Alumna Helps Iraqis Build New Life in the United States

Author: Claire Bourne

Picture this. It is your wedding night. The ceremony is over, and you and your betrothed have returned to your Baghdad apartment. Suddenly, your residence is rocked by an explosion, as a bomb from a passing warplane meets the city landscape. Debris rains down on you, and you are forced to flee the building into an urban war zone dressed in nothing but bedclothes. You run, and you never come back.
As a therapist to 58 Iraqis displaced by the 1991 Gulf War, Beth Sandel '79 has to picture scenarios like this every day. Sandel works for the multicultural services division of a Seattle-based community agency that oversees the resettlement and assimilation of 500 Iraqi families.
Many of her clients spent as many as seven years in Saudi Arabian refugee camps before the United States accepted them under refugee status. They settled in subsidized housing in the northern Seattle suburbs. With the help of Sandel and others like her, they are in the process of rebuilding their broken lives - a feat that has proved much harder than Sandel expected.
She counsels mostly women, 98 percent of whom suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), she said. "Theoretically, I am there to help them stabilize emotionally," she explained. "It has been interesting because I'm dealing with so many different layers of issues." Not only has Sandel had to overcome a towering language barrier (the majority the women under her purview are illiterate in both English and Arabic), but she has also encountered enormous cultural disparities.
"The big question is what kind of psychological concepts we can agree on," she said. "There is all this talk nowadays about whether Iraq is open to democracy. Thirty-five years of dictatorship has its impact on the way people relate to each other."
The memory of Saddam Hussein's authoritarian regime haunts those refugees who spent years under his rule. "I have one client who landed in the United States on Sept. 10. It is very real and fresh to her what Saddam Hussein has done to [Iraq]," related Sandel.
Similarly, the first Gulf War has left many of these expatriates suffering from open wounds. For example, the woman who fled the Iraqi capital on her marriage night still jumps every time the phone rings or the door slams.
"I have scaled back my expectations," Sandel noted. "It is a foreign concept for them to be in control of their own existence and experience. If we can focus on slow breathing for three minutes, that's a success. How can you be a vibrant human being when you are living with a gut fear?"
The recent outbreak of war in Iraq has not helped the situation. "In the last two weeks we have been in a holding pattern," she said. "They are glued to the T.V. I call to confirm an appointment and I can hear the news in the background." Despite the refugees' meager residences, they closely follow Arabic television networks by way of satellite feeds since all of them still have family in the region. Fear for their relatives coupled with hope that the conflict will ultimately improve the state of their mother nation places them in "an odd space of fear and hopelessness," Sandel said.
Although the refugees have displayed more pronounced PTSD symptoms since the United States launched its military campaign against Hussein, they have become mentally "more present and accounted for, more focused," Sandel pointed out. She has been instructed to avoid broaching political issues during her group and individual sessions, a directive she said she finds hard to follow given that all of those being counseled want to express their opinions. "One point of view is that if the war hadn't started, Saddam would have inflicted more injury than war. Another point of view is that since we supported Saddam in the past, it behooves the States to fix it. A handful says, 'Boy, is the West in big trouble,'" she elucidated.
Today, Sandel finds herself in the unique position of seeing the decade-long tension between Iraq and the United States from both sides. "It is very evocative because I lived in Egypt. The buildings look the same. The civilians pictured on the news could be my brothers-in-law," she said. "I am in an ambiguous situation because I am not of the culture, but I lived in the culture."
While at Middlebury College, she majored in French, spending her junior year abroad in Paris. While looking for a way to get back to Paris after graduation, she decided to enroll at the College's summer Arabic School. She attended the program's inaugural session in the summer of 1982 and followed up her first-year studies with two subsequent summers at the College.
Thanks to a family friend, she ended up working as a translator in Egypt, where she met her former husband, an Egyptian citizen. Following a year in the Arab nation, she moved to Washington, D.C., and secured a job with the Egyptian Embassy's educational programs division.
In 1999, she completed a master's degree in counseling, which, when coupled with her uncommon Arabic language skills, opened the door to her current employment.
Working with the refugees has provided Sandel with a pretext for introspection. "I am exploring for myself how much cultural baggage is blocking me from being a support to them," she explained. She knows she must continue the uphill battle to improve their quality of life in the United States. "I am supportive in questioning and exploring and leave room open for their own questioning and surviving," she said.
A hard task given that the current war in Iraq will postpone her chance to erase the recurring nightmares of dictatorial control and American bombing raids that have troubled the minds of these displaced Iraqis for more than 10 years.