Last year, NPR's Ari Shapiro visited Toledo, Ohio, to talk to refugees settling there from Syria's civil war. Recently, he returned to Toledo to check in on the community. When we first met Omar Al-Awad and his family in the fall of 2015, they were among the newest refugee families from Syria settling in to life in Toledo, Ohio. Back then, Awad was attending his first English class at a local church and couldn't say much more than his name. Today he's able to haltingly conduct a basic conversation in English. He and his wife, Hiyam, also had a fourth baby — a boy, Salman, who just turned 1 and is a full-fledged American citizen. The other kids — Taiba, 5, Abdul-Jabar, 7, and Hammam, 10 — are now practically fluent in English. But Hiyam says overall, this first year in the U.S. was tough. "We came to a country that is not our country, and everything changed on us: the system, the people the area, the city," she says in Arabic. Though her husband is trained as a carpenter, for now he is
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