Bartamaha (Edmonton):- When 23-year-old Mohammed Jama was shot to death in front of horrified onlookers at a restaurant on New Year’s Eve, he became the 11th young man from Edmonton’s Somali community to die in a hail of gunfire in less than 30 months.

Cops say that most of the victims had some kind of tie to the drug trade. Many moved to Edmonton from Toronto within the last few years.

The body count has horrified the city and sent ripples of fear, dread and anger through the city’s rapidly-growing Somali community.

Its 14,000 members make up the largest Somali-Canadian community outside of southern Ontario and the largest African community in Edmonton.

A youth worker who helps immigrant teens fears more young Somalis will end up in body bags if more isn’t done to keep some young men from “falling through the cracks.”

“First off,” says Ahmed Abdullahi, who is also Somali, “I want to stress that the vast majority of Somali kids do well. They get good marks in school and they’ll go on to university or a career and contribute to society.”

But there is small group of kids, he says, who feel “disconnected with their community but haven’t connected with mainstream society.”

Abdullahi says typically these boys grow up without a father. Divorce is rare in the Somali community, but whenever it happens, the father vanishes to another city, remarries and starts a new family.

The ex-wife and children never hear from him again. The mother, often with little education and poor English, becomes overwhelmed.

“You can see it coming,” says Abdullahi. “These teens kids start getting disillusioned. Their school attendance drops dramatically, their marks fall. They’re very defiant and angry.”

They become easy pickings for drug dealers looking for foot soldiers.

“Suddenly they’re bringing money home. Their mother is just happy to see some more income and she believes him when he says he’s got a job,” he says. “And they have a group to identify with, a place to belong.”

One such case was Abdinasir Dirie, a 19-year-old who came West looking for work to make some money so he could study computer science at the University of Toronto.

According to his family, he quit his job in an Edmonton restaurant in August, 2010, and went north looking for better paying oilsands work. His family lost all contact, but by January he was arrested on

drug trafficking charges.

Four months later he contacted his family in Toronto to say he wanted to come home.

The following day Dirie’s body was found in a Fort McMurray apartment. He’d been shot.

So far, the story could apply to any immigrant group to Canada.

But it’s even more complex for struggling new Somali families, Abdullahi says, because too often the

parents bring their homeland’s clan rivalries with them.

“People from one group have nothing to do with another,” he says. Abdullahi says there are at least five different Somali cultural associations in the city and they’re all rivals.

“Some are better than others at being inclusive, but if there’s funding for any special programming, they all compete for it instead of working together,” he said.

He added that the marginalized kids refuse to have anything to do with these community

groups, which are run by traditional men with a traditional mindset.

“These men need to move over and let the younger, educated adults start having a say,” he said. “Only then will these rivalries be put aside and we can do a better job of helping these kids.”

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Source:- torontosun.

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