With master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Louisville, pharmacology instructor Tareq Al Maqtari had published articles in peer-reviewed journals and had a good command of the English language. He taught in Yemen from 2015 to 2019, left during its civil war and settled in Syria, where another civil war was underway.
Al Maqtari soon realized he needed to leave Syria. A colleague told him about the Scholar Rescue Fund, which is a program of the Institute of International Education.
He was quickly approved by the institute. But his Yemen nationality kept him out of the U.S. and Al Maqtari wanted to go somewhere in which a more religiously and politically tolerant atmosphere existed.
Other options were England, Australia and Canada. But in 2020 the world was experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic.
“So universities were not trying to get anyone. Everything really slowed down, so I got rejections and stayed in Syria for another eight months,” Al Maqtari said.
In 2021, the pandemic had eased, and with Joe Biden as president, the Yemini immigration ban was lifted. The institute submitted Al Maqtari as a candidate for an SDSU teaching position that had become open due to increasing teaching needs at the College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions.
Al Maqtari met with Dan Hansen, dean of the pharmacy college, and Omathanu Perumal, then head of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, via Zoom in January 2021 and was offered the position.
Al Maqtari was understandably excited, but it proved to only open a whole another set of challenges.
“It took me an entire year just to come here because of visa issues,” he said. Part of the problem was there were no active U.S. embassies in Yemen or Syria because of civil wars. “I was in Syria but had to take my family back to Yemen and then try to get an embassy where I could get an interview. That was Egypt.  

“When I got to Egypt, there were lots of people in Egypt applying to get into the United States, so I was delayed.”
Brookings in January
Because Al Maqtari is from Yemen and had been in Syria, his application received additional scrutiny from officials at the U.S embassy in Egypt. All told, he made three trips from Yemen to Egypt. He arrived in Brookings in January 2022 without a car, adequate winter clothing or his family. In addition, he was now teaching in English and the courses were slightly different than what he had been teaching.
“I had to adapt to all of that.”
Adapting to a South Dakota winter with no car was the biggest challenge.
“Without the car in a place which is frozen, that was a torture to walk 15 minutes every day to the university and then walk to Walmart, then walk to Goodwill to buy some stuff for myself or my family if they come. It took me three or four months of struggling to adapt in every way. Then maybe within four months I got my car and finished my first semester. That’s when I started to feel well-equipped to stay,” Al Maqtari said.
In May, he returned to Yemen to get his wife and children. It took one month in Yemen for his family to receive their new passports.
After that the Al-Maqtaris made the long drive from northern Yemen to southern Yemen, where the only international airport is located, to fly Egypt. The family stayed in Egypt from June to September 2022 to get the U.S. visas. The only explanation Al Maqtari received was “‘You have to wait until we finish the administrative processing.’ I didn’t know what that meant or how long it would take.”
Family in Cairo
Therefore, he returned to Brookings in July 2022 and left his family in a rented Cairo apartment.
In Brookings, Al Maqtari collected furnishings for the apartment in anticipation of his family’s arrival, prepared for fall semester and maintained contact.  
“It was scary for my family to be in another country, even though it is an Arab country. Still it is another country where they don’t know many people. It’s just the kids and a wife who doesn’t travel or work. It was a scary time for them and for me” he said.
He also contacted the Institute of International Educational and SDSU pharmacy administrators to see if they could influence the visa processing.  
That didn’t work either, but “at least they tried,” Al Maqtari said.
“I want to thank the understanding of my department head and also the dean. All of them were very supportive and understanding during my family’s visa process” he said. Two of them, Perumal and Hemachand Tummala, current head of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, received a certificate of appreciation from the Institute of International Education for their role in bringing Al Maqtari to SDSU.
“Then the U.S. embassy in Egypt gave the visas to four members and not the fifth, which was my oldest daughter. I asked my wife and three others kids to come to Brookings, which was great, and we got a bigger apartment, but one daughter was stuck in Egypt and we didn’t know the reason,” Al Maqtari said.