I sip black TEA IN THE HOME OF RANIA
Alahmad in Wylie, a city 30 miles northeast of Dallas. Alahmad and her friends, Khuloud Sultan, Nawarah Shaker, and Maisaa Alkhdir, have cooked an elaborate afternoon meal. I catch whiffs of the food they’ve prepared: grilled chicken seasoned with aromatics and cilantro, alongside roasted, shredded carrots. Their near-instantaneous kindness and willingness to break bread with me has already cemented the meal as one of my most memorable dining experiences. Welcoming guests with food, love, and generosity is common in places like Syria, the women’s country of origin.
“Home was a lot of people—our family, our friends, our community,” Alahmad says. “I miss home, where our front door was always open. So I try to create something similar here.”
Alahmad is one of 6.8 million refugees who left the Middle Eastern nation of Syria due to the violent ongoing civil war. After fleeing in 2012, Alahmad and her family spent four years as refugees in Jordan, where she describes the refugee housing as overcrowded and unkept. Four years later, she received a call from the International Organization for Migration, asking her if she’d be interested in moving to Texas. “I said, ‘Are you joking? Of course I want to go!’”
Between 2010 and 2019, Texas has resettled around 57,000 refugees—more than any other state in the country. Most recently, as the war in Afghanistan
