Posted on 05/23/2003 12:08:04 AM PDT by sarcasm
Most of the Mugoya family, refugees resettling in Denver after arriving Thursday from Africa, speak no English.
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They are descendants of slaves, accustomed to grappling daily for food, fuel and water, blocked by Somali clans from education and job opportunities.
Now in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, Jele, 50, his wife, Megenei, 30, and their children - Ishmael, 2, Fatuma, 5, and Mohamed, 15 - find cupboards stocked with food. They have a television, refrigerator and, just beyond their blue carpet, a swimming pool. Until Thursday, they had never seen such modern conveniences.
It won't all be a world of wonder and excitement. They will also face new challenges, new perils. Drug dealers, until recently, dominated their east Denver neighborhood, so emboldened in their surroundings that would often adjust ceiling security cameras to avoid surveillance.
This family is among the first of some 12,500 Somali Bantus - forced off their land during Somalia's civil war - who have been accepted by the United States. The first of hundreds fleeing persecution and earmarked for Colorado, they'll receive welfare support for up to eight months.
Dozens of groups across Africa compete for this designation. The Bantus have passed through multiple security interviews and now are scheduled to move, over the next two years, to dozens of U.S. cities. Denver emerged as a top location because federal officials considered it well suited for assimilating people from radically different cultures.
The project has raised hopes that America will play a greater role in helping the 15 million people worldwide uprooted by poverty and conflict.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. resettlement of refugees has decreased sharply. America accepted 72,515 refugees in fiscal 2000. Fewer than 12,000 have arrived so far this fiscal year. During the Cold War, when political concerns drove refugee resettlement, as many as 200,000 refugees a year resettled in America.
"We say we are the beacon of freedom around the world, and if we don't provide it to people who flee persecution, then our words will ring hollow," said Lavinia Limon, executive director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees.
The Mugoyas and other Somali Bantus fled fighting in Somalia in 1991 to refugee camps in bone-dry, bandit-ridden northeastern Kenya.
Somali clans for decades treated the Bantus as inferior, forcing them to live in isolated rural areas that kept their culture alive but gave little chance to improve their material living conditions.
In 1999, U.S. authorities recognized their plight and designated 12,500 Somali Bantus - mostly those who had signed up for the U.N. resettlement in Mozambique - a persecuted class of people who deserved to move to America.
U.S. immigration officials went to the Kakuma camp and conducted new security interviews required after the Sept. 11 attacks. Last month, the first 74 Bantus cleared for travel rode buses to Kenya's capital, Nairobi. There they received training on how to ride in an airplane, use a stove and modern bathroom, and operate lights and alarm clocks.
Not since the Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia moved to America in the early 1990s has a refugee group faced such a wide leap from pre-modern to modern living, experts say. In rural Somalia, the Bantus lived for the most part without electricity or running water. Roads were unpaved. Telephones were scarce. In their isolation, the Bantus spoke Af Maay - a relatively unknown language with roots in southeastern Africa. Some now have learned to speak Somali and Swahili but not English.
"There's as much anticipation about these people as any group of refugees over 25 years," said Peter Van Arsdale, a University of Denver anthropologist involved in refugee resettlement.
Volunteer Jean Firmin and her team from the St. Francis Cabrini parish in Littleton are planning to offer the Bantus rides to medical appointments and anything else they might need. They've worked with refugees who don't speak English before, Firmin said. "We've just done a lot of gesturing."
In the first weeks, resettlement workers said, they will enroll the Mugoyas in English classes at the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, which issues bus passes to students. They also planned to set up medical coverage and enroll the three children in school for the fall, and accompany the family to grocery stores.
The U.S. government pays a family of five refugees about $800 a month for up to eight months, unless the refugees find work, said Patricia Vorwerk, executive director of Ecumenical Refugee Services. After 120 days, if a refugee finds work, federal support ends.
"Our funding requires us to have 92 percent of our refugees working within 120 days," Vorwerk said. "It used to be easy. There aren't as many jobs these days."
Refugees in Denver often find jobs and new homes in a busy first year. Then, troubles surface as they miss friends and family and familiar ways.
Resettlement volunteers are wary of contact between Bantu newcomers and the non-Bantu Somalians already in Denver because Somalians have oppressed the Bantus for so long, said Jennifer Gueddiche, program coordinator at Denver's African Community Center. "But there's a large portion of the Somali community that wants to help."
Maybe they can compete with the illegal immigrants for those coveted "jobs that Americans won't do".
Future democrats?
Future democrats?
Yeah we seem to be bent on importing a lot of them!
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