Afghan refugees have begun arriving in Vermont.
One family arrived at a home in Montpelier Thursday. They do not speak English, and their host posted a request for a Pashto-English interpreter on Front Porch Forum Friday. He declined to be interviewed.
“We started receiving just a few in the last couple of weeks,” Tracy Dolan, director of the Vermont Refugee Office, told VTDigger.
Dolan said 35 people are expected to arrive over the next week.
She said military bases are a difficult environment for the refugees, and so their transfer to communities across the country is being accelerated.
Dolan said the goal is to set people up in permanent housing as soon as possible, but because so many are arriving at the same time, more are staying with host families until permanent housing can be arranged.
“We’ve had a real outpouring of people who mostly have been host families in the past, so they have some experience with this (and) have offered up their homes again, which is wonderful,” Dolan said.
Dolan said for the most part, the families are being resettled in Chittenden County.
The state and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants are also looking to resettle people in Rutland.
Tracy said another group of Afghan refugees will be assigned to Brattleboro, where the Ethiopian Community Development Council is the resettlement agency. They are expected to arrive in mid-December.