Over the past decade, California has resettled more Middle Eastern refugees than any other state in the country. In Northern California, Santa Clara County in the South Bay is a resettlement hub for Middle Eastern refugees – more than 1,300 moved there since 2006. About one out of three of those refugees are from Iraq. And most have seen or suffered through violence related to the war.
JASMINE: What happened will remain like a scar inside yourself. Especially like we saw a lot of stuff not normal. Like dead people in the street. People killed in front of your eye. I don’t believe like I’m going to forget them.
Iraqi refugee Jasmine asked that we not use her full name for this story. After two years in the U.S., she’s been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and she’s receiving therapy for it. But Iraqi culture, like many others, often considers mental health problems shameful, and Jasmine is concerned about embarrassing her family. Reporter Shuka Kalantari shares Jasmine’s story.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Twenty-four year old Jasmine is sitting in a San Jose community center, watching a video on her laptop of a roomful of people dancing. She’s an engineering student, and that night she had introduced her college classmates to a traditional Iraqi dance called Chobi.
JASMINE: It was like ethnic night on campus. So we got like our foods. We got baklava, konafa, Arabic coffee, and Iraqi tea with cardamom.
Jasmine misses her home. She misses her culture. But as a refugee displaced by war, she can’t go back. She says she’s enjoying the safety she and her family have found in their new home in California. But finding happiness has proven to be more difficult.
JASMINE: You left your home. You left the place that you belong to. Your people who loved there … Sometimes I feel like everything for me after Iraq is different, the roads, the air, the dust. I know back home. The dust of back home. I know the air of back home.
Before she fled Iraq, Jasmine was studying computer science at Baghdad University. She left after insurgents killed her father.
JASMINE: He was walking with a couple of his friends. There’s a car stopped. There is three armed people inside it. He called my father name and he give him seven shots. Four in his chest and three in his head.
Soon after her father’s death, some classmates warned her that strange men were looking for her. Frightened of being kidnapped and held for ransom, she fled and never returned to the campus.
JASMINE: Because at that time, when my father like killed, my other friend her father got kidnapped. And they didn’t receive body. They don’t have right now like any kind of knowledge if he’s alive or dead or what … so I can’t say I’m unique. I’m something common in Iraq, unfortunately.
Within four months of her father’s murder, Jasmine’s family escaped to Syria. Two years later, they were granted asylum and moved to San Jose. She says her family was in survival mode in Iraq and experienced a delayed reaction to the stress of war.
JASMINE: And after a while like you notice your huge loss. Like the country and the house and the father. I have like grave issues because when my father got killed I couldn’t say goodbye to him.
Once she landed in America, depression hit Jasmine hard.
JASMINE: It was my dream to be a teacher in Baghdad University. Right now I believe it’s so far – I can’t reach to be a teacher at Baghdad University. You start being so far from your dreams back home. Like right now I feel like not only am I start at zero, but before zero, because people don’t trust my education.
Jasmine’s social worker recommended she see a therapist and referred her to the Center for Survivors of Torture. Doctor James Livingston is a psychologist at the center. He says just the experience of having to flee your home country is usually enough to cause post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
JAMES LIVINGSTON: The re-experiencing symptoms are very painful and disruptive because they’re typically accompanied by the kinds of feelings that were experienced in the original situation. And so terror, horror, all sorts of very painful emotions…
Jasmine remembers one of those flashbacks. She was at a women’s studies class at her college in San Jose. They were watching a documentary about a war in Chile. After the film, the teacher asked students to try to imagine how their lives would be if they lived in war.
JASMINE: So she tried like to make the student feel the feelings of these people. So she start like direct her hand for the students in the class and say, “Imagine if you lost your husband?” And she came to me, “You imagine that they tried to kidnap you.”
Jasmine didn’t have to imagine.
JASMINE: I felt like I’m out of air. I left the class and I remained outside like for over like 20 hours just crying in a wail.
For the next two days her mind was flooded with bad memories. She says even seemingly unrelated things would trigger her symptoms.
JASMINE: Sometimes like part of songs make me like really sad, and depression. Like when something happen with me I feel like I’m out of the world for a couple of days.
Jasmine says she also has the extra burden of constantly worrying about her friends and family back in Baghdad.
JASMINE: I feel like, kind of like guilty. I’m sitting here. A normal day. And there is people here still suffering back home. Facing the same problems that I faced.
Dr. Livingston, the therapist at Centers for Survivors of Torture, says this burden has real effects. It can be hard for people with PTSD to focus their attention long enough to be able to do new things, or move forward with their lives.
LIVINGSTON: We get people who were professionals in their home countries who are very intelligent and very educated and find themselves unable to learn because they’re traumatized.
Jasmine says she can’t forget her past, but she is learning how deal with it.
JASMINE: Especially like when I’m over-thinking I go to crochet. The stitch that took for me like normal times 10 minutes, when I’m like in a certain situation, wow! In two minutes I did this.
Still, she knows that the healing process will be slow.
For Crosscurrents, I’m Shuka Kalantari.