Recession causes financial distress for African refugee women in Phoenix
By Aaron Camara, November 2009
Staff Writer
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Photo byAaron Camara
Refugee woman Sallay Sankoh is still motivated and hopeful that things wil get better with the recession's end.
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African refugee women are trying to cope with recession struggles. The recession has brought difficult moments for Africa Refugee Women in Phoenix. Most of them have lost their regular jobs and cannot afford to support their families any longer.
The community of North Phoenix has a large number of single mothers who came from different countries in Africa and are uneducated. They left their native lands to come to America in search of a better life. Some of them have lived in Phoenix for three years or more.
Sister Fatu Katie, a refugee single mother from Liberia in West Africa, describes her personal experience on what the recession has done to her and her family.
“It is much more difficult these days to find a job,” she says.
She has been unemployed for about seven months now and could not pay her monthly bills any longer.
She explained that it was not like this when she first arrived in Phoenix, Ariz., three years ago. It used to be easy for her to find a job, from 99 cent stores to big groceries stores, group homes or nursing homes; there were jobs everywhere.
But now, things have completely shifted in the opposite direction. The present situation she finds herself in is almost like the one she left back home to come to America to find jobs to improve her life, she says.
“I could not understand the reason for this ugly change,” she concluded.
Another African refugee woman, Madam Kadiatu Sesay, who lives at 27th Street on Greenway Parkway, also described her experience as being bad and ugly.
“Some of us used to have two jobs,” Sesay lamented. “I used to work very hard to pay my bills and also send money for my relatives back home, but this is no longer possible. The current recession has made it impossible for me to continue to do so.
“To make even a simple international phone call to my loved ones back home is a difficult problem; the recession has slowed everything down,” she says. “I don’t have any savings in my account. Life is difficult for me at the moment.”
Another woman, Sallay Sankoh, describes how she went to the hospital after she fainted and came back home without treatment or medication because she did not have the money to pay for treatment. She said that she is not the only one who is faced with this problem, and that a large number of her friends are also faced with similar problems of unemployment and financial difficulty. Sankoh also said that even though she and her friends are presently going through tough times, they are highly motivated and determined to overcome the entire struggle brought on by this recession.
All of these refugee women do not plan to return to their home countries soon. They all believe and hope that the economy will soon turn around for the betterment of everyone.
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