It’s not just Egypt’s soccer team that is getting results! In the past several months, the Resettlement Legal Aid Project (RLAP) at Saint Andrew’s has continued with its core work—resettlement assistance for refugees seeking permanent relocation outside of Egypt—but it has also been developing an array of additional programs. We are in a phase of expansion at RLAP on a variety of fronts: we are expanding our staff, broadening the types of services we provide to our clients and, while our clients remain predominantly Iraqi, we are reaching out to other refugee communities in Cairo.
We have had tremendous success with resettlement recently. On October 17th, 7 of our clients were resettled to new lives in the United States.
This number included one of our beloved office administrators, who resettled to Florida. She hopes one day soon to move to Washington, DC, and work as an Arabic translator. Also on October 15, a mother and her two daughters were successfully resettled to New Mexico. Everyone at RLAP familiar with their case breathed a tremendous sigh of relief—they were in incredible danger in Cairo and had moved apartments three times in order to hide from their persecutors, who had spent over a year sending the older daughter weekly and sometimes daily death threats. We are thrilled that they have the opportunity to begin news lives free from this fear.
Recently, a driver appeared at RLAP’s door. We had never seen him before, but he explained that he had driven a man, wife, and son to the airport that morning. The driver reported that this man had burst into tears and started kissing the ground and thanking God at the terminal. The driver came and told us because he was so moved, and thought we should know how happy we had made this man. It turns out he was one of our clients who had finally been resettled after a particularly long wait. We had lost contact with him and had been worried—and now he is in the United States! .
Of course, for every success story, there are at least 20 clients still in desperate situations in Cairo. We still have hundreds of clients with active cases. Their needs, and our abilities to help, give us the stamina to keep going despite the obstacles to serving refugees in Egypt. More and more clients keep coming to our office, and our reputation for helping people—both psycho-social counseling as well as resettlement—continues to grow. We are very busy, and the work continues to be incredibly inspiring and fulfilling.
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This post was written by Stephanie Biedermann, RLAP’s Legal Director since June 2009.
What RLAP does: to date, RLAP has advised over 700 clients on a variety of legal matters related to life as a refugee in Cairo. Our staff and interns conduct extensive interviews in order to analyze whether a particular client satisfies the legal criteria for refugee status and for resettlement. Then we prepare testimony, communicate with UNHCR, the IOM and USCIS on our clients’ behalf as necessary, and prepare them for their resettlement interviews. If a refugee’s claim for resettlement has been rejected, we can assist him or her in drafting an appeal. RLAP’s team includes a Legal Director, Psycho-social Team Leader (a trained medical doctor), two psycho-social counselors, two office administrators, and now, 20 part-time and full-time interns. We are currently in the process of hiring a new Program Director with the help of recent foundational support.
