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The 17-year-old girl arrived alone in San Jose on Friday, marking\u00a0a new chapter in a painstaking journey that took her from a refugee camp in Ethiopia to a new life in the Bay Area.<\/p>\n
Waiting at the end of a long passageway was her new foster mother, an Oakland sociologist with no children of her own.<\/p>\n
The two women had\u00a0never\u00a0spoken, yet they would go home as mother and daughter.<\/p>\n
The teenager\u2019s trip to the U.S., after years of waiting, was interrupted by President Trump\u2019s order suspending refugee arrivals and her original trip to San Jose was cancelled. But on Friday, she finally landed at Mineta San Jose International Airport, where she met her foster mother, Laura Fantone, after being greeted\u00a0by a small crowd holding welcome posters and balloons.<\/p>\n
Once an activist in her native Italy, Fantone\u00a0had volunteered at refugee camps across Europe and welcomed refugees fleeing political turmoil in Yugoslavia. But this time, something spurred her to act in a much larger way, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did the (foster parent) training and started to really take in the idea of what it means to open your door, open your home, open your heart to someone that you don\u2019t know,\u201d said Fantone, who teaches at Santa Clara University.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m glad that I have this chance, but a lot of people are still struggling to get out of the countries that have been blocked because they are a Muslim-majority and this is clearly unconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fantone said she spent Thursday shopping for ingredients to cook traditional Eritrean dishes, which she researched online. Their first few days together will be spent exploring their East Bay neighborhood,\u00a0shopping, meeting family members and making trips to the library, she said.<\/p>\n
The Eritrean girl is going home with Fantone\u00a0as part of a refugee foster program run by Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County.\u00a0Catholic Charities, the girl\u2019s legal guardian, declined to identify her in order to maintain her privacy.\u00a0Since the Eritrean government does not allow people to leave the country, they feared naming her would put her extended family and other loved ones at risk,\u00a0according to Angela Albright, director of the organization\u2019s refugee foster care program.<\/p>\n