{"id":27081,"date":"2016-07-21T02:06:37","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T02:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/refugees-from-war-torn-congo-appear-headed-for\/"},"modified":"2016-07-21T02:06:33","modified_gmt":"2016-07-21T02:06:33","slug":"refugees-from-war-torn-congo-appear-headed-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/refugees-from-war-torn-congo-appear-headed-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Refugees from war-torn Congo appear headed for Missoula"},"content":{"rendered":"

{It looks like Missoula\u2019s first round of refugees will be from sub-Saharan Africa, not Syria.}<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t finalized when they\u2019ll be coming, so I can\u2019t give you specifics, but it will most likely be Congolese to start, Congolese from the Democratic Republic of Congo,\u201d Molly Short Carr said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Carr, Missoula\u2019s new International Rescue Committee director, arrived in Missoula two weeks ago to start preparations for a resettlement office that was approved earlier this year by the U.S. State Department. A native of Buffalo, New York, she spent most of the past two years as an administrator based in Nairobi, Kenya, working on \u201cthe other side\u201d of the international continuum of refugee resettlement efforts.<\/p>\n

Carr said she has been in the three camps the Congolese refugees to Missoula are most likely to come from \u2013 Gihembe in Rwanda, Nakivale in Uganda and Nyaragusa Refugee Camp on the coast of Tanzania. She was in Nyaragusa just a month ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis year there\u2019s been a push to bring certain populations out of Africa, so our resources on the continent were shifted to certain locations,\u201d said Carr. \u201cThat\u2019s why I was with those populations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Refugee numbers from the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo swelled in the mid- to late 1990s as people tried to escape civil war. An estimated 150,000 people reportedly crossed Lake Tanganyika to escape ethnic and political violence.<\/p>\n

Secretary of State John Kerry announced last week that the Obama administration will meet its highly controversial target of settling 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S. by Sept. 30, the end of the federal fiscal year. The national IRC office played it close to the vest, but there were indications in recent months that some of those Syrian refugees would be headed for Missoula.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t appear to be the case, at least not initially, said Carr, who expects the first Congolese to arrive in August or September.<\/p>\n

Missoula County commissioners touched off a firestorm when they sent a letter to the U.S. State Department last winter saying they\u2019d welcome the resettlement of 100 refugees a year to deal with the worldwide crisis, which has reached proportions not seen since the aftermath of World War II.<\/p>\n

One hundred is roughly the number Carr expects to work with, though Bob Johnson, a senior adviser for the IRC office in Seattle, said the number isn\u2019t set in stone.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pretty hard to predict because we don\u2019t know family size,\u201d he said. \u201cIt could be 100, it could be 125 total people. One hundred within the first 12 months was kind of how we calculated, given that things would start off very slow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to put more refugees here than the capacity,\u201d Carr said. \u201cWe have to look at what\u2019s available, how many refugees would we be able to support and provide assistance to, and how many would the community be able to support and provide assistance to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Missoula has a number of advantages, she noted, including the assistance of Soft Landing Missoula, which has built an impressive network of support and volunteers. It\u2019s a bike-friendly community which now offers a fare-free Mountain Line bus system.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The first arrivals are now in refugee camps in East Africa and should be aware of their destination after up to three years of intensive screening and background checks. The vetting process for Syrian refugees has come under scrutiny but Carr, who has seen the system in action in Africa, insisted it is extremely thorough. <\/p>\n

“We\u2019re going to make sure that everyone who comes through is exactly who they say they are, doing what they said they were going to do,” she said. “We\u2019re going to be very risk adverse in this process. The highest priority on the national side is security and the integrity of the program.”<\/p>\n

As Carr understands it, the IRC\u2019s initial intent is to resettle families, though coming from a war-torn nation they aren’t likely to be intact.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may have single moms or dads, we may have older children, younger children. Many of the younger children who come will have lived their entire lives in a refugee camp,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Office space for the IRC has been secured in the Solstice Building on West Broadway, and interviews are ongoing this week to fill the positions of caseworker and a half-time finance manager. The focus is on hiring locally from what Johnson characterized as a deep pool of applicants.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel that the local knowledge of the community is going to be invaluable as we bring in the refugees,\u201d Carr said.<\/p>\n

Those who fled the Congo may speak a variety of languages, including Swahili, Lingala, or Kikongo.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe a little English. There are some English training programs in the camps, but it\u2019s very minimal,” Carr said. “Some of them will have French, because the Congo is a French-speaking country. That will be helpful for learning English, because grammatically they\u2019re very similar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Missoula has no Congolese community to speak of, but it does offer a strong international component at the University of Montana and an uncommonly large return population of Peace Corps volunteers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they were anywhere in East Africa, they\u2019ll probably speak Swahili and be able to help us communicate and work with the refugees,\u201d Carr said of the latter.<\/p>\n

The university will do its part, assistant professor Tobin Miller Shearer, director of the African-American Studies program, said in an email Wednesday<\/p>\n

His department “will be very interested in connecting with the families, and finding ways to support them,’ Shearer said, “especially in terms of providing any orientation that we could to racial realities in the U.S.”<\/p>\n

\"Molly<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{It looks like Missoula\u2019s first round of refugees will be from sub-Saharan Africa, not Syria.} \u201cWe haven\u2019t finalized when they\u2019ll be coming, so I can\u2019t give you specifics, but it will most likely be Congolese to start, Congolese from the Democratic Republic of Congo,\u201d Molly Short Carr said Wednesday. Carr, Missoula\u2019s new International Rescue Committee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[99],"byline":[2651],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-27081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-greatlakesnews","byline-missoulian"],"bylines":[{"id":2651,"name":"Missoulian","slug":"missoulian","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"contributors":[{"id":2651,"name":"Missoulian","slug":"missoulian","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27081"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=27081"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=27081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}