In Somalia, Aukia Mehoza used firewood to heat water to cook the food grown on her family’s farm. She’d walk 10 minutes one way down a narrow dirt road surrounded by jungle for the 20 gallons of dirty river water she’d carry on her back to her village. It might be 120 degrees that day, the sun unrelenting.
“I can’t express enough how life was so different,” Mehoza said recently from her Utica home. Mehoza resettled in Utica five years ago. “We were depending on our own hand – farming. Sometimes the farm does not produce, and you don’t have the energy to cook.”
Today, Mehoza turns the knob of the sink faucet; clean water gushes forth. She turns the dial of her electric stove; the burner turns red, indicating it’s hot enough for cooking. Food comes wrapped and packaged.
These cultural differences are just some of the challenges for agencies serving the Somali Bantu refugee group.
The Municipal Housing Authority has been faced with providing adequate housing for typically large families of as many as 11 children, in some cases. Traditionally, the housing authority accommodates families of two to three children.
“The family organization is very different, so adequate housing becomes difficult with larger families,” said Municipal Housing Authority Executive Director Taras Herbowy. “They need four or five bedrooms, which is typically uncommon.”
‘Huge issues’
Providing the families with adequate living space has been the simplest challenge to overcome – the walls dividing two (and sometimes three) apartments were removed to make one apartment to accommodate a family of up to 14 members, Herbowy said. Some apartments already had been renovated in this way to accommodate Russian refugee groups, housing officials said.
An estimated 2.5 percent of households in the Municipal Housing Authority are Somali Bantu refugees, grant writer John Furman estimated, and those refugees make up about 6.7 percent of the Municipal Housing population.
An informal census conducted by The Neighborhood Center, Inc. counted 640 Somali Bantu refugees here — about 200 of them were resettled in Utica beginning in 2003.
Since 2005, The Neighborhood Center has adapted and created services to address the needs of this group, including contracting with Multicultural Association of Medical Interpreters (MAMI) for a Somali Bantu caseworker, who specifically provides services to that refugee group.
“The Somali Bantu’s needs have been different than other refugees coming into our community, and I think community services were not as prepared to address all of those needs, and that has been somewhat of a struggle,” the Neighborhood Center’s executive director, Sandra Soroka, said. “Many of them have spent 10 to 15 years in refugee camps, and that is a different lifestyle; and to be transplanted to Upstate New York in a fairly urban community when their skill set and all of their social norms are very different — right down to how they’re prepared to deal with the weather — those are huge, huge issues.”
Cultural differences
The Somali Bantu were a marginalized group in Somalia — facing discrimination, denied education, forced into low-status manual labor jobs and subjected to violence, rape, theft and murder. The group has had little exposure to Western culture and norms, according to Bridging Refugee Youth and Children Services, a project of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration and Refugee Services.
“Every refugee population has the same problem, but it’s more with the Somali Bantu community (because) people have never had access to education when they were in their country,” said Haji Adan of the Somali Bantu Community Association of Syracuse.
Plus, there are significant cultural differences, he said.
For instance, raising children in Somalia is the responsibility of the entire village, he said. Making decisions has always been the role of the male head of household, he said.
“It takes a whole village to raise a child, that’s how we believe. Here, you are responsible for your own family,” Adan said.
That village-to-raise-a-child mentality has led to issues where it might seem like children are being neglected, Adan said. Culturally, the group expects the entire community look after and discipline their children, he said, so it may seem that individual parents are not always supervising their children.
Bridging the gap
Locally, groups such as The Mohawk Valley Somali Bantu Community Association and the Somali Bantu Association of Central New York, have been addressing those cultural differences, especially in bridging the growing gap between children who are quickly assimilating to American ways and their parents, whose transition is taking a little longer.
The Neighborhood Center, housing authority and both associations, as well as other social services agencies are providing parenting education classes, tutoring, job coaching and after-school care to close that gap as quickly as possible.
Peter Vogelaar, executive director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, warns against generalizing about the Somali Bantu community.
“This group is quite capable of negotiating their environment; it’s just sometimes the cultural complexities encountered with their dealings with service providers can be difficult to overcome,” Vogelaar said. “The Bantu are quite capable with a myriad of skills and the (Bantu) community is well-positioned to help itself with services and trainings to complement what the community is already doing.”
Source:n The Observer-Dispatch, Utica, New York
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