MUNCIE, Ind. — Families who evacuated from Afghanistan are beginning to get settled in Muncie.
Earlier this week, Muncie Community Schools welcomed a group of students who were getting registered for school. They said seven brothers signed up for classes and received complimentary school supplies to get them started in school.
Muncie Schools said they are looking forward to adding more Afghan families to their classrooms.
More than 6,000 evacuees were brought to Indiana from Afghanistan to live temporarily at Camp Atterbury but are free to settle anywhere in the United States when they're ready to start their new lives.
The Muncie Afghan Refugee Resettlement Committee said last month they were ready to settle "as many (evacuees) as we can handle" in the city. That includes an evacuee named Edris, who moved to Indiana from Fort Bliss in Texas through a program called Exodus Refugee on Oct. 14. He stayed with a couple who volunteers for MARRC before moving into his own rental home.
“I saw that Muncie is like my own place because I never feel lonely or like I am from the other side of the world," Edris said in a news release last month.
He said at the time that he was waiting for his family to join him. It's not clear if members of his family are among those who enrolled in school this week.
“It was a pleasant surprise when Exodus told us Edris was coming. We are happy he is here and can’t wait to see him thrive in our community," MARRC President Ashraf Abou El Ezz said in the news release.
MARRC said they expected the first evacuees from Camp Atterbury to begin settling in the city in November.