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n September 2015, 15-year-old Katreena quickly won the hearts of the sisters and elderly residents at her temporary home in Connecticut. A diminutive Iraqi girl with hair long enough to sit on, her quiet and cheerful presence became a mainstay while she served meals at St. Joseph’s Residence in Enfield, Conn. Although Katreena speaks little English, she expressed a clear fondness for the Little Sisters of the Poor. To her, the residence director, Mother Genevieve Regina, was “Sister Mama.” Katreena’s crutches, though, betrayed the reason for her brief respite in scenic northern Connecticut: She required urgent medical attention beyond what a Slovakian medical clinic for refugees in Erbil, Iraq, or Iraqi medicine in general, could provide. A little over a year earlier, in the summer of 2014, she and her family fled their home near Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Together with tens of thousands of other Christian families, they barely escaped the invasion that irrevocably changed their lives. Forever seared in their memories is the day “ISIS came.” To assist those affected by the persecution, the Knights of Columbus launched its Christian Refugee Relief Fund in August 2014 and has since raised more than $8 million. Katreena and her family are among those who have benefited, and through a partnership between the Knights and medical clinics in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Katreena received the life-saving treatment she needed.
Katreena, an Iraqi girl who was injured while fleeing from ISIS with her family in 2014, is pictured with Dr. Zuzana Dudová in Erbil, Iraq.
MARCH 2016
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