PHILADELPHIA — The trail between the zebra and giraffe enclosures at the Philadelphia Zoo was filled with chatter in different languages — including Ukrainian, Burmese, Swahili, and Pashto. About 300 people from all over the world and of various ages had come together Sunday at America’s first zoo to celebrate World Refugee Day.
What they all had in common is that Philadelphia has become their new home.
In the crowd were Jaseng Pan’s two daughters, Maybawknoe Galau, 4, and Sengmun Galau, 7, who were on a mission to see a koala bear. Pan arrived from Myanmar in 2012.
“Normally we don’t come [to the zoo],” she said, adding that the event gave her an opportunity to do something different with her girls — who seemed unimpressed with a sloth-bear as an alternative to Koalas.
Bibi Hawka Akhtri, a 17-year-old from Afghanistan, came to Philadelphia about 10 months ago with most of her family. “I’m so happy,” she said as her family strolled through the zoo exhibits.
World Refugee Day was established by the United Nations in 2001 and is commemorated annually on June 20. Sunday’s local celebration was organized by the Philadelphia Regional Refugee Providers’ Collaborative, a coalition of multiple organizations, including HIAS Pennsylvania and Nationalities Service Center.
The event, sponsored by Peco and FS Investments, was free to refugee clients of the service organizations and their family members.
“Every year the celebration looks different,” said Anneke Kat, community engagement specialist at HIAS PA, a large refugee resettlement organization in Philadelphia. “This year we really wanted to do something that felt like a celebration and a day of family fun.”
She called the event an in-person visual representation of Philadelphia’s ability to welcome refugees.
Samuel Abu walked through the zoo’s big-cat exhibit with a group of refugees from Afghanistan. After arriving in Washington, D.C., from Liberia, he chose to move to Philadelphia in 2010 to join the city’s West African community. Now he works as the supervisor for case management at Catholic Social Services’ refugee resettlement program.
The past year came with crises that led to an influx of refugees worldwide — most notably the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the winter. Abu said those were challenging times.
“Because of the situation in their country, they were brought in exodus en mass,” Abu said, leaving resettlement agencies little time to prepare for the arrival of Afghans and Ukrainians. Permanent housing, he says, is still a major challenge.
“The community has been very supporting,” he said.
The year has been challenging for all local refugee resettlement agencies. Adi Altman, who oversees the resettlement team at Nationalities Service Center, said that for people in their line of work, the past 10 months were “the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the World Series — all together.”
Local resettlement agencies had to rebuild capacity, he says, after refugee flows into the U.S. dramatically went down during Donald Trump’s presidency.
The fiscal year before Trump took office, the refugee ceiling was set at 85,000. By his last year in office, the ceiling was lowered to 15,000. President Joe Biden increased the refugee ceiling to 125,000 this year but so far the U.S. is on track to admit only 18,962 refugees this year — a fraction of the ceiling.
The U.S. is resettling 76,000 evacuees from Afghanistan and up to 100,000 from Ukraine. But many of those are not coming in as refugees, a specific designation that provides legal status and access to social programs.
More than 25,000 evacuees from Afghanistan passed through Philadelphia International Airport last fall, most of whom did not remain in the city.
About 560 refugees were resettled in Pennsylvania so far this year, arriving from 20 different countries.
The crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine dominated the news, but Altman stresses the importance of recognizing refugees from all places — Syria, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Haiti, Myanmar, to name a few.
“Individuals from around the globe really find home, find safety, and try to find their future here in Philadelphia,” he said.
Among those is Manzi Charline, a 23-year-old from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with her two little boys, Ishami Muneza Caleb, 4, and Ishami Bana Blessing, 1. Charline arrived in Philadelphia in 2019, she said in Swahili through a staffer for a refugee services organization who helped translate. It wasn’t always easy but she is grateful that the U.S. is a “peaceful country.”
She said that World Refugee Day means a lot to her — especially after all she has been through and with the daily pressures of life in a new country.
“It’s nice to bring the kids outs,” said Charline, “to get to enjoy a day at the zoo with others who might have had the same experience.”
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