SPOKANE — Since Kalthouma Mohamed took the Oath of Allegiance and became a U.S. citizen last month, she has been torn between two emotions.
On one hand, the Spokane resident said, she’s grateful for the safety and opportunity she’s found in her new home after a lifetime marked by conflict and displacement since she was a child in her native Chad. She feels lucky to have the apartment she shares with her two youngest children, 10-year-old Mohanad and Maha, who was born in 2013, and the housekeeping job at a downtown hotel that lets her provide for them.
At the same time, she is wracked with guilt and worry about her two older children — Nassim, born in 2006, and Nasma, born in 2008 — who were separated from her when the family fled Libya’s civil war in 2011 and live with their grandmother in northern Chad, a country twice the size of Texas in north-central Africa.
“It’s very difficult for children at that age to live without their mom, without their dad, in a war,” Mohamed said in Arabic through an interpreter. “They’re so young and they don’t know how to get out.”