The Garden City Telegram

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A new home

Published 6/26/2010 in Local News

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of stories about the area's refugee populations and the resettlement resources available to them. Today's story details the integration efforts of southwest Kansas' Somalis. Next week's story, which will publish July 3, takes a closer look at the endeavors of the Coalition of Ethnic Minority Leaders, a group which aims to pre-empt ethnic or racial divisions in the community.

BY SHAJIA AHMAD

sahmad@gctelegram.com

Large images of Somali men and women in their brightly-colored garb and camels walking on dust-red ground, and a painting of the Kaaba, the holy Meccan edifice where Muslims across the world turn their heads in prayer five times a day, hang on the charcoal-colored walls inside the community center. Next to the photographs, an American flag lies juxtaposed to a light blue banner with a single white star in the center.

Beside both flags, a neon green poster with words carefully stenciled in marker, reads "Finney County: Many cultures, One community." For $850 a month, members of the Somali community in Garden City have pooled together their funds to open a new community development center on North John Street, next to the local Department of Motor Vehicles.

On weekends beginning last month, leaders in the community began holding English and citizenship classes, and provided a place for interpreters to assist with the needs of those who come calling for help. The flourishing center has become a saving grace for 38-year-old Ali Mohamed Ali, who said it wasn't long ago that he didn't know where to find someone to help him communicate with his doctor or how he might learn English or work toward becoming an American citizen. "The biggest dream I have is to buy a house and call Garden City my last home," Ali said through a translator.

After spending four years separated from his family in a refugee camp outside Cairo, Egypt, the father of five has been working at Finney County's Tyson Fresh Meats beef-packing plant since last year, after having lost his job in early 2008 at Tyson's Emporia-based beef-packing plant, where many of the 1,500 laid-off workers were Somali refugees like Ali and share his story. Ali is 38, but his graying hair and weathered face make him look older. His wife and children -- the oldest is 15 and the youngest 11 -- are still in Somalia, where he wires some of his earnings to support them.

When describing his work -- he cuts chuck roasts weighing "100 kilos," he said, more than 200 pounds -- Ali makes slicing motions with one hand, wiping imaginary sweat off his forehead with the other.

Despite the toil of his work, Ali says he doesn't want to express any dissatisfaction. Life in Garden City has exceeded his expectations because finally he's living, working and supporting his family, he said.

"In Africa, there's no freedom," Ali said. "Here, you have freedom."

A new wave of immigrants

Some Somalis in Garden City say 20 years ago there was no country better than theirs. Now, the east African country is described as one of the most insecure places in the world, rife with violence that has left hundreds of thousands dead due to conflict between its Transitional Federal government and Islamist fundamentalist insurgents.

The U.N. refugee agency estimates that 1.5 million are internally displaced, with nearly three-quarters of a million more who have fled into exile in neighboring countries.

For a decade and a half, small numbers of Somali refugees who have resettled in America have been in and out of Garden City. But in recent years, their numbers, along with incoming Burmese refugees, have swelled, according to Levita Rohlman, director of the local Catholic Agency for Migration and Refugee Services.

The voluntary, faith-based group with two staff members welcomed its first refugee family to southwest Kansas in July 1975. In the years following, Rohlman oversaw the resettlement of thousands of Vietnamese and other southeast Asian families through the mid-1980s, the height of refugee resettlement in the region.

Around the same time, in 1980, the Finney County beef-packing plant formerly owned by IBP and the largest in the world at the time, became the magnet drawing Mexican migrants and refugees with limited work and language skills to the sparsely populated area, Rohlmann said.

Today in southwest Kansas, three small cities boast four meat-packing plants within a 70-mile radius, each competing for workers. And the migration and newcomers to the area continue to come in cycles, Rohlmann said.

"Some years are a feast; others are a famine," she said.

Most of Garden City's newest Somali residents are single, working men, most all of whom came following the closures of the Emporia plant and a Tyson beef-processing plant in Norfolk, Neb., in early 2006.

Community leaders now put the number of their own at between 500 and 700 in the city of about 27,000.

The phenomenon of rapid ethnic diversification is not unique to southwest Kansas, though the region is unique in that places like Garden City first saw waves of Mexican migrants in the early 1900s who became railroad and sugar beet field laborers and Southeast Asian refugees in the late 1970s and early 80s.

All across the heartland states, communities also are rapidly changing with newcomers from southeast and east Asian countries, former Soviet states and east African nations, leading to "microplurality," a term used by Mark Grey, a professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Iowa.¬ 

The demographic changes are a relatively new phenomenon in the Midwest in places like Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota, where microplurality is supplemented by rapidly growing Mexican and Latino immigrant populations, according to Grey, who also serves as a director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration at the University of Northern Iowa.

But cultural or ethnic demographic changes also cause visible rifts in these communities, as needs for more social services or burdens on the school system or health care networks come about.

In Garden City, the burgeoning local Muslim community made up mostly of Somalis and some Burmese families have made a request for special burial considerations at the municipal cemetery.

They also are raising funds to establish a mosque in the area -- for the meantime, Friday prayers are held at an apartment building -- and a refugee service center operated out of the adult literacy center at Garden City Community College has been tracking the area's newest residents for just more than a year now.

With funding that amounts to "pennies on the dollar," the heavy task of providing as many services as needed and at affordable costs is daunting, according to Mohamed Abdurahman, a regional refugee coordinator with the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services.

That is why the efforts of the Somali community are especially laudable, according to Jonathan Galia, who is a chaplain at the local Tyson plant. Galia agreed that the unifying force of their religion -- Islam -- has helped the community assemble.

"Instead of being enabled by the community, they're helping themselves," Galia said. "Once you empower a community, they become a powerful force."

Galia, who has been spearheading efforts to help Garden City's ethnic groups -- both old and new -- organize and identify leaders, is the face behind the local Coalition of Ethnic Minority Leaders.

The coalition, which also includes a board of representatives from the police department, school system, city commission, and other agencies, has been meeting monthly to share information and listen to each other's needs. It's an initiative Galia said he hopes will pre-empt racial tensions and other rifts.

"Is our desire to help them intentional or not? If it is, we need to listen to them and understand what kind of life they have here," Galia said. "If the community sees that the minority groups are active and doing something good, that will help them to accept them more."

A place to gather

The scent of grilled onions and other spices fills the room inside the Dodge City restaurant, where the walls are painted a light blue, the same hue as the Somali flag. A few small tables and chairs are on one side of the small eatery on Second Avenue.

On the other, the restaurant owner, Liban Ali, has set up three computers for his patrons to surf the Web. A sign in Somali above the desktop computers reads "Please pay first before using the Internet."

Ali, who wears wooden beads around his neck, said he came to Dodge City from Omaha, Neb., late last year to open his burgeoning business because he knew there were Somalis in the area. He has traveled the country, he said, to open business where he knows Somalis are gathering.

In early May, Ali's grocery shelves inside his restaurant were still empty. He said he planned to fill them with rice and lentils and other items difficult to find in rural parts of Kansas.

Every few minutes, young Somali men shuffle in and out, ready to fill up on the same meal of goat meat and rice before heading off to work at one of two beef-packing plants in Dodge City, and Ali jumps back inside the kitchen. One of the men is Abdihakim Abdullahi, a trainer at the Cargill beef plant.

When Abdullahi came in early 2008, there were few Somalis and few if any places for the men to gather, he said. But now he estimates there are a couple hundred in Dodge City, a western town known for its cowboy history and which also boasts a Hispanic and Latino population of about 42 percent.

"If they need help, they ask each other, friends, relatives, somebody else who is Somali," Abdullahi said. "Everyone takes care of each other."

Most of them, like those in Garden City, also are young, mostly single men. They're either unmarried or have left their wives back in Minnesota, which boasts the largest population of Somalis in the country, or in camps in Africa.

Some of the Somalis in Garden City refer to Minnesota as home, where The Minneapolis Foundation estimates that in 1990 fewer than 5,000 Somalis lived in the state. By 2000, that number had reached 34,000, and that number may be even greater following the completion of the 2010 Census.

The challenges for the Somalis in Dodge City, like in Garden City, are similar, according to Abdullahi: religious and cultural barriers continue to exacerbate their role as "outsiders" in western Kansas, and many in his community would prefer to work outside the beef plant, he admitted.

Those same challenges -- learning English, how to drive, how to purchase a vehicle or take out an insurance policy, or where to go to seek help when they're sick -- are the ones his community is trying to tackle on its own, said Mohamed Abdulkadir, the vice-president of the Somalis of Southwest Kansas, part of the same group that helped establish Garden City's community center.

During one Saturday citizenship class -- refugees resettling in the United States must wait one year before they can apply for permanent residency, and only then can they apply for American citizenship -- Farah Hanaf, a young Somali man who also serves as the president of the organization, played a tape from a citizenship manual.

Hanaf stopped and started the tape player between questions about U.S. history and government, and the students answered in return.

"How many years does a U.S. representative serve?" Two years.

A U.S. senator? Six.

"Who is the congressional representative for your district?" Members of the class name all four in Kansas.

Hanaf, 26, who often dons a taqiayh, a short, rounded cap worn by Muslim men, said he spent two months in Ohio before moving to Garden City three years ago to work at the Tyson plant.

He is the one who stenciled the poster that hangs by the flags inside the center, and he often smiles in earnest when describing the positive reception he feels the Garden City community has offered his Somali community.

While the community development center has been a start, there are still many problems facing his community: His people want to know how to bring their family members left behind in camps to their new home, and to learn English to make use of work skills they already possess. Some Somalis were teachers, doctors and other professionals back in Africa, Hanaf said.

"There is still work left to do," he said.

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A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the number of years a U.S. senator serves. U.S. senators serve six year terms.

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