FOR REFUGEES FROM COLOMBIA, ST. LOUIS IS A HAVEN – CIVIL WAR, ATTACK ON FATHER LED TO FLIGHT TO COSTA RICA, THEN UNITED STATES – 9 Sep 2003 P-D

“Seguro” – that is the Spanish word for safe. Fernando and Ingrid Tabima say “seguro” frequently, like a mantra, as they talk about their new life in St. Louis, safe from the civil war that had threatened Fernando Tabima’s life in Colombia.

“Here I can give my family stability and hope,” said Fernando Tabima, 39.

“Here I find peace and safety; my kids can grow, and I am not scared,” said Ingrid Tabima, 33.

The Tabima family – Fernando, Ingrid and their children, Andres, 12, and Maria Camila, 7 months – are one of six families with a total of 22 people, all refugees from Colombia, that the International Institute of Metropolitan St. Louis is helping to settle in St. Louis.

The Tabimas arrived in St. Louis on Aug. 20. They told their story in an interview through interpreter Maria Mullis, their case worker at the International Institute.

The U.S. Department of State selected St. Louis as a place to settle Colombian refugees because there already were Colombian immigrants in the area who were willing to help newcomers, says Ann Rynearson, senior vice president for culture and community at the International Institute. Rynearson says the Institute does not expect a flood of refugees from Colombia, as was the case with Bosnians.

The Tabimas’ odyssey began two years ago in Cali, Colombia. Cali is a city about the size of the metropolitan St. Louis area. Cali is two hours from the Pacific Ocean and southwest of Bogota. Fernando Tabima worked as combination bodyguard and assistant for one of the executives in Cali’s electric company.

Colombia has been torn by civil war for 38 years. The Associated Press says about 3,500 people, most of them civilians, are killed in the fighting each year.

Fernando Tabima said leftist guerrillas had tried to kidnap him. He fled but was shot in the leg as he escaped.

He told the Colombian government that he and his family needed to leave Colombia. The government placed the family in nearby Costa Rica.

Fernando Tabima said the only jobs he could find were odd jobs such as cutting grass, washing cars and taking care of dogs. There were times when the family didn’t have enough to eat. So they signed up with an international agency that resettles refugees in Canada, Australia or the United States.

Thirty days before the Tabimas departed, they learned that they would be going to the United States. Two days before leaving Costa Rica, they heard that their new home would be in a city they had never heard of: St. Louis.

On the way, on the plane, Ingrid Tabima cried. She worried about where her family would sleep.

“I was scared,” she said. “I didn’t speak English. I didn’t know the city.” But her fears lifted at the airport when she saw Mullis holding a sign that said in Spanish: “Welcome Tabima Family.” Mullis spoke Spanish. Mullis was from Colombia.

Ingrid Tabima felt safe. Mullis and the International Institute will be a combination parent and guardian angel for the Tabima family for the next year or so, setting up an apartment, offering English lessons and helping them to find jobs.

On that first night, Mullis, 42, took the Tabimas to their new home in the Shaw neighborhood.

The apartment has high ceilings and hardwood floors. It is simply furnished with hand-me-down couches and a chair or two.

The Tabimas call it grand and have made it their own. Pictures of Andres with his grandparents, Ingrid Tabima’s parents, sit on the mantel.

Fernando Tabima has found a job as a banquet waiter at the Adam’s Mark Hotel. Andres is a seventh-grader at the St. Louis Public Schools’ Fanning Community Education Center. He says six of his schoolmates are Colombian or Mexican. They speak English and Spanish and help him.

A big grin lights up his face when he talks about school. His new school has computers. His former schools did not. Andres says he loves computers, mathematics and lunch.

“We are happy here,” Ingrid Tabima said. “People here are so kind. The International Institute is wonderful.”

Added Fernando Tabima: “Downtown is beautiful. The Arch is magnificent.”

They even like the green street-name signs, which Fernando Tabima said made it easy to know where you were.

Their plans and dreams are sprouting. First they are going to learn to speak English. Then Fernando Tabima, who is trained as a mechanic, hopes to find a job in the automotive field. Ingrid Tabima wants to find work as an administrative assistant. Andres plans to play soccer and basketball.

Money will be tight for a while. The International Institute, through a contract with the State Department, will spend $1,600 to resettle them. That money must stretch to pay for rent, home furnishings, transportation and food until the family qualifies for food stamps.

The Tabimas are in a federal program that rewards them for finding employment quickly and staying employed. If Fernando Tabima remains in his job for four months, the family will get $2,200, which they hope to spend on a car. The Tabimas also must come up with enough money, almost $2,000, to pay for their air fare to St. Louis.

Still, the family is jubilant. Fernando Tabima explained, “We have opportunities Colombia didn’t give us.”

KURDISH FAMILY PUTS DOWN ROOTS, WORKS TOWARD GOALS: HOME, HEALTH – 19 Mar 2001

Seven members of the Kako family live in a two-bedroom apartment. Rihat, 2, is recovering from high levels of lead in his blood; a new baby is due next month.

Khayal and Heshyar Kako dream of an apartment in which they have a room to themselves and the walls do not poison their child.

The Kakos and their son, Rihat, 2, live in a two-bedroom apartment near Tower Grove Park in St. Louis with four other people: Heshyar’s mother and father and his two brothers.

In April, Khayal will give birth to the couple’s second child. They have been in the United States for about four years and married about three years. They share their bedroom with their child.

The Kakos are Kurds. They want an apartment of their own with Heshyar’s family living in an apartment beneath them. That situation would be more like their native Iraq, where extended families live in sprawling white stucco houses in which each nuclear family has its own space.

The Kurds come from a mountainous region on the borders of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Since the 1800s they have struggled periodically for independence, often as pawns in the region’s wars. Powers including the United States first have supported and then abandoned them.

Saddam Hussein often has launched attacks on the Kurds, and the Kurds also suffer from internal political conflict. The Kurds are not Arabs but an Indo-European people. Most are Sunni Muslims.

Recently, little Rihat tested positive for lead poisoning. He has taken medicine. Their landlord patched the crumbling walls that seemed to be the culprit. The levels of lead in Rihat’s blood have gone down.

“Money; money is slow,” Heshyar said with a shrug and a bit of embarrassment. The lack of money has kept him and his wife in cramped quarters and nervous about their son’s health.

But Heshyar, 26, then smiled spontaneously, and Khayal, also 26, smiled too. They do that often, like newlyweds.

They were seated on the floor around a traditional luncheon meal. Khayal cooked tomato soup, pita bread, chicken with herbs. It was food from a painting, the white rice in a mound topped with brown noodles, the chicken golden, the soup scarlet. Most of the time the family eats traditional foods, but sometimes they order pizza. Their favorite: lots of cheese with bits of beef.

Their guests sat on cushions half the size of a couch cushion covered in a bright red and beige print. Khayal made the cushions, which approximate the furnishings in a Kurd’s Iraqi home.

Their baby, Rihat, climbed from lap to lap to get a hug and kiss wherever he landed. His grandfather, Hassan, 62, and his grandmother, Herea, 55, also were seated on the floor to eat. There was much laughter and many smiles.

Heshyar, who works as a bartender at the Adams Mark Hotel, has picked up a great deal of English and often speaks for his parents, neither of whom speak English. Khayal, who is learning English from the Immigrant & Refugee Women’s Program, is a promising pupil.

The lunch was for Khayal’s teacher, Sister Elise Silvestri, a School Sister of Notre Dame, who also helped the family navigate hospitals, doctors and public-health officials when Rihat was sick.

Khayal said that whereas many Kurds from northern Iraq had arranged marriages, she and Heshyar were a love match. “Yes, yes, a love match,” he said in agreement.

Had the couple not emigrated to America, they might never have met.

Both are from Zakho, a city of about 100,000 in the foothills of the mountains. They did not know each other in their native land, but both had ties to the Americans, who were in their city to help contain Saddam.

Khayal was a nurse in the children’s ward of an American hospital. Heshyar’s brother worked as part of a Kurdish security force for the Americans. Heshyar was a truck farmer growing mangoes, potatoes and tomatoes.

In 1996, rumors swept the city that the Americans, Britons, French and Turks who maintained the no-fly zone that kept Saddam from bombing the Kurds were pulling out. Kurdish Iraqis such as Heshyar and Khayal were certain that because they had helped Americans, Saddam would kill them and their families.

Most of Heshyar’s family sought refuge in camps first in Turkey, then in Guam. Khayal traveled the same route but alone.

In Guam, Khayal met Heshyar’s brother, Noori, and the two learned that they were distant cousins. From Guam, Heshyar emigrated to Charlotte, N.C.; Khayal to Kentucky, although she does not remember the name of the city. Those are the places to which the international refugee agencies sent them.

About three years ago, Heshyar worried about high prices – the family’s apartment cost $700 a month – and a lack of jobs, so he called a cousin who had emigrated to St. Louis. He learned that food and housing were less expensive here, and his cousin told him there were jobs.

He and his parents and brothers moved to St. Louis, where the families’ rent is $325 a month. Between 30 and 40 Kurdish refugee families live in th e St. Louis area. Five Kurdish families live in the same apartment building as the Kakos. Three of those families are the Kakos’ cousins.

Soon after Heshyar and his family moved to St. Louis, Khayal, who was having a difficult time making her way in a new country with a new language and without kin, called Heshyar’s family for help. Heshyar’s father, Hassan, an expansive man, told her to come to St. Louis to live with them.

So Heshyar and Khayal met. Like many Kurds, they are slight, slim people. He is about 5 foot 5 inches tall. She is smaller. Both have black hair and large, almost-black eyes, although some Kurds have blond hair and blue eyes.

He dresses like an American, in casual slacks and sports shirts. For the luncheon, she wore a long, loose-fitting caftan-like dress of burgundy crushed velvet. A plaque of yellow fabric and silver-colored beads trimmed the bodice.

The two asked their parents for permission to marry. For Khayal, that meant a telephone call to her mother back in Iraq. Everyone said yes, and the couple was married on Feb. 17, 1998, in the Daar-Ul-Islam Mosque in Manchester.

One of the bedrooms in the apartment is theirs. More fabric-covered cushions line the walls. Rihat’s crib is next to the window. Khayal washes all the woodwork, the floors and often the walls to eliminate dust and the danger of lead poisoning. The level of lead in Rihat’s blood is now at a level a child could pick up walking on the street.

Khayal does nearly all the cleaning and cooking. Her mother-in-law, Herea, has kidney problems; often her legs and ankles are swollen, and she is in pain. The house is spotless. Cleanliness makes its small spaces look large.

The family has its problems. Heshyar’s brother Talib Kako is trying, so far without success, to get his wife and son in Iraq the papers they need join him here.

Yet the family has its joys. Before the luncheon, Rihat demanded a glass of orange juice. Everyone was ready to scold him because they thought he wanted it for himself. But when he got the juice, he gave it to his grandmother, who wasn’t feeling well.

Heshyar spoke for all of them when he said he was glad to be in the United States. He does not want to return to the rolling green hills of his native land.

“Too many times,” he said, “I have seen war roar through.”

Neighbors

* Who: Khayal and Heshyar Kako, Kurdish refugees from Iraq.

* What: Their struggle and triumphs in the four years since they came to this country to build a new life for themselves and their extended family.

* Where: Shaw Neighborhood

EFFORT IS UNDER WAY TO REVITALIZE AREAS AROUND GARDEN – 26 Nov 2000 P-D

About a dozen empty buildings near the Missouri Botanical Garden have been bought, so they can be torn down and replaced with modern housing.

Jestene Bowen is one of the first people to admit that her south St. Louis neighborhood should change: Bowen, 35, doesn’t even want her 12-year-old son to leave their apartment’s yard to play because she fears for his safety.

But Bowen, a small-business owner, also isn’t necessarily happy about the possibility of having to move from her two-bedroom apartment.

The apartment building in the 3900 block of Lafayette Avenue, just north of Interstate 44, is slated to be purchased and demolished as part of an ambitious, multimillion-dollar plan to revitalize the Garden District, an area made up of the Shaw, McRee Town, Tiffany and Southwest Garden neighborhoods.

Overall, the Garden District Commission, a coalition of clergy, residents, neighborhood leaders and the business community, hopes to oversee the development of more than 120 new houses and the renovation of dozens of other houses and apartment buildings in a $50 million plan to be completed within the decade. Most of the development, which would include a community center, would be done in the McRee Town neighborhood.

So far, the group has raised about $10 million from the city, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Danforth Foundation.

Like Bowen, some residents are not happy about the prospect of moving to make way for a mixed-income development that either they can’t afford or forces them from their current homes.

Still, they say, they want vacant buildings torn down or renovated. The empty structures, they say, are havens for crime.

Additionally, some complain, old buildings in the area laced with lead paint have contributed to a disproportionately high number of children who are annually reported to be lead-poisoned. Excessive levels of lead in the blood can cause learning disabilities and illness.

At the same time, leaders in the four neighborhoods, including many who have been active participants in developing the proposal, are supporting the plan. They say it will stabilize and make the neighborhoods safer and provide better city housing.

Within the last three months, the Garden District Commission has purchased about a dozen vacant buildings throughout the district, including three on Bowen’s street, said George Robbnet Jr., executive director of the Garden District.

Overall, roughly 234 parcels of property are targeted throughout the district, which is bounded by Folsom Avenue on the north, Magnolia Avenue on the south, South Grand Boulevard to the east and Kingshighway to the west. Most of the targeted properties are vacant.

Of the 17 multifamily buildings on Bowen’s street, for example, nine are vacant.

Building plans

Under the plan, the buildings on Lafayette Avenue would be replaced by houses that cost $100,000 to $150,000. Two developers are currently bidding to build in the Garden District.

“I guess it is good for the community,” said Bowen, who has a patient transportation business and pays $295 a month for rent. “But I’m afraid my little $16,000 income (last year as a tour bus driver) will put me in an area that’s worse.”

Commission members said they plan to help relocate 80 families who could be affected by the plan. The families would have the option of moving to new and renovated property inside the Garden District, or the commission would help families move to other areas, Robbnet said.

“I can understand why some people are apprehensive,” said Dell Breeland, president of the McRee Town Neighborhood Association and part of the district’s commission. Breeland is a real estate agent and lives on the 4200 block of Lafayette Avenue, just three blocks from Bowen. Her house will not be directly affected by the plan.

“People wonder what is going to happen to them,” added Breeland. “But I think it is a good plan. If it weren’t a good plan, I wouldn’t be involved in this.”

The effort began in 1997 when Jonathan Kleinbard, deputy director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, contacted neighborhood groups to help bolster growth and fight decay in the area. The collaborative effort was a change from the garden’s attempts to buy neighboring houses across Shaw Boulevard and replace them with a parking lot in 1991. Residents quickly convinced garden officials to snip that plan.

Kleinbard and the neighborhood leaders have worked diligently for three years to improve the Garden District area, with some proponents of the project having been involved in more than 150 meetings. The Botanical Garden has invested about $3 million into the plan so far.

“This project has merit and has widespread support,” said Alderman Stephen Conway, D-8th Ward.

Proponents say the effort will assist with other initiatives to improve the area currently under way, such as the one led by lawyer Edward Roth, chairman of the Garden District Commission. Roth has established a group of lawyers to sue landlords who let their rental properties deteriorate.

Another Commission member, the Rev. Ken Brown of St. Margaret of Scotland church in the Shaw neighborhood, unveiled a program two years ago to allow families outside the city to get up to $5,000 from Catholic church sources toward the cost of buying a house in the St. Margaret parish or two other parishes in south St. Louis.

The Botanical Garden has been involved in expansion in the area, including the $19.4 million Monsanto Center for research at Shaw and South Vandeventer Avenue.

“This will stabilize the area and establish strong mixed-income community and be a very attractive area for people to bring up their families,” Kleinbard said. “There are neighborhoods that are in a state of decay and blight. It may not be easy. It seems to be coming together now. But it won’t happen overnight.”

OLD FRIENDS – ELDERLY CAN BENEFIT FROM SHARED HOMES; NUNS LEAD THE WAY – 19 Feb 1995 P-D

In the corners of beauty parlors and funeral parlors, over water coolers and birthday cake, middle-aged women muse about avoiding early entry to nursing homes by sharing a house with friends.

“I made a commitment to do that instead of being another little old lady all alone in her own bubble,” said Virginia Benson, an administrator with the Episcopal Church Missouri Diocese who lives in the Lafayette Square area.

“Four kindred souls would buy a house with enough bedrooms and bathrooms for each of us and hire a couple to keep up the place.”

Benson is 10 to 15 years away from such a move, and her recent marriage could change her plans. But those who work with the elderly say house sharing is an idea whose time has come.

Last fall, HOPE, or Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, a non-profit agency in the Shaw neighborhood, began matching elderly homeowners with retired tenants who can run errands and provide companionship and security. They have set up two households, one with two elderly people, the other with three.

“Mostly it is for companionship,” said Ken Anderson, HOPE manager.

“We need new models, new inventions,” said Gloria Gordon, 71, a psychologist in St. Louis. Communal living and sharing Social Security checks should be an option, she said.

Thousands of elderly women and men suffer loneliness in the isolation of their own homes, said Cora Burks, OASIS St. Louis director of volunteers and centers.

Others move into nursing homes because they need the security of having someone to help them if they fall, she said

“It’s time to hold forums on sharing homes,” Burks said.

Shaw Housing Committee To Form – 20 Dec 1990 P-D

Alderman Steve Conway, D-8th Ward, is setting up a housing advisory committee in the Shaw neighborhood. He says he wants it to set goals for improving housing in the ward and help bring together all available resources from the city.

”It’s a new direction in terms of addressing neighborhood problems from an overall perspective,” he said recently.

The group will have a representative from both the St. Margaret Housing Corporation and the Shaw Neighborhood Housing Corporation.

A $48,000 grant to the St. Margaret of Scotland Housing Corporation has been approved by the Community Development Agency, Conway said. The group will receive $4,000 a month beginning in January.

St. Margaret’s will be ”one of the mechanisms” used to promote the neighborhood programs, Conway said. The Shaw housing group, formed earlier this year, also will give advise, he said.

Conway said he told Shaw group members several days ago he wanted their ideas and that St. Margaret’s officers had indicated a willingness to add new board members.

”The overall goal is to get politics out of neighborhood organizations,” he said.

Other groups, including the Shaw Apartment Owners Association and the Thirty-ninth Street Redevelopment Corporation will also be involved, he said.

The housing committee will try to find the best way to use a limited amount of money, Conway said. Members will consider to spend money on major renovations of buildings or work on a lesser scale, he said. It would consider whether to spread the money through the ward or concentrate on ”horrible blocks,” he said.

Members of the advisory group are Dr. Jane Anton, Kathy Brucker, Birdie Chandler, Anthony Defilio, Joe Fank, Mike Holmes, Kathy Kane, John Lenzini, Julie Miller, Jeanne Potts, Rich Rhode, Conway and Patty Boyer, the ward representative of Operation Conserv.

Members ”represent a cross-section of the neighborhood residents. Some are tenants and some are owners of property,” Conway said.

Some residents have lived in the area for quite a while and others have moved in fairly recently, he said.