Samiullah Yosife, 19, a resident of Montreat, is a teenager with curly dark hair and a sheepish smile who loves to play volleyball. Yosife, who goes by Sami and is from Kabul, Afghanistan, came to the U.S. as a minor with limited English proficiency, after the Taliban took over his country.
His parents and siblings remain in Afghanistan. For more than two years, he has faced significant challenges navigating the resettlement system alone and he recently obtained asylum in October.
“If you don’t endure difficulties in life, how else can you move forward at all,” Sami said of the challenges he has been facing in an interview in Pashto with Carolina Public Press.
Sami’s resettlement story echoes the challenges faced by thousands of Afghans nationwide over the past two years, as a result of what advocates say is an underfunded resettlement programs that lacks the capacity to provide adequate support.
However, his story also gives an exemplary perspective into what being an Afghan refugee is like for a teenager in North Carolina, which ranked ninth among states taking in the number of refugees from Afghanistan between July 2022 and June 2023.
“There is a continuous underfunding of refugee resettlement for new Afghan arrivals,” Arash Azizzada, a co-founder of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, a nonprofit group of community organizers in the Afghan diaspora. “There is still a lack of capacity that exists within refugee resettlement agencies.”
“We have many stories of people going through refugee resettlement organizations and not even hearing back from their appointed person,” said Azizzada, who is based in Los Angeles.
Sami said he found himself left to his own devices in critical situations, such as when he was kicked out of a camp in the greater Asheville area, and was nearly unhoused. His assigned resettlement agency, Catholic Charities in Western North Carolina neglected him and did not provide adequate support, Sami said.
He was already 18 years old when he was assigned to the agency and is considered an adult in the system. A volunteer, who has been housing and supporting Sami and who he calls his “American mom,” Susan Haws, agreed. She said the agency has not been the most responsive to Sami’s needs.
Catholic Charities in Western North Carolina is a service location of Catholic Charities Diocese of Charlotte. Carolina Public Press reached out to Catholic Charities for comment on Sami’s account of lack of support from the agency.
“Due to government confidentiality requirements, we cannot confirm that any particular individual is a client or discuss the personal circumstances of those who are clients,” said Gerard A. Carter, the executive director and chief operating officer at Catholic Charities Diocese of Charlotte, in a written statement to Carolina Public Press.
“We can share, however, that we would respect the wishes of — and provide support for — any adult client who might choose to remain in North Carolina instead of relocating with family elsewhere. We maintain robust records documenting the facts of all services provided to our refugee clients, and we are monitored by the state and federal governments. We are proud of the work we do to help refugees build new lives, as it is our calling to welcome the stranger.”
Catholic Charities provides services to refugees from arrival through their first 90 days in the country in collaboration with community partners to ensure that the clients “have safe and secure housing, required health screenings and vaccinations, access to medical and SNAP benefits, assistance with school and ESL enrollment, and cultural orientation to life in the U.S.,” Carter said in his statement.
Beyond the three month period, Catholic Charities continues to work with refugees as needed for up to five years, he said.
North Carolina is home to about 4,195 Afghans who arrived between September 2021 and December 2023 with 15 local agencies helping them resettle across 30 counties including Guilford, Mecklenburg, Wake, Durham and Buncombe, according to the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.
Since August 2023, more than 600 new arrivals resettled in the state. About 37% of the Afghan arrivals to date were minors, according to DHHS.
Sami’s resettlement challenges
Sami initially came to U.S. with some of his extended family, his uncle and aunt and their children, with whom he evacuated from Afghanistan soon after the Taliban takeover and U.S. withdrawal from the country in Aug. 2021. They were all assigned to Catholic Charities in Asheville, where they reached in Oct. 2021. Sami said he lived with his relatives until they migrated to Canada, and he chose to stay on, in June 2022.
“When my extended family left and I stayed on, my living situation became challenging,” Sami said. “I felt I had more support from the agency when I wasn’t on my own.”
Haws first met Sami at his high school in February 2022, where she was a substitute for his ESL teacher. She didn’t hear from or see Sami for months until August 2022, when she found out that he had been kicked out of a local camp because of his faith, she said.
While he was living at the camp, Sami, a practicing Muslim would do his prayers and listen to the Quran on his phone in his room. It wasn’t the most comfortable place for him and he said he was only able to eat once a day, but he lived there after his extended family left.
One day, Sami said, a man who was in charge of the camp, whose name he cannot recall, overheard and came to his room to tell him to pack up his things and leave. Sami’s English was more limited then, but while he wasn’t sure what the man said word-for-word, he understood that he was not welcome there anymore because of his faith, according to Sami.
“I was the only Muslim there,” Sami recalled. He reached out to his caseworker at Catholic Charities to help him find another place to live.
“I kept telling my caseworker that I need a permanent living situation and she kept telling me that I need to be patient and that it will all work out,” Sami said.
Sami couldn’t wait. He asked someone from school for help and was able to find a room for rent in a building. During this time, he continued to attend school and rode his bike to work at a local hotel restaurant, where he worked as a dishwasher part time.
Haws would check in on Sami and help him out, as needed during this time, she said.
“At the time, he had no support whatsoever, he was living by himself in this little hovel of a building and it was being torn down,” Haws said. “They let him live there.”
She could see how depressed and sad Sami was during that time, she said. The building was older and lacked proper heating. The owners were going to tear it down to rebuild a new one, according to Haws.
“In his room he only had a microwave, a rice steamer, a little refrigerator someone had given him and he was getting food stamps from Catholic Charities,” she said. “But even then with Sami, everything is straight in a row, his shoes and everything.”
In October 2022, Sami injured himself at school with a severe ankle injury while playing volleyball. Haws called Catholic Charities to inform them that he was injured, but was unsuccessful in getting communication going with them or having someone from the organization show up, she said.
The caseworker at Catholic Charities “was unavailable and was busy working with another family and I was told to take him to urgent care with his Medicaid insurance,” Haws recounted.
That same month, there was “a real cold spell,” Haws said and Sami texted her and told her he was very cold. Haws took blankets and an electric heater for him, but there was not enough power to run the heater in the room. She called Catholic Charities again and told them that “this is unacceptable and that Sami had also been given notice that he had to vacate the building by November 1.”
Sami’s caseworker at Catholic Charities told Haws that while she was figuring out a permanent living arrangement for him, she would put up Sami in a local motel, the Quality Inn in Black Mountain, according to Haws. Sami stayed at the hotel for about five days, he said.
“He’s an 18-year-old Afghan boy living there and I wasn’t comfortable for his safety,” Haws said. “As a mother, I wouldn’t want my son living at a motel by himself.”
Catholic Charities then found an Airbnb for Sami to move into, Haws said. The agency agreed to pay for six months of his rent. A local church, Black Mountain Presbyterian Church, was going to help pay the other six months, according to Haws. The owner of the property wanted Catholic Charities to bring in an interpreter to go over the contract with Sami the day before he moved in on Nov. 1, 2022.
On October 31, 2022, Catholic Charities did not show up with a check for the rent or an interpreter to go over the contract, Sami and Haws said. The owner did not feel comfortable having Sami sign the contract without someone from Catholic Charities and an interpreter showing up, according to Haws.
“So, that didn’t happen and I was so angry,” she said. Haws decided to have Sami move into her home in Montreat.
“I decided that he is going to stay and be a part of my family,” she said. “I told him you’re coming here and gave him his own room which he decorated.”
Sami has been living with Haws since then, attending English classes, working long hours at a warehouse to package products to support eight members of his family back home and playing pick-up gym and beach volleyball games to continue to practice his favorite sport.
“Susan is a very caring and generous person,” Sami said. “She has supported me so much.”
Sami and Haws both hope that once Sami’s English improves, he will be able to apply to and attend an area college. They also hope he is able to get a scholarship to continue to play volleyball on a college level.
Helping Afghan refugees
Anne Vilen, a volunteer for Afghans resettled in Western North Carolina, has provided personal assistance with resettlement to six Afghan men since 2021.
Vilen started helping out in December 2021, by driving an Afghan man to the mosque in Asheville once a week. Within a few weeks, “it became clear that the needs were much greater than that,” she said. “He lost his housing suddenly, needed a place to live and also a job.”
Vilen, who has mostly helped provide support for the resettlement of single men without families, has not worked with Afghan minors. “I do think that single individuals have different needs than the families and particularly because they are here alone, have no family or community in this country,” she said.
Vilen had more success getting timely communication from Lutheran Services, she said. “They have done a great job of sustaining support and staying in touch with people,” she said.
Refugees who were assigned to Lutheran Services in North Carolina continue to get support and case management from the agency even two years after their arrival, according to Vilen.
Another volunteer, Erik Iverson, who worked exclusively with eight single men and one minor, a 17-year-old boy, who were all assigned to Catholic Charities, provided the home he lives in to house the individuals temporarily.
“We felt we had the resources to support these folks,” he said. However, one caseworker at Catholic Charities was extremely under-resourced and working with 40 Afghans, families and individuals, resettling in Western North Carolina, according to Iverson.
“I don’t think it was individuals who dropped the ball,” he said. “Maybe it was just the agency biting off more than it could chew.”
Iverson and his family had only offered their home for three months, but then it turned into five months because the agency couldn’t find a permanent home for the individuals until then, Iverson said.
In his observation of working with Afghan refugees, he said the three-month period of support required from a resettlement agency is not enough time to leave people on their own in learning and navigating American systems.
“It’s been two years that the individuals we housed for five months have been here and they still come over at least two to three times a week needing help with different things, such as filling applications,” Iverson said.
“We choose to continue our participation in the lives of these men because we recognize that they have been abandoned by the U.S. government who evacuated these folks and said it would support them,” Iverson said.
The U.S. government fell short in supporting these individuals long-term to help them build a life and assimilate into U.S. systems, he said.
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