Hagerstown has been in the news lately. A religious organization that works in refugee resettlement called the Virginia Council of Churches has announced that they will no longer resettle refugees in Hagerstown. They have determined that Hagerstown is just too unfriendly to refugees.
The Virginia Council of Churches’ announcement caps 12 months of sour relations. Many residents of the western Maryland city of 39,000 didn’t know that nearly 200 refugees had been placed in their community until last October, when emergency medical workers, lacking an interpreter, mistook a Burundian woman’s morning sickness for a chemical or biological threat and set up a decontamination tent on a downtown street.
Since then, despite regular monthly meetings with local officials, the group’s requests for funds to help pay refugee housing costs have been denied by the city and Washington County.
The emergency medical technicians mistook a Burundian woman’s morning sickness for some type of biological threat because she called to 911. Maybe women in the Republic of Burundi call 911 when they have morning sickness. Woman in Hagerstown do not.
When the emergency medical technicians arrived on the scene, they had no idea that they were called because a woman was experiencing a bad case of morning sickness. They thought she was severally ill. After all, she called 911. As fate would have it, none of the EMT’s spoke Kirundi and the woman didn’t speak English. None of the refugees spoke English. The other refugees in the home mistakenly conveyed to the EMT’s that they too were sick.
The EMT’s believed the refugees may have had a communicable disease. Can’t say I blame them. Hazmat units were sent to the area, and the 12 African refugees were briefly quarantined.
Up until the historic morning sickness 911 call was made, nobody in Hagerstown even knew the Virginia Council of Churches had placed 12 non-English speaking Burundian refugees in our fine city. Maybe they should have told someone.
Some people in Hagerstown have wondered why a religious group from Virginia placed African refugees here in Maryland. I can’t really blame them.
