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Lately, the genuine dishes served at Flavors from Afar have earned it a point out on any checklist of memorable locations to eat within the metropolis of Los Angeles.
Within the kitchen of the tiny restaurant is a month-to-month rotation of cooks from all over the world, every cooking conventional plates in style of their dwelling nation. Ouze from Lebanon, manti dumplings from Chechnya or Palestinian musakhan.
However Flavors from Afar is greater than a culinary hotspot. The brainchild of 42-year-old Meymuna Hussein-Cattan, the restaurant is probably the most seen in a sequence of efforts by the Tiyya Basis to help immigrants and refugees who’ve newly arrived in the US, in addition to Indigenous individuals who have been displaced.
Tiyya works with the “residual” of worldwide crises, stated Hussein-Cattan, serving to individuals after they’ve made it by way of the customarily harrowing journey to the US however face the equally daunting problem of rebuilding their lives. “We’re doing the work when it’s not cool anymore. That’s why I’ve hassle on Instagram,” Hussein-Cattan laughs, sitting in Flavors from Afar’s Little Ethiopia eating room. “I can’t sustain with what’s taking place proper now as a result of I’m nonetheless working with households from what occurred 5 years in the past.”
Hussein-Cattan began Tiyya together with her mom, Owliya Dima, who immigrated to the US from East Africa within the Nineteen Eighties, and for years helped different refugees arriving in southern California settle into their new lives – serving to individuals get furnishings for his or her properties and diapers for his or her youngsters, translating paperwork and checking in on them.
Tiyya was based in 2010, with community-based programming like back-to-school drives and English-language studying alternatives. Slowly, its work expanded to employment applications.
The inspiration to begin the restaurant got here, like a lot of Tiyya’s work, from the individuals the group serves.
“It was a former asylum seeker who gave me the thought. He was from Egypt,” stated Hussein-Cattan. “I considered tea, and he was like, ‘That’s cute. However you already know, there’s a ton of excellent meals round you. There’s ghost kitchens. And there’s these apps known as Uber and DoorDash. Perhaps you may cater.’”
True to Tiyya’s mission, the expertise for the rotating cooks is career-oriented: the cooks be taught to function a business kitchen, get headshots {and professional} bios achieved to develop their resumes and even have skilled pictures of their meals taken.
5 % of the restaurant’s proceeds go to the cooks straight and 40% to the muse.
Discovering a job is among the many greatest challenges new immigrants expertise, particularly a job that’s much like the one they did at dwelling, stated Mira Tarabeine, the profession placement specialist at Tiyya.
“Work expertise and training is just not honored if it was in a distinct nation – in any respect,” stated Tarabeine, who moved to the US from Syria in 2012.
Tarabeine recalled a consumer from Afghanistan, a physician who ran a surgical unit again in his dwelling nation and was working in the direction of a doctor’s assistant diploma within the US. After they submitted his paperwork to certify his tutorial {qualifications}, they acquired an automatic electronic mail saying his diploma couldn’t be re-evaluated for the reason that US doesn’t acknowledge Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities. Refugees from Afghanistan made up the biggest group of arrivals in California in 2023, in line with the Migration Coverage Institute.
“In your nation you have been someone. You then come to the US. In the event you have been a professor, you can’t be a professor once more. You’re a physician, you can’t be a physician right here,” stated Tarabeine’s colleague at Tiyya, housing specialist Beatrice Kihagi, of the expertise of shifting to the US.
Kihagi was a profitable enterprise proprietor in Kenya earlier than emigrating. She stated she and lots of others get by way of the challenges with humor. She has a buddy who was a college lecturer in Afghanistan who now works as a safety guard. “Generally we meet and we simply snicker about issues, you already know, and simply encourage one another. Yeah, and transfer on with life. As a result of I imply, what do you do? It’s a must to be a really sturdy particular person to know that, yeah, you possibly can lose all of it. And you may all the time begin once more.”
Creating relationships with potential employers has allowed her to share the {qualifications} of her candidates, stated Tarabeine. “Over 70% of the parents in profession placement are at the very least college-level educated. And 60% of these have a postgraduate diploma, whether or not that’s a physician, a regulation diploma, and medical diploma, very profitable people.”
Kihagi does this with property managers and landlords, explaining that lots of the individuals in search of housing have authorized authorization to be within the US.
In 2022, Tiyya Basis positioned individuals in 49 jobs, with 87% of oldsters staying employed, the group stated. They supported 4 people with their very own catering corporations and succeeded in getting 15 re-certifications or upskilling alternatives.
It’s all a part of reframing the narrative about refugees as a complete, Hussein-Cattan argued. “There was once these actually meek-looking photographs of individuals with luggage over their shoulders, strolling by way of deserts and little shadows of them marching … No, no. The refugee simply acquired off the aircraft. Has their touring visa that may expire as a result of they’re on the lookout for that lawyer. That refugee simply was on the financial institution, you already know? Stability was wholesome.”
Hussein-Cattan stated anyone can expertise displacement, citing the households displaced by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, California. “It might be any certainly one of us. We’re all simply so weak. If we hold othering the refugee narrative, then we’re in denial that it might happen right here at dwelling.”
In 2022, Tiyya served 218 households, in line with the group: 774 people and 507 kids. Their shoppers got here from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Palestine, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Venezuela; and spoke 11 languages, together with Afaan Oromo, Dari, Farsi and Spanish.
Regardless of beginning the identical month because the Covid-19 lockdown, the restaurant has been profitable. Flavors From Afar acquired the Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2022, and was within the Los Angeles Instances’s 101 finest eating places in Los Angeles two years in a row. It’s been such successful that they’re increasing in a brand new location.
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