Bantu immigrants navigating new Cleveland home !!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: Akron Beacon Journal
November 28, 2007 Author: ROBERT L. SMITH The Plain Dealer


A caravan of minivans approached Joseph Gallagher School in the darkness of a rainy fall morning, headlight beams piercing the mist to spotlight a yellow school bus as it rumbled away.

Five late-model vans turned into the school yard and parked side by side. Doors slid open. Forty boys and girls from Africa spilled out.

As the children swarmed toward the glowing windows of the school, the van drivers, mostly fathers just off third shift, stepped out to admonish them to zip up coats and to listen to the teachers.

Speaking in Maay Maay, the language of the Bantu of Somalia, they reminded the children to watch out for one another until they returned to get them. Only then did the men depart, one task finished in a daily, exhausting progression of making it in America.

The vanpool emerged last year, after Bantu parents realized their children were being bullied on the bus to school. Mothers, who in Africa wrapped children on their backs to carry them through risky camps, devised a plan to move them safely through Cleveland.

It's one of several quick, innovative actions taken by a surprising refugee group. Nothing in Somalia, it seemed, prepared the Bantu for northeast Ohio. But a poor and often bewildered immigrant group is finding its way, in part, by tapping cultural traditions that were not supposed to work here.

"They've done wonders," said Tom Mrosko, director of the Office of Migration and Refugee Services of Cleveland Catholic Charities, which helped the Bantu move to Cleveland over the last three years. "They're working. They're supporting their families. They've relied on their own strength and will to survive."

Life remains an anxious effort for a refugee community of about 300 people in 42 families. They came on an airlift of 12,000 Bantu plucked from desperate straits in Africa beginning in 2003. The U.S. State Department contracted with groups like Catholic Charities in dozens of cities to welcome a rural, illiterate farming people into American life.

In Cleveland, most Bantu adults are struggling with English while working low-wage jobs. The refugee odyssey left scars that will last a lifetime. Yet a stable, nurturing community rooted in African traditions is emerging on the city's west side.

Devout Muslims, the Bantu support their own mosque. They started a soccer team to unite their young men and launched a tutoring program to fathom school. When challenged, they tend to innovate, rally around a plan and pursue it like a mission.

Abdi Gafow, a 40-year-old father of six, purposely works the third shift at Cintas, an industrial laundry that hired 15 other Bantu after him. That's so he's free for his community role.

Each school-day morning, Gafow and a handful of other volunteers drive to the homes of every Bantu student in Cleveland _ 72 in all _ pick them up and deliver them to school. The cost in gas and time and energy leaves him winded but resolute.

"If we don't do this, we don't have learning for the children," he said in labored English. "My country, too much fighting, too much hungry. We need the children to learn America."

The Bantus arrived lonelier than most immigrants, Africans without a nation. They are the descendants of east Africans kidnapped by Arab traders and dragged north to Somalia as slaves two centuries ago. The outcast brand endured to the present day, and Bantu families were largely denied access to schools, jobs and basic protections.

When Somalia exploded in civil war in the early 1990s, the Bantu fled by the thousands to Kenya, where many languished in harsh refugee camps for more than a decade.

They arrived in America unfamiliar with modern life and its essentials, like plumbing, electric lights, cars, clocks and calendars. They also brought a culture both colorful and resilient.

The trees at Halloran Park in Cleveland blazed in autumn colors as two teams of lithe young men raced across a green field. A recent soccer match between a Bantu team from Columbus and the Bantu of Cleveland displayed a blend of Muslim modesty and Bantu personality.

A dozen young women sat watching from a grassy hillside. Their headscarves and wraparound gowns shimmered with bold stripes and colors in the Bantu fashion. The old world garments contrasted with trappings of American fashion, like 4-inch heels and the occasional headphones beneath a scarf.

The mothers talked among themselves and watched their children _ the little girls dressed just like moms _ as the men ran and shouted on the lawn beyond.

The Cleveland players controlled the field, as they tend to do. When they scored the game's first goal, the women clapped and cheered.

They cheered for more than a goal.

Community leaders created the team two years ago to compete on the national Bantu circuit for men age 18 to 22. But they also sought to tie the young men to the community _ and to tap their skills.

Teens and young adults play a key role among the Bantu. In United Nations refugee camps, many learned to read and write, skills denied their parents in Somalia. So along with representing their community on the pitch against the Bantu of Toledo, Detroit and Erie, Pa., they staff its key institutions.

After school, the minivans converged on an unusual mosque. The two-story, brown brick house once was home to the Islamic Center of Cleveland, before the grand mosque rose in Parma. Now it's known in the Muslim community as the refugee mosque, a congregation of newly arrived Afghanis, Burmese, Turkmen and, most obviously, Somali Bantu.

Children raced across the lawn, laughing and playing, before sharp voices in Maay Maay called them inside. They removed shoes and filed upstairs to classrooms, where young Bantu men searched backpacks for notes from school to be translated for parents and slapped simple math problems onto blackboards.

The lead tutor, Osman Ali, had organized instruction at Hagadera, the Kenyan refugee camp from which most of the Cleveland Bantu hail. In the African way, he groups children according to abilities, not ages. He tapped the soccer players to teach.

"We came to realize, if a community does not help one an other, they cannot make a better life in America," said Ali, a lean and soft-spoken 28-year-old. "This is what it was like in Africa."

Downstairs, other young men staffed a phone bank, taking calls from Bantu parents anxious over a sick child or mystified by a utility bill. They dispatched Bantu families that own cars to drive other Bantu to the store and to work.

Every working Bantu family _ and that is most of them _ is expected to contribute toward the mortgage on the mosque as well as toward a crisis fund for funerals and other emergencies. The pooling of resources astonishes Americans who have befriended the community, people such as Suhail Mustafa, the co-owner of a medical transcription service in Strongsville.

"This sense of community they bring from Africa, it's something we can learn from," he said. "They say, 'We'll take care of our selves. Just come in and be our friend.'"

He observes that the Bantu help themselves because, in their experience, no one else would.

As a Bantu community took root here, resettlement counselors sought to introduce them to other African immigrants, especially other Somalis. The Bantu said no thanks.

"They are the reason we did not get education," said Ali, still wary. "We remember."

By the benchmarks of assimilation, the Bantu are succeeding. Local employers praise their work ethic. Many Bantu women are also working _ a rarity among Muslim immigrants _ and so the community enjoys some dual-income families. Through six marriages, and at least twice as many births, a community that favors big families has grown larger and more resourceful.

But as far as the Bantu have come, they have miles to go. Bantu children crowd the bottom ranks at Joseph Gallagher, an immigrant-savvy K-8 school. Some had never before seen a pencil or heard English.

"We have almost no way to communicate with the parents," said principal Jennifer Rhone, citing a key obstacle to advancement.

The Bantu children are polite and earnest, Rhone adds, "an asset to our school." She's confident they will steadily advance.

The same cannot be said of parents. A work ethic and a bus schedule take an immigrant only so far, and people who assist the Bantu fear working-poor status will be lasting.

"I don't know if any one of the first generation will make good," said Zahid Siddiqi, a retired Ford supervisor who drives in from the suburbs to help the Bantu at their mosque. "But their children will."

That's the plan.

There's a warm, festive feel to dinner at the Gafow house, where on a recent night Mom, Dad and six children dug into bowls of a cornmeal porridge called soor.

They had arranged themselves on low couches circling twin coffee tables in a room adorned with colorful cloths hung ceiling to floor. The close, tentlike quarters resembles mealtime in Kenya, where all six children _ ages 5 to 15 _ were born.

Family members laughingly recalled some of the surprises that awaited them in Cleveland when they arrived in January 2004. How they were reluctant to use the bathroom, because the toilet looked so beautiful.

When Dad rose to imitate a man walking in snow in sandals, the children laughed.

Abdi Gafow and his wife, Fatuma Ali, both laundry workers, bought the drafty, two-story house in April, becoming the Bantu community's first homeowners. They talk of other, giant steps to come.

Their oldest, Abdirizak, is earning As in math and science at Joseph Gallagher School. He brought home a tall trophy after the eighth-grade soccer team won the city championship. He's the team captain.

Fatuma Ali, 38, a round-faced woman with a shy smile, never attended school but talks like a true believer.

"A doctor, or a teacher, or a dentist he could be," she said in a lilting African accent. "In Cleveland, I think that can happen."

"Engineer is good," her husband mused.

The 15-year-old boy nodded ever so slightly, his jaw set, as if accepting a mission.