are covered in paintings of Arab street murals. Middle Eastern artifacts and antique plates are scattered throughout. Unlit lamps hang from the ceiling, and trays of glass teacups and kettles sit on a table in the entryway.

Mustafa, who declined to give his last name, opened Moonlight when he came to Phoenix in 2014. Like Hassan, he left behind tragedy in Iraq. He and a brother both worked as interpreters for the U.S. Army. When his brother was murdered for that work, Mustafa fled, fearing he was next. A green card holder, he now spends his days cooking up shawarma, lamb shanks and kebabs, as well as giant platters of fresh cut vegetables, baba ghanoush and oily hummus.

The restaurant has become a hub for fellow Iraqis and, at least on a recent Wednesday, some non-Middle Easterners too. “It’s good,” he said of business. “When you start a new life, everything is new here. We have nice people here.”

Gregarious and playful, Mustafa took the tape recorder from my hand and placed it directly under his mouth to make sure his every word was properly recorded. But when I pointed out he could still be stuck in Iraq had Trump’s travel ban been in place three years ago, he grew recalcitrant and handed the recorder back. He said he supported the ban, but refused to elaborate. “I don’t have time now,” he said, darting back to his kitchen. 

Hassan, who sat nearby, couldn’t quite explain why Mustafa felt this way, other than to note that every refugee has his or her own stories, fears, hopes and experiences. Some are content with their corner of a Phoenix strip mall. Others fret over the possibility that their new lives might be ripped away from them. Still others feel that the only way to find stability is by showing those around them that they’re human, too.

Hassan is firmly in the latter category. She is a whirlwind of activity and adopted American tastes. She wrote an ebook on healthy living, goes to rock concerts ― Nine Inch Nails is a favorite ― and dreams of one day working at a fashion magazine in New York City. She is also proudly Muslim ― though not particularly observant ― and operates under the belief ― naive, perhaps ― that the more the rest of America sees people like her, the harder it will be for them to ban people like her.

“I’m lucky,” she said, an odd description for someone who’s lost so much. “Some people, when they lose family they will end up with mental issues or homeless or doing bad things. With me, that made me stronger. It made me appreciate life.”

Want more updates from Sam Stein? Sign up for his newsletter, Spam Stein, here.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

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from DIYS http://ift.tt/2kAtO7L

[realestate63141]

They Fled Iraq For America. Now, They Cope With Life Under Trump.

PHOENIX ― Shortly after the car bomb killed her family, hitting their vehicle as her mother and brother rushed their ailing father to a nearby hospital, Hanan Hassan decided to leave Iraq.

It was 2007, four years into the war, and tragedy still came with regularity. But you can’t understand how it feels to suddenly lose your loved ones until it actually happens. In one moment, the foundations of Hassan’s life had been shattered, leaving behind only one inescapable reality: Her future was not in Baghdad.

She went to a United Nations office and pleaded with them to help her leave, to send her to a place where opportunities were plentiful and tragedies remote. She went to Lebanon first. Five months later, she was on a plane to the United States, penniless, with no family to help her assimilate and barely any English in her vocabulary. She was 28 years old.

She landed first in Michigan, but her final destination was Austin, Texas. She’d heard about Texas ― from the movies, naturally ― and envisioned it filled with cowboy hats and desert. When she landed, a man from the International Organization for Migration met her and drove her to her new apartment. It had a mattress, bed frame, table and refrigerator, but not much else.

The man didn’t stay long. It wasn’t his job to be her friend or translator or confidant. That first night in a new country, Hassan was alone and unable to sleep.

“I spent all of the night on the balcony just looking,” she said. “Just looking.”

Nine years and various chapters of her life have passed since then. Hassan found work and made friends. She fell in and out of love. She traveled the country, developing a soft spot for city life, and recently settled in Phoenix.

She now works for the Arizona Allnation Refugee Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps assimilate newly arrived refugees. Some of them remind her of the petrified young woman she was when she first set foot in Austin. Others are more religious or from different parts of the world or have more resources at their disposal.

The more recent ones have arrived in a fundamentally different America than the country Hassan confronted on that balcony in January 2008. It is a place more scared and skeptical than back then, more willing to close its doors to those eager to come in.

It’s a place where the newly elected president, just days after taking office, signed an executive order to block resettlement of all refugees for 120 days, ban Syrian refugees indefinitely and bar more than 200 million people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days.

“It has affected the refugees emotionally,” Hassan said of that ban, which is currently under a temporary restraining order. “A lot of people think they will be sent back home. I get phone calls almost every day from people saying: ‘Hey, are we going to be OK here? I don’t want to be sent back home because if they did, they will kill me there.’”  

When politicians and lawyers and cable prognosticators debate Donald Trump’s plan to temporarily suspend immigration, they speak in broad terms about constitutional constraints, political ripple effects and the nuance of counter-terrorism policy. But the real-world impact of the ban is felt in remote corners of America’s towns and cities, by people you won’t see on TV or arguing in front of a judge or casting votes in Congress.  

Hassan’s office is in a downtrodden strip mall in downtown Phoenix, obscured from the road by JB’s Restaurant, a 1-800-Flowers retail store and an abandoned building. If you don’t know where to look, you’ll have a hard time finding it. There is no sign on the street. The only hint is the Arabic script dotting the windows of storefronts in the strip mall: a “Baghdidi Hookah Lounge and Coffee Shop” that is in the process of being built, a Mediterranean grocery store that is also coming soon, and the words “Refugee Center” written faintly on a nearby glass door.

But refugees in Phoenix know where to look. Word of mouth leads them here, as do social media posts about the various services the center provides: language classes, drivers education, legal help and community events. On any given day, Hassan says, dozens of new immigrants come seeking help to pay rent or fill out citizenship or green card forms. Others come to learn English, cramming around plastic tables in a windowless room with badly stained carpet lining the floor. The room is not the most conducive to learning, but it’s what they have.  

Many, however, come just to talk with people who can empathize. In recent weeks, those talks have grown darker and more panicked. People wonder whether the current ban is just a starting point, whether their lives will soon be uprooted, whether they made a horrible mistake in coming to America.

Florida Al Amery teaches citizenship classes in that makeshift classroom. She says she got a legal degree in Iraq and worked with a U.S. company as an adviser. In 2006, her son was kidnapped. She suspected it was because of her ties to the American company. She paid a $30,000 ransom and sent him to Jordan, joining him there later after an envelope appeared in her car warning her she had to leave Iraq within three days.

By 2008, Amery had made her way to Phoenix. Now 60, she jokes that she chose the city because its climate is about as close an approximation to Baghdad as one could find in the United States. In reality, her sister was already here. That made her assimilation easier, but it wasn’t without its psychological toll. She left behind her legal career, figuring it would be too hard to earn another degree at that point in her life. There is a sense of longing in how she discusses her old life too ― the friends left behind and those no longer alive.

She’s also now haunted by the notion that she’s helping usher the students in her citizenship classes into an unwelcoming world.

“I am a teacher of citizenship,” she said. “And I am thinking of stopping because I can’t teach students or clients to follow the Constitution when the president breaks the Constitution.”

Over the past decade, Arizona has become, somewhat unexpectedly, a popular landing place for refugees. According to state data, 4,138 refugees settled in the state from the fall of 2014 through the fall of 2015. The subsequent year, more Syrian refugees came to Arizona than all but three other states. And, according to the State Department, in the past four months, another 1,539 refugees from around the globe have arrived there ― including 223 from Iraq, 208 from Syria, 24 from Iran, 12 from Sudan and 250 from Somalia (all states on Trump’s banned list). Only six states have welcomed more refugees in that time period.

There are various theories about why Arizona is such a magnet for refugees ― the hot climate being one, the cheap real estate being another. None of those theories involves the generosity of the state’s politicians.

Arizona is a haven for anti-immigrant political sentiment. Lawmakers there have called for a suspension of refugee resettlement programs, while some have gone so far as to propose fining charities $1,000 a day for each refugee they help resettle. Catholic Charities of Arizona, an organization that helps with resettlement in the state, declined to put me in touch with a refugee it had helped, citing the possibility that the person could become a target in the current political climate.

This, among other things, has caused the refugees already settled in Arizona to wonder just how public they should be in pushing back on Trump’s executive order, or whether it is worth fighting at all.

Mustafa, the proprietor of Moonlight, an Iraqi restaurant down the road from the refugee center, is one of those torn by the politics.

From the outside, his restaurant doesn’t look like much, tucked away as in a small storefront in another nondescript strip mall. But inside, he has nobly tried to conjure up scenes of old Baghdad. Arabic music videos play on the TV, and the walls are covered in paintings of Arab street murals. Middle Eastern artifacts and antique plates are scattered throughout. Unlit lamps hang from the ceiling, and trays of glass teacups and kettles sit on a table in the entryway.

Mustafa, who declined to give his last name, opened Moonlight when he came to Phoenix in 2014. Like Hassan, he left behind tragedy in Iraq. He and a brother both worked as interpreters for the U.S. Army. When his brother was murdered for that work, Mustafa fled, fearing he was next. A green card holder, he now spends his days cooking up shawarma, lamb shanks and kebabs, as well as giant platters of fresh cut vegetables, baba ghanoush and oily hummus.

The restaurant has become a hub for fellow Iraqis and, at least on a recent Wednesday, some non-Middle Easterners too. “It’s good,” he said of business. “When you start a new life, everything is new here. We have nice people here.”

Gregarious and playful, Mustafa took the tape recorder from my hand and placed it directly under his mouth to make sure his every word was properly recorded. But when I pointed out he could still be stuck in Iraq had Trump’s travel ban been in place three years ago, he grew recalcitrant and handed the recorder back. He said he supported the ban, but refused to elaborate. “I don’t have time now,” he said, darting back to his kitchen. 

Hassan, who sat nearby, couldn’t quite explain why Mustafa felt this way, other than to note that every refugee has his or her own stories, fears, hopes and experiences. Some are content with their corner of a Phoenix strip mall. Others fret over the possibility that their new lives might be ripped away from them. Still others feel that the only way to find stability is by showing those around them that they’re human, too.

Hassan is firmly in the latter category. She is a whirlwind of activity and adopted American tastes. She wrote an ebook on healthy living, goes to rock concerts ― Nine Inch Nails is a favorite ― and dreams of one day working at a fashion magazine in New York City. She is also proudly Muslim ― though not particularly observant ― and operates under the belief ― naive, perhaps ― that the more the rest of America sees people like her, the harder it will be for them to ban people like her.

“I’m lucky,” she said, an odd description for someone who’s lost so much. “Some people, when they lose family they will end up with mental issues or homeless or doing bad things. With me, that made me stronger. It made me appreciate life.”

Want more updates from Sam Stein? Sign up for his newsletter, Spam Stein, here.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2kAtO7L

[repwincoml4a0a5]

They Fled Iraq For America. Now, They Cope With Life Under Trump.

PHOENIX ― Shortly after the car bomb killed her family, hitting their vehicle as her mother and brother rushed their ailing father to a nearby hospital, Hanan Hassan decided to leave Iraq.

It was 2007, four years into the war, and tragedy still came with regularity. But you can’t understand how it feels to suddenly lose your loved ones until it actually happens. In one moment, the foundations of Hassan’s life had been shattered, leaving behind only one inescapable reality: Her future was not in Baghdad.

She went to a United Nations office and pleaded with them to help her leave, to send her to a place where opportunities were plentiful and tragedies remote. She went to Lebanon first. Five months later, she was on a plane to the United States, penniless, with no family to help her assimilate and barely any English in her vocabulary. She was 28 years old.

She landed first in Michigan, but her final destination was Austin, Texas. She’d heard about Texas ― from the movies, naturally ― and envisioned it filled with cowboy hats and desert. When she landed, a man from the International Organization for Migration met her and drove her to her new apartment. It had a mattress, bed frame, table and refrigerator, but not much else.

The man didn’t stay long. It wasn’t his job to be her friend or translator or confidant. That first night in a new country, Hassan was alone and unable to sleep.

“I spent all of the night on the balcony just looking,” she said. “Just looking.”

Nine years and various chapters of her life have passed since then. Hassan found work and made friends. She fell in and out of love. She traveled the country, developing a soft spot for city life, and recently settled in Phoenix.

She now works for the Arizona Allnation Refugee Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps assimilate newly arrived refugees. Some of them remind her of the petrified young woman she was when she first set foot in Austin. Others are more religious or from different parts of the world or have more resources at their disposal.

The more recent ones have arrived in a fundamentally different America than the country Hassan confronted on that balcony in January 2008. It is a place more scared and skeptical than back then, more willing to close its doors to those eager to come in.

It’s a place where the newly elected president, just days after taking office, signed an executive order to block resettlement of all refugees for 120 days, ban Syrian refugees indefinitely and bar more than 200 million people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days.

“It has affected the refugees emotionally,” Hassan said of that ban, which is currently under a temporary restraining order. “A lot of people think they will be sent back home. I get phone calls almost every day from people saying: ‘Hey, are we going to be OK here? I don’t want to be sent back home because if they did, they will kill me there.’”  

When politicians and lawyers and cable prognosticators debate Donald Trump’s plan to temporarily suspend immigration, they speak in broad terms about constitutional constraints, political ripple effects and the nuance of counter-terrorism policy. But the real-world impact of the ban is felt in remote corners of America’s towns and cities, by people you won’t see on TV or arguing in front of a judge or casting votes in Congress.  

Hassan’s office is in a downtrodden strip mall in downtown Phoenix, obscured from the road by JB’s Restaurant, a 1-800-Flowers retail store and an abandoned building. If you don’t know where to look, you’ll have a hard time finding it. There is no sign on the street. The only hint is the Arabic script dotting the windows of storefronts in the strip mall: a “Baghdidi Hookah Lounge and Coffee Shop” that is in the process of being built, a Mediterranean grocery store that is also coming soon, and the words “Refugee Center” written faintly on a nearby glass door.

But refugees in Phoenix know where to look. Word of mouth leads them here, as do social media posts about the various services the center provides: language classes, drivers education, legal help and community events. On any given day, Hassan says, dozens of new immigrants come seeking help to pay rent or fill out citizenship or green card forms. Others come to learn English, cramming around plastic tables in a windowless room with badly stained carpet lining the floor. The room is not the most conducive to learning, but it’s what they have.  

Many, however, come just to talk with people who can empathize. In recent weeks, those talks have grown darker and more panicked. People wonder whether the current ban is just a starting point, whether their lives will soon be uprooted, whether they made a horrible mistake in coming to America.

Florida Al Amery teaches citizenship classes in that makeshift classroom. She says she got a legal degree in Iraq and worked with a U.S. company as an adviser. In 2006, her son was kidnapped. She suspected it was because of her ties to the American company. She paid a $30,000 ransom and sent him to Jordan, joining him there later after an envelope appeared in her car warning her she had to leave Iraq within three days.

By 2008, Amery had made her way to Phoenix. Now 60, she jokes that she chose the city because its climate is about as close an approximation to Baghdad as one could find in the United States. In reality, her sister was already here. That made her assimilation easier, but it wasn’t without its psychological toll. She left behind her legal career, figuring it would be too hard to earn another degree at that point in her life. There is a sense of longing in how she discusses her old life too ― the friends left behind and those no longer alive.

She’s also now haunted by the notion that she’s helping usher the students in her citizenship classes into an unwelcoming world.

“I am a teacher of citizenship,” she said. “And I am thinking of stopping because I can’t teach students or clients to follow the Constitution when the president breaks the Constitution.”

Over the past decade, Arizona has become, somewhat unexpectedly, a popular landing place for refugees. According to state data, 4,138 refugees settled in the state from the fall of 2014 through the fall of 2015. The subsequent year, more Syrian refugees came to Arizona than all but three other states. And, according to the State Department, in the past four months, another 1,539 refugees from around the globe have arrived there ― including 223 from Iraq, 208 from Syria, 24 from Iran, 12 from Sudan and 250 from Somalia (all states on Trump’s banned list). Only six states have welcomed more refugees in that time period.

There are various theories about why Arizona is such a magnet for refugees ― the hot climate being one, the cheap real estate being another. None of those theories involves the generosity of the state’s politicians.

Arizona is a haven for anti-immigrant political sentiment. Lawmakers there have called for a suspension of refugee resettlement programs, while some have gone so far as to propose fining charities $1,000 a day for each refugee they help resettle. Catholic Charities of Arizona, an organization that helps with resettlement in the state, declined to put me in touch with a refugee it had helped, citing the possibility that the person could become a target in the current political climate.

This, among other things, has caused the refugees already settled in Arizona to wonder just how public they should be in pushing back on Trump’s executive order, or whether it is worth fighting at all.

Mustafa, the proprietor of Moonlight, an Iraqi restaurant down the road from the refugee center, is one of those torn by the politics.

From the outside, his restaurant doesn’t look like much, tucked away as in a small storefront in another nondescript strip mall. But inside, he has nobly tried to conjure up scenes of old Baghdad. Arabic music videos play on the TV, and the walls are covered in paintings of Arab street murals. Middle Eastern artifacts and antique plates are scattered throughout. Unlit lamps hang from the ceiling, and trays of glass teacups and kettles sit on a table in the entryway.

Mustafa, who declined to give his last name, opened Moonlight when he came to Phoenix in 2014. Like Hassan, he left behind tragedy in Iraq. He and a brother both worked as interpreters for the U.S. Army. When his brother was murdered for that work, Mustafa fled, fearing he was next. A green card holder, he now spends his days cooking up shawarma, lamb shanks and kebabs, as well as giant platters of fresh cut vegetables, baba ghanoush and oily hummus.

The restaurant has become a hub for fellow Iraqis and, at least on a recent Wednesday, some non-Middle Easterners too. “It’s good,” he said of business. “When you start a new life, everything is new here. We have nice people here.”

Gregarious and playful, Mustafa took the tape recorder from my hand and placed it directly under his mouth to make sure his every word was properly recorded. But when I pointed out he could still be stuck in Iraq had Trump’s travel ban been in place three years ago, he grew recalcitrant and handed the recorder back. He said he supported the ban, but refused to elaborate. “I don’t have time now,” he said, darting back to his kitchen. 

Hassan, who sat nearby, couldn’t quite explain why Mustafa felt this way, other than to note that every refugee has his or her own stories, fears, hopes and experiences. Some are content with their corner of a Phoenix strip mall. Others fret over the possibility that their new lives might be ripped away from them. Still others feel that the only way to find stability is by showing those around them that they’re human, too.

Hassan is firmly in the latter category. She is a whirlwind of activity and adopted American tastes. She wrote an ebook on healthy living, goes to rock concerts ― Nine Inch Nails is a favorite ― and dreams of one day working at a fashion magazine in New York City. She is also proudly Muslim ― though not particularly observant ― and operates under the belief ― naive, perhaps ― that the more the rest of America sees people like her, the harder it will be for them to ban people like her.

“I’m lucky,” she said, an odd description for someone who’s lost so much. “Some people, when they lose family they will end up with mental issues or homeless or doing bad things. With me, that made me stronger. It made me appreciate life.”

Want more updates from Sam Stein? Sign up for his newsletter, Spam Stein, here.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2kAtO7L