Striving for education and stability in a new land
Afghan refugee, Sajia Afzali and her young family escaped their home in the capital city just hours before the brutal Taliban regime regained authority. The family is building a new life – with local support – in Virginia.
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A family reunion in Israel, broken by war
Yehudit Shamir and her husband returned to the Kibbutz on the Gaza border where they first met decades earlier. October 7 sent the family running from tragedy.
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I am an Arab American
Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American who is poet laureate of Alexandria, writes longingly about her ancestral home in Palestine while celebrating her American identity, often peppering her English poetry with Arabic. Azzam, 68, came to the U.S. at the age of 10 after living in Homs, Syria and Beirut.
Her parents fled their home in Haifa in 1948 when Zionist paramilitary forces drove more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes to establish the Israeli state. The Zionists were largely European Jews who themselves suffered through centuries of displacement, antisemitism, and genocide.
This mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians is called Al Nakba, or The Catastrophe, and ignited a refugee crisis that’s lasted decades. Today, Israeli settlements continue to displace Palestinians in the West Bank. This history has fueled both Israel and Hamas to conduct violent strikes and retaliations.
Next month, VCIJ at WHRO will profile an Israeli-American.
Azzam has made a colorful and happy home in Alexandria, decorated with cultural emblems from the Arab World, fig trees and jasmine plants.
Her poem, “Write My Name,” has gone viral with its vivid description of children surviving in war-torn Gaza. Azzam read the poem before the United Nations Palestinian Rights Committee, and the verse has been translated into multiple languages.
Speaking independently, not as the Poet Laureate of Alexandria, she shared stories about her life as a child of refugees in America, Al Nakba, the Israeli-Hamas War and her hope for the future.
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Not in My Backyard
Jammie Hale moved to a rural hilltop in Southwest Virginia to get back to his family’s roots. When the Mountain Valley Pipeline came through a neighboring property, he found another purpose
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Tactical Activism
Georgia Allen, 70, remembers growing up during segregation in Pleasant Ridge, a sleepy, agricultural community in southern Virginia Beach. Her family bought groceries at the local country store, where her parents suffered the indignities of white customers always being served ahead of them.
But as a young girl, Allen wasn’t aware of it because her mother would find ways to distract her during shopping trips. Before Allen walked to the counter with her chosen toy or candy, her mother would say, “Come here a minute, are you sure you want that?”
“She would keep us busy, I ultimately realized later in life that you know, my mom was creative,” Allen said. “She was making sure we weren’t experiencing it (racism) as much as other people.”
Allen is now a civil rights activist and long time member of the Virginia Beach branch of the NAACP, having served as branch president from 2001 to 2012.
In 2021, she was a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that successfully changed the local election system in Virginia Beach after decades of underrepresentation for the city’s Black residents. In most cities, people living within voting districts elect city council members from within their districts to represent them in local office. But Virginia Beach had a system in which council members must win elections citywide, instead of solely within their districts.
This voting system prevented the election of candidates preferred by voters of color, plaintiffs argued. The city of Virginia Beach, created in 1963 by a merger between Princess Anne County and Virginia Beach, did not have its first Black city councilmember until 1986. Before the lawsuit, it had had only five Black city councilmembers in its history.
Virginia Voices captures first-person stories from the people most affected by current politics, policy and the economy. The series gives a stage to Virginians outside the news to share stories about how these forces have shaped their lives.
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