Apparently, some places in America are worse than a Middle Eastern war zone.
After being relocated from a refugee camp, Syrian refugees living in North St. Louis are afraid of even going outside. Several refugees told a local St. Louis news station the horrors of the neighborhood--which include gunfire, bugs, and rodent infestations. They spoke of the constant shooting late at night reminding them of the violence in their home country.
“8 p.m. we cannot leave our apartment,” the translator said, “And if we want to leave, we need to be in a group. No one can leave the apartment as a single, or with one other — no– we need to be in a group.”
A video taken by St. Louis station KMOX shows the disgusting conditions of one of the apartments.
The situation in the city is so bad that one woman told a translator she phoned a relative living in a refugee camp in Jordan and warned her not to come to St. Louis. Other refugees report that their apartments do not have electricity, and that they have been effectively abandoned by the International Institute, a non-profit that was supposed to help them adjust to living in the United States.
It's completely unacceptable for a non-profit, especially one centered on refugee resettlement, to permit families to live in conditions like this. It's also a heartbreaking reality that some places in the United States are equally as bad as a war-torn nation. Nobody should be living like this.
