When Omar Biladi came to Vermont in 2019 as a refugee from Burundi, he thought life would get at least a little easier.
Biladi is a single father of six children, between the ages of 8 and 18. His wife died at a refugee camp in Burundi just after the birth of his youngest child. He believed in America his family’s luck might change.
“I know that I was in a bad situation back in Africa,” Biladi said, through a translator. “That wasn’t easy; that’s why I came here. But now, I was so shocked that after coming here, it became even worse. Instead of giving me a good place to live, I felt like this was even worse from how I was living before.”
When Biladi arrived in Vermont, his family found a four-bedroom apartment in Winooski with the help of the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. But after three months, the financial help from the refugee resettlement program ran out, and he was struggling to make ends meet, despite working 40-plus hours a week at Preci Manufacturing in Winooski.
“I work full time, but my salary as one person cannot pay for a four-bedroom; it’s impossible,” he said.
To make things worse, their apartment came with cockroaches, leaky ceilings and broken appliances. He tried to get help from his landlord, but because of the language barrier, his landlord didn’t listen to his complaints and their living situation worsened.
Biladi and his family were forced to move several times — one of his apartments caught fire, while another was ruled uninhabitable by the city.
But all that, Biladi said, he thought they could handle. Then Covid hit.
“Sometimes I was even going to the bathroom to cry there,” he said. “I didn’t want to cry in front of my kids, because I didn’t want to show them that I’m really affected about this.”
Biladi’s family ultimately became homeless, and the family of seven had to live out of a motel. They spent three months moving to four different motels around the Burlington area, all while his kids were still in school.
“Living in a hotel in this unusual time is not easy,” Biladi said. “There’s a lot of people in the elevator, a lot of people in the stairs, it is not safe.”
It wasn’t long before Biladi and all of his kids became sick. They took one Covid test, which came back negative, but they still had coughs and fevers, so the kids couldn’t go to school, and he couldn’t go to work.
Instead of working full time, he took care of the kids, taking them to the hospital, and waiting until everyone’s symptoms went away so that they would be allowed to return to school and work.
“There’s a time when we are all sick, but we couldn’t do anything about it,” he said. “We were just drinking home remedies, you know, those drinks from Africa that we know about, to try to see if that would help.”
He said it was frustrating that, even with negative test results, they couldn’t return to school.
“Because of Covid, even a cough becomes a problem, even sniffles become a problem,” he said. “So my kids spent most of the time like at home, and I spent most of the time at home because of that.”
The Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity eventually connected with Biladi, providing resources to help pay part of his rent. His kids’ school has been sending home gift cards to Shaw’s and CostCo to help with groceries, and he’s on food stamps.
Without all that, Biladi said, he doesn’t know how he would have made it through the year.
“Now I feel like I’m living,” he said. “Before, I wasn’t living. I was living under stress. But now, I can breathe, I can smile. I can even talk to my kids, sit down and eat together. I feel good about myself compared to before.”