Archive for the ‘Somali Bantu’ Category
Posted by Christopher Coen on April 11, 2012
Catholic Family Service in Amarillo has decided to reduce new refugee resettlement numbers by half due to concerns of overload from the local school district, according to an article in the Amarillo Globe-News. Resettlement will now be limited to “family reunification cases” – refugees who are resettling to be reunified with local family members. (The article also gives various confusing numbers for the amount of money the State Department gives for initial resettlement needs (intended as seed money). As of last year the amount was $1800 per refugee, with $700 available for resettlement agency overhead, $900 minimum to each refugee, and $200 that resettlement agencies may redirect to the neediest refugees at the agency. The $1800 was supposedly increased this year, but no numbers yet available.)
Catholic Family Service has lowered the number of new refugees it helps settle in Amarillo to help school officials better handle unique needs posed by refugee children and help the organization meet budget cuts.
Roughly 800 to 900 of the 1,100 refugee students enrolled in Amarillo schools had little to no formal schooling when they arrived in the U.S., and that has created a major learning block, said Kevin Phillips, executive director of student performance for the Palo Duro High School cluster…
…Catholic Family Service, a nonprofit organization, is one of two groups that receives federal funds to help newly arrived refugees settle in Amarillo. Executive Director Nancy Koons said the organization has decided to take in no more than 200 arrivals per year, down from 400 in previous years. Koons said the arrivals will be limited to “family reunification cases.”…
…Koons said [Amarillo Independent School District] principals and school nurses have expressed concerns about the challenges posed by refugee children.
“It seems like we were creating needs by bringing in too many refugees,” she said… Read more here
Posted in Amarillo, Catholic, Catholic Family Service, Amarillo, children, funding, R&P, schools, Somali Bantu | Tagged: Amarillo, Catholic Family Service, refugees, resettlement, schools | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on January 31, 2011
More than 100 Somali Bantu refugees in Omaha did a sit-in protest at their public housing office to complain about the lack of security at their housing complex as well as a lack of action by police. The refugees report that they are regularly beaten by nearby residents of another apartment, and police have failed to follow-up on the matter. A story in the Omaha World-Herald details more about the protest.
Refugees from war-torn Somalia and their families packed a South Omaha public housing office Tuesday morning to plead for protection after a recent series of assaults and incidents.
The two-hour protest by more than 100 people at the office of South Side Terrace drew Omaha Housing Authority officials, a police officer and eventually City Councilman Ben Gray of the OHA board.
Mohamed Hassan, director of the Somali Bantu Association of Nebraska, urged the people to protest because they were frustrated with what they said was a slow response from authorities…
…“(The refugees) come from work, they are beaten,” Hassan said. “They came from school, they are beaten. There is no safety and security. We came here for peace. We did not come here to fight.”
He and witnesses said people have seen the attackers run out of a South Side apartment and beat people, then run back in. They said they’ve told police, but officers haven’t followed up.
Omaha Police Department Capt. Kathy Belcastro-Gonzalez called the reports concerning, saying police would meet with the residents, OHA and the schools “to ensure that we are responding appropriately.”… Read more here
Posted in dangerous neighborhoods, housing, Omaha, police, safety, Somali Bantu | Tagged: assaults, beatings, Omaha, police, public housing, refugee resettlement, refugee resettlement program, refugees, resettlement, Somali bantu, Somali refugees | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on November 26, 2010
Sidi Mwalimu, executive director of the not-for-profit agency Mohawk Valley Somali Bantu Community Association Inc. gave a lecture recently about the suffering his people experienced before they resettled to the U.S. Somali Bantu are descendants of slaves taken to Somalia from Tanzania and northern Mozambique. An article in the Utica Observer-Dispatch outlines some of his talk.
…The Somali Bantu clans – non-native to Somalia — were the victims of murder, torture and rape at the hands of native Somalis during the Somali Civil War, forcing what was left of the Somali Bantu to flee to refugee camps in Kenya, Mwalimu explained.
“The Somali clan were raping our females and killing the husbands,” he said, relating an incident in which Somali clan members shot a 2-day-old infant in the head (they had killed the baby’s father nine months prior), and left the 15-year-old mother alone and traumatized.
“It was a very difficult time; we were barely surviving.”
He would pause, overcome, as he recounted how the Somali Bantus had to flee to Kenya on foot. Some walked for 30 days, forced to leave those who could not continue along the roadway. Without food and water, they drank urine and the blood of animals in order to survive.
“People were dying on the road and there is no way you can help them, so you have to leave them and help yourself,” Mwalimu said, remembering how people were killed by lions and hyenas.
But it was the story of a woman, the mother of two children, who could no longer walk and was left to die on the roadway that moved Mwalimu to tears that slid, unchecked, down his cheeks.
“She called to the children and told them this is my last word for you: ‘Walk with these people; I can’t walk with you anymore. Please look after each other,’” Mwalimu said after his emotion silenced him for almost a minute. “The children had nowhere to go, nobody to go to, they had nothing, just themselves.”… Read more here
Posted in Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, Somali Bantu, Utica | Tagged: Mohawk Valley Somali Bantu Community Association Inc., refugee resettlement, refugee resettlement agencies, refugee resettlement program, refugees, Sidi Mwalimu, Somali bantu, Somalia, Utica | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on November 22, 2010
Nothing seems to have changed at Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of San Antonio, Inc. Last March we reported about the severe problems that Burmese refugee clients were having with the agency. Now Somali and Ethiopian refugee clients of the agency are coming forward to express their distress and frustrations. Refugees report that Catholic Charities placed them in small, roach-infested apartments without any home-safety orientation. When refugees call the agency they don’t hear anything back for days at a time, or case workers tell them they will be out to see them and then don’t show up. The agency has made late rent payments to landlords resulting in landlord warning letters to the refugees. Some refugees are also receiving electrical disconnect notices. Refugees lack transportation and report that overall communication with the agency is extremely poor. They asked to meet with the agency’s director of refugee programs, Paula Walker, but so far she will only speak to them by phone. Some refugees have been so desperate for help that they have resorted to calling 911.
An American volunteer said that some of the refugees asked him a couple of times to come and meet a group of new refugees “that nobody is helping”. He said he went and the small apartment soon filled with over 30 people. Most of the refugees were Somali and they were desperate. They shared some
of their stories. One said that his family was picked up at the airport and left for three days and two nights without enough food. Another refugee said that instead of the traditional rental assistance for six months, it was being cut to three months because of the huge influx of refugees into San Antonio. Yet another refugee said that they were a family with eight kids and had a two room apartment. None of the refugees had a job and no one was helping them look. The volunteer said he came out of the meeting and saw a refugee woman with a young child with hydrocephalus—the child’s head twice the normal size. The woman said the family had been in the country for a month and still had not seen a doctor, nor did they yet have a doctor’s appointment. The child clearly needed a shunt inserted into his head to relieve fluid buildup.
The volunteer said he went back the next day and started on the myriad problems of one family – because the Catholic Charities’ caseworkers were refusing to help. While he was there, one refugee man called his Catholic Charities caseworker about an appointment to get scheduled inoculations for his family. The caseworker said that he couldn’t take the family because it wasn’t “in the budget”. Another refugee had an 85-year-old mother with hepatitis-C and a wife with a uterine infection – and again, no scheduled appointments. The volunteer reports that the number of serious complaints went on and on. Some refugees complained of verbal abuse from Catholic Charities staff, with an assistant director named Hisham telling one man that he “didn’t care about his problems!” All of this added to the volunteer’s experiences from earlier this year with the abandoned Catholic Charities Burmese refugee families. One Burmese refugee man hung himself and his body was found by children. The volunteer said that his conclusion is that there are hundreds of abandoned refugees in the Wurzbach-Gardendale-Datapoint streets area – and another 80 families are expected within weeks.
After the crisis with the recently arrived Somali refugees, a couple of days later the refugees called the police on Catholic Charities. Four police cars pulled up to the apartments. The police then called Catholic Charities to find out why they weren’t helping the refugees. Then two Catholic Charities administrators arrived and passed out $100 gift cards and told the refugees to go back into their apartments. A couple of days later, four blocks away, Catholic Charities held their annual “International Gala” at the Omni Hotel. The volunteer reports that San Antonio has been completely overwhelmed by vast numbers of refugees that continue to be mindlessly pumped in. The apartment complexes in the Wurzbach, Gardendale, and Datapoint streets area have basically become “refugee camps” of confused, frustrated, un-served, and under-served refugees.
Catholic Charities’ refugee program director Paula Walker was quoted last year in a news article about the agency saying, “In the past two years, the local program grew from helping 600 refugees settle into new lives to more than 1,000.” Perhaps this is the result of raising the number of refugees an agency receives so quickly in such a short period. That, of course, would be the State Department’s doing.
Posted in Burma/Myanmar, capacity, Catholic, Catholic Charities Archdiocese of San Antonio Inc., children, Ethiopian, faith-based, food, health, housing, housing, overcrowding, insufficient assistance with daily tasks, late health screenings, police, San Antonio, Somali, Somali Bantu, State Department, transportation | Tagged: Archdiocese of San Antonio, Burmese refugees, catholic charities, Ethiopian refugees, refugee resettlement, refugee resettlement agencies, refugee resettlement program, refugees, San Antonio, Somali refugees | 1 Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on November 16, 2010
There is an interesting article in a Lewiston, Maine newspaper, the Sun Journal. It discusses the phenomena that many refugee parents deal with once they arrive to the US and find they can no longer control their children. It turns out that because other cultures rely on corporal punishment to control children, refugees arriving in the U.S. simply need to be taught the usefulness of simple non-corporal punishment techniques for controlling children’s behavior — such as grounding and time-outs.
…Ambiya Bule, 34, is another parent involved in the Bantu Youth Association. She has five children, ages 1 to 14. She was born in Somalia, lived in a Kenyan refugee camp for 13 years, moved to Colorado in 2004, and to Lewiston in 2009.
She smiles broadly when she says she recently became a U.S. citizen.Bule joined the association so her children could play soccer and keep out of trouble, and she could get help parenting in a new land.
“Here, there is no parenting for us,” she said through an interpreter.
Warsame explained that parents have lost the disciplinary ways they knew in Africa.
“It’s different here,” he said. “Back home if they do something bad, we can use the cane or stick. But here, the only punishment we can do is talk to them.”
The look on Bule’s face indicated that talking doesn’t always work.
Through the association, parents are learning to set household rules and take away privileges, Warsame said. When his daughter misbehaves, he tells her she can’t watch television. But the concept of grounding is new; it didn’t exist in their old world… Read more here
Posted in children, cultural adjustment, Lewiston, Somali Bantu | Tagged: Lewiston, refugee children, refugee resettlement, refugees, resettlement | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on September 16, 2010
The numbers of refugees resettled to South Carolina has increased steadily since 2006, and most refugees are resettled to the Columbia area, according to an article in The Augusta Chronicle. Lutheran Family Services in South Carolina had problems in 2004 when residents of Cayce said they did not want Somali Bantus in their community.
South Carolina has about 150 refugees in the program now, with about 40 percent from Burma and 40 percent from Iraq.
If refugees have a family or friend in some part of South Carolina, they are typically sent there.
About 75 percent come with no ties and stay in the Columbia area. Numbers of refugees fleeing war or persecution have increased steadily since 2006, when the Palmetto State had 123 refugees, with recent federal funding per year about $370,000, according to federal data.
Sometimes residents pose a challenge.
The most notable resistance in South Carolina took place in 2004, when residents of Cayce said they did not want Somali Bantus in their community.
Residents said their schools could not accommodate the refugees’ children and that their tribal culture and Muslim faith were too foreign.
“LFS decided not to challenge that,” Jazic said. “We did not want to put refugees in a situation where they would not be welcome. Thank goodness there were others who said, ‘We can deal with it and work it out.’ ” here
Posted in Burma/Myanmar, Iraqi, Somali Bantu, Lutheran Family Services of the Carolinas, faith-based, unwelcoming communities, South Carolina | Tagged: refugees, resettlement, refugee resettlement program, refugee resettlement, refugee resettlement agencies, Lutheran Family Services in South Carolina, Somali Bantus, Columbia, Palmetto State, South Carolina, Cayce, South Carolina DSS, south carolina Department of Social Services | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on September 8, 2010
The Refugee Women’s Health Clinic in Phoenix is the subject of an article in The Arizona Republic. The clinic set up a system to guide refugee women through each step of the process to show them how the system works, so they can learn to navigate it on their own. Refugees seem to benefit greatly from a hands-on approach to refugee resettlement, rather than a tough love approach that leaves refugees lost – an important lesson for refugee resettlement agencies.
Volunteers…are the lifeblood of the Phoenix clinic, working hands-on to guide refugees through every step of their appointments. Many of them…are refugees themselves. They understand the fears and frustrations these women feel about navigating something totally alien: the American health-care system.
The clinic has served more than 400 patients since it was opened in October 2008 by the Maricopa Integrated Health System as part of its larger women’s clinic. The clinics are funded through the county health system.
Crista Johnson, the clinic’s medical director, said she recognized the need for more hands-on involvement when patients began wandering around MIHS for hours at a time, not knowing where to pick up prescriptions or get blood work done.
The clinic, which now has five volunteers and five translators, is an important resource for Arizona’s refugees, whose population is growing as its demographics shift. There are 3,260 refugees in the state, according to the Arizona Refugee Resettlement Program. Somalis, Cubans and Sudanese historically have dominated Arizona’s refugee population, but since 2008, there has been a surge from Bhutan, Myanmar, Burundi, Iraq and Iran…
…For most refugees, scheduling an appointment is a foreign process – like everything else about their new lives here.
The ultimate goal is to empower patients to navigate the health-care process by themselves, Johnson said.
Until then, patients are guided every step, starting with a knock on the front door.
Employees at apartment complexes remind every patient of her appointment the day before and call for a taxi to pick her up on the day of the appointment.
Once the cab drops a patient off, hospital volunteers accompany her as she waits in the reception area. They help her fill out insurance paperwork and start friendly conversation.
A volunteer or an interpreter stays with every patient throughout the appointment, taking care of her other children while her temperature is taken or translating from behind a curtain in the exam room as she gets a pap smear.
Then, volunteers take every patient to pick up her prescriptions or get X-rays. Before patients leave the clinic, Nizigiyimana schedules follow-up appointments and calls for taxis to take them home.
Georgia Sepic owns and manages a Phoenix apartment complex in which 97 percent of residents are refugees. Sepic said she emphasizes the importance of routine health checkups to her residents…
…Refugee women are skeptical and fearful of authority, Nizigiyimana said, because many of them have experienced rape, torture or trauma. Volunteers like Abdalla try to minimize the patient-provider mentality by approaching the women as friends… here
I notice that at one apartment complex in Phoenix refugees make up 97 percent of the residents, which is interesting following on the heels of refugee housing segregation in Boise, in another article.
The mention that refugee women are often skeptical and fearful of authority is something that is central to refugee resettlement. Countless times I have witnessed resettlement agencies who play with refugees’ fears in order to intimidate refugees not to complain when the resettlement agencies neglect their contractual responsibilities. Another common practice is questioning refugees after they have spoken to community members who are critical of resettlement agencies. Resettlement workers will pepper refugees with questions about who they spoke to, why they spoke to that person, and what they said – sending a clear message that refugees are not to voice any of their concerns or complaints to members of the community. The refugee program should never tolerate any refugee resettlement agency that uses refugees’ fears to coerce them.
Posted in Arizona, Burma/Myanmar, Burundian, Cuban, health, intimidation of refugees, Iranian, Iraqi, Nepali Bhutanese, Phoenix, Somali, Somali Bantu, women | Tagged: Arizona, health-care system, Maricopa county, Maricopa Integrated Health System, Phoenix, rape, refugee health, refugee resettlement, refugee resettlement agencies, refugee resettlement program, refugee women, Refugee Women's Health Clinic, refugees, Somali bantu, torture, women's health | Leave a Comment »
Christopher Coen
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