‘We Are Not Going to Die Out’ : Budget Cuts and Policy Changes Threaten the African Community Resource Center, One of the Few Government-Subsidized Support Organizations That Place Their Focus Primarily on African Refugees.

Working as a cashier at an LAX parking lot isn’t the most action-packed job, but that’s just fine with Sara Arkangelo.

She had her share of action, and fear, fleeing the bombs and bullets of a fierce civil war in her native Sudan. Even after Arkangelo escaped, she and her family endured three years in dusty, overcrowded refugee camps where nighttime raids by roving bandits were a common occurrence.

But that’s all behind her. “I have peace now. Everything is 100 percent better,” the 28-year-old mother of two said recently. “In Sudan there was nothing but war; there was no future.”

Two years after leaving Africa, Arkangelo is certain she has a future thanks in part to a small agency made up of former refugees that has helped her and her family settle in their new land.

“I thank God for them,” Arkangelo said of the Miracle Mile-based African Community Resource Center. “They helped us more than I can say.”

The nonprofit agency not only put her family up in a rent-free apartment for a month, but staff members also helped Arkangelo and her husband find jobs at LAX after they completed an agency-sponsored English as a Second Language course. Along the way, the organization helped the couple with their immigration papers and even stocked their refrigerator with food until they could start making their own money.

“Someday I’m going to repay them,” Arkangelo vowed while her children napped in the next room. “Someday I will.”

She and her family are among more than 200 African refugees the center has resettled in Southern California in the past 10 years. The center has also helped 10 times that many with support services such as job referrals and family counseling, said Nikki Tesfai, the agency’s executive director.

Many refugees have moved to the Los Angeles area after initially being resettled in other parts of the country, Tesfai said. The local population of African refugees is estimated at about 22,000, and many have heard about the center through outreach efforts and word-of-mouth. Those the center resettles, however, are assigned to the agency through the U.S. State Department.

But as the agency enters its second decade, its own future appears less certain than that of many of its clients.

A sharply reduced budget has forced the center to lay off half its small staff in the past two years and recent changes in U.S. resettlement policies have slowed to a trickle the flow of African refugees to California.

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What’s more, some federal lawmakers have proposed cutting in half the number of all refugees allowed into the country, and others have called for eliminating funds for many refugee support programs.

“Things are very scary right now,” Tesfai said recently at the center’s small suite of offices on Wilshire Boulevard. “I’m very concerned about what’s happening.”

While there are many agencies in the county that help refugees, the African Community Resource Center is one of the few government-subsidized support organizations to focus primarily on Africans.

This, coupled with U.S. State Department plans to lower by nearly a third the yearly limit of new African refugees allowed into the country, leaves the agency particularly vulnerable, Tesfai said. Currently, the limit is 7,000, but it is expected to fall to 5,000 next year. The ceilings for five other geographic areas the State Department uses to categorize refugees are also expected to drop.

But bad news for the organization isn’t new.

In the past two years, the resource center has seen its resettlement cases plummet from 135 to two after the State Department began allowing only refugees with family ties to be resettled in California. State Department spokeswoman Pamela Lewis said the move was meant to give California an opportunity to absorb the high number of refugees it already had.

The decision, however, has not only affected the agency’s flow of clients, it has also cost it close to $100,000 a year in funds the State Department pays for resettlement services.

Other grants and public money have also dried up given California’s recession-rocked economy, and the agency’s budget has fallen from nearly $1 million two years ago to only $140,000 this year. In the process, its staff has shrunk from eight to four.

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“Things are very shaky right now,” said Kurt Rivas, who sits on the agency’s board of directors. “There’s less and less money out there to get, so we’re going to have to try other approaches.” Increasing local fund raising is among the ideas currently under consideration, he said.

As it stands, the agency’s main funding source is the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has given money specifically for programs to prevent the breakup of refugee families and to help refugee women find jobs.

But even that money has become a target of congressional budget-cutters.

Sen. Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.) recently proposed legislation to eliminate funding for refugee social service programs. While the proposal was voted down in committee, similar legislation has been introduced in the House of Representatives. One bill, for instance, would reduce the total number of refugees allowed into the United States for all refugees from 110,000 to 50,000.

Despite the ultimate fate of those bills, Tesfai and other refugee advocates say the proposals and the debate they have sparked have soured the political climate for refugees--especially Africans--like never before.

“There is no constituency here that advocates or puts pressure on policy-makers for more African resettlement,” said Tsehaye Teferra, who operates a Virginia-based refugee center and refers clients to Tesfai’s agency.

State Department figures show that during the past 20 years, fewer refugees were admitted into the United States from Africa than from any other geographic division, including Asia, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and Near East Asia.

“It’s a reflection of the low priority African refugees receive in this country,” Teferra said.

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One way to resolve that, Tesfai said, is to encourage the estimated 48,000 African refugees in the nation to become citizens and get politically involved.

Until that happens, however, the 41-year-old former Eritrean refugee is determined to stick out the agency’s rough patch. “We’re never going to stop what we’re doing. I guess we’re just going to have to fight.”

But even as the resource center trains an eye on the nation’s changing political landscape, it still keeps the other squarely fixed on its reason for being: helping African refugees.

“We are not going to die out,” said Tesfai, who founded the agency in 1984. “This is a community center for Africans.”

Among the agency’s most important pursuits, Tesfai said, is teaching clients English so they can become self-sufficient as quickly as possible.

Every Monday through Thursday, half a dozen refugees gather at William Grant Still Arts Center on West View Street for 2 1/2 hours of sometimes unorthodox instruction.

Teacher and agency staff member Jassie Mulongo, a native Liberian who came to the United States as a refugee in 1990, has taken her students to the grocery store and even McDonald’s to reinforce sometimes abstract vocabulary.

“They don’t realize French fries is another word for potato unless you show them,” Mulongo said.

One of her students, 67-year-old Addanne Afera of Ethiopia, has been taking the class for about a month and is eager to become proficient in the language of his new land. “I live here now,” he explained. “I must learn.”

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The class is among a handful of services the agency provides outside its offices such as Saturday afternoon family mixers and volunteer translators, who accompany refugees to the store or meetings with immigration officials.

Home for the agency is a collection of four small offices neatly crammed with desks, tables, filing cabinets and boxes. Wall space is practically nonexistent among the United Nations refugee posters, office memos, telephone lists and occasional job postings.

By midmorning most days, the office fills with the sounds of English, French and various African languages. Often heard is a soft-spoken “Excuse me,” as clients ease past one another in the office’s narrow walkways.

The mix of clients in the office changes with the day and the services offered.

On Tuesdays, young women frequently come for lessons on typing or how to run office machines in hopes of eventually landing jobs as secretaries. On Fridays, many people--often women in the colorful robes of their native countries--come to consult with an attorney on their applications for citizenship or permanent residency.

Wednesdays tend to be the busiest days, when the agency passes out care packages of beans, cereal, rice and powdered milk. Before the distribution, refugees gather in the agency’s cramped conference room for a discussion on topics ranging from health and money management to political and social issues. Recently, the discussion or “talk circle,” led by outreach worker Kalifa Omar, focused on a proposed congressional bill seeking to limit refugee access to welfare.

“Because of this, most of our efforts will go toward helping you find employment opportunities,” Omar told the gathering, switching alternately among English, French and the Ethiopian language of Amharic.

Degfu Tedesse of Ethiopia, who was among the eight refugees who participated in the talk circle, agreed that finding a job is important. But he said that in the two months since he arrived in Los Angeles with his wife and 23-year-old daughter, his search for work has been unsuccessful.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Tedesse, 48, who used to work in the housing ministry of Ethiopia’s previous government that was toppled during a civil war in 1991.

To help Tedesse and other refugees find jobs, the agency has formed an employment referral partnership with local hotels, restaurants, professional offices and medical facilities. Refugees are catalogued by their skills and matched with job postings that come from the businesses. About 60 people a year find jobs this way, Tesfai said.

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For the past year, the resource center has particularly focused on finding jobs for refugee women. The effort is part of a program sponsored by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement that seeks to incorporate in the work force women who most likely have never worked outside the home.

Lenny Glickman, a spokesman with the refugee office, said the program is designed to help refugees better support their families with two incomes.

More than 70 women have found full- or part-time jobs under the program at the resource center.

Among them is Desta Haliu, a 25-year-old Ethiopian refugee who was jailed after the 1991 revolution because of her ties to the former government. She escaped only after her mother paid off a prison guard.

Haliu came to Los Angeles in late 1992 and found work as a baby-sitter while she learned English at Inglewood Adult School.

Earlier this year, she went to the center for office-work training and did so well she was hired as the agency’s receptionist.

“Baby-sitting made me very tired,” she said. “I’m much happier now.”

So too is fellow refugee Arkangelo, who said she can’t imagine tiring of the cashier job the agency helped her find.

The positions she and her husband have with AMPCO Parking service at LAX have allowed them to get off Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which they needed to support their family during their first few months in Los Angeles.

Staying off the dole, in fact, has been an enduring source of pride for Arkangelo.

“We don’t want to be on welfare; we don’t want to destroy our new country,” she said. “We want to make our new country stronger.”