Carol Cain

Detroit Free Press Business Columnist

Every time President Donald Trump talks about his immigration ban, Najah Bazzy winces knowing any proclamations will reverberate through the community of people she is helping at Zaman International.

Bazzy, a 56-year-old mother and grandmother, also is a nurse from Dearborn whose family moved to Michigan in 1885. Her father served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War.

She founded the organization — known originally as Bayt Al Zahra (Arabic for house of hope and light) — in 1996. The name was changed to Zaman in 2004.

Bazzy, who is Muslim, helps immigrants and refugees through Zaman, which is based in Inkster.

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Her clientele — mostly women, often with children — face tough times. Many don’t have a roof over their head, or money for food. Her organization is a lifeline.

“We are the anchor for our clients living under $12,000 (annually) or who end up homeless or hungry,” she said.

“We stabilize by providing food, clothing, shelter, then we bring them back for goal setting, work with them to get out of the cycle of poverty, and keep them with us for up to two years,” Bazzy said.

I talked with Bazzy after we taped “Michigan Matters,” airing at 11:30 a.m. today on CBS 62. She and Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson traded terse words on Trump’s immigration ban and the need for it.

Bazzy said her clients are from across our region — 22 cities locally. And the come from many different countries, too.

“Thirteen percent of our clients in 2016 were refugees from Syria, but many are double refugees having fled from the Gulf War in Iraq and since the fall of Saddam Hussein to Syria as refugees and then from Syria to the refugee camps again for several years until they reached the USA,” she said.

Lately, her job has also included holding the hands of her clients amid Trump’s tough words on immigration.

“It’s been painful to see them arrive to their new home country and hear the president talk about Syrian refugees like they are all terrorists,” which they are not, she added.

“One (client) said her daughter, son-in-law and children were in Jordan and had received their status to come to America. They were at the airport when the ban happened and were not allowed to board. “

“The family is now split up in other countries,” she added.

Since its inception, her organization has helped more than 180,000 people locally with its various services.

Bazzy quit her nursing job and began helping women in dire situations by collecting furniture, food, clothes and providing shelter

“It was started because of a home visit I made (when she was a cultural nurse at a Dearborn hospital) to a family (recently immigrated here) with an infant that was dying,” Bazzy said. “They brought the baby to me in a laundry basket. The baby laid on clean white towels. They had a Styrofoam picnic cooler for the baby formula and a propane picnic stove. The poverty was so stark that I could hardly breathe. I could not live with myself knowing I could provide help for them.”

In recent years, her organization has expanded to include non-Muslim women from Detroit and Inkster and surrounding communities

Over the past five years, Zaman has helped many thousands through many volunteers and community partners like Ford.

“We are in tremendous need of financial donations to keep up with the amount of clients we are seeing,” she said. “In addition, we need a new roof, we have buckets everywhere and finding a donor to help with this would be amazing. Our food pantry always needs food, and community clothing drives are critical.”

Most of her clients today are women who have been “abandoned, abused, divorced, widowed. If there is a man in her life, she is often the caregiver because of a disability or chronic/terminal illness he has. We also see families with children who are severely disabled and these moms really, really struggle."

She added: “We give them hope. We give them a sense of self, dignity, honor. We believe in them, and because we do, they learn to believe in themselves. We give them confidence.”

To help more people, Bazzy recently hired Michele Ureste, a former supervisor for West Bloomfield Township, as its new chief development officer.

“A donor sponsored her hiring,” Bazzy explained.

“I knew we needed a one-stop client service experience to serve the basic needs (of our clientele),” she said. “With our Hope for Humanity Center, we can now give our clients more dignity because they now have more choice about the food they eat, the clothes they wear, and the furniture and housewares they want.”

She said she was inspired in her work by Eleanor Josaitis, the late cofounder of Focus: HOPE. Bazzy toured Focus: HOPE as a teenager and was struck by its incredible work.

Bazzy is making an impact in her own way.

Knowing a job is paramount to escaping poverty, Bazzy added vocational training at her facility .

“Single mothers living in poverty struggle every day to make ends meet,” she said.

Bazzy envisions Zaman expanding to satellite locations elsewhere, maybe Flint, and other places.

And she’d like to become a national advocate for the women and families she and Zaman International help.

“We are all working to create a culturally congruent organization that has the ability to build human potential and break down barriers in a real way,” she said.

Carol Cain can be reached at 313-222-6732 or clcain@cbs.com. She is senior producer/host of “Michigan Matters,” which airs at 11:30 a.m. Sundays on CBS 62. See Matt Simoncini, Brooks Patterson, Denise litch and Najah Bazzy on today’s show.