Diaspora
From war-torn Somalia to graduating from UC Berkeley
Published
8 months agoon
By Anne Brice / UC Berkeley
Sayah Bogor, a UC Berkeley graduate student in public health, will make the short walk across the stage Monday to receive her master’s degree. For Bogor, a native of war-torn Somalia, the event will mark a joyous leap in a long and difficult journey.
“My mom is very very practical. She told me over and over and over, every single evening, ‘If you hear anything, run straight home. Straight straight home.’”
Five-year-old Sayah lived in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. It was the late 1990s. Although the country had been in a civil war since the early part of the decade, Sayah knew her home to be peaceful.
“You could go to anyone’s house and have food or go to anyone’s house and hang out. It was a very safe, comfortable environment.”
But there had been rumors that violence might break out, so the family had a game plan. Her father had taken Sayah’s two older brothers to New York, where he had worked for the past six months as a cab driver. Soon, he would be back with visas, so the whole family could move to the U.S.
One afternoon, Sayah was walking to the local gelato shop with her aunt, hand-in-hand with her cousin and best friend, Sarah.
“She also had three brothers, so we just clicked. Her name was Sarah and I’m Sayah, so we were like sisters in a sense. My parents said we were inseparable.”
But their walk was cut short.
“I heard shouting, then I started hearing screaming. Then, I heard this loud bang. I didn’t know it at the time, that’s a gunshot. I had never heard a gun before.”
Sayah tried to pull her cousin in her direction, but their hands dropped and, hearing her mother’s voice in her head, she sprinted home without looking back.
“When I got home, my mom is packing — whatever she can. And my brother is 3 and a half, so he’s a handful. He doesn’t know what’s going on, so he’s crying.”
Her mom used a long cloth to strap her son to her chest so she could carry him more easily. Sayah grabbed a bag and the family took off.
“We start running in the opposite direction.”
“But I told my mom, I was grabbing her skirt, and I was like, ‘Sarah and auntie, they’re at their house,’ and their house was just around the other side. So, my mom was like, ‘We can’t stop. We can’t stop. We gotta think about us.’ But I was a little kid. It didn’t click, the danger of the situation.”
So, Sayah turned around and ran away from her mother toward Sarah’s house.
“I was already pretty far by the time she noticed that I wasn’t right behind her. She turned around, but she couldn’t scream and shout out because you didn’t want to bring attention. So, she ran after me.”
“I saw my cousin’s house, and I’m kind of running around. I hear commotion. I come closer behind the house and I see the window, and I look inside the window. And there’s a bunch of men in the house. My aunt is on the ground. Sarah’s in the corner crying. My mom catches up to me right when I’m looking in the window. My mom knew what was going on, but I didn’t know. I just knew something bad is happening…”
“My mom is trying to pull me away from the window. I was like, ‘We gotta get them, we gotta get them, we gotta help them, we gotta save them.’ My mom was like, ‘There’s nothing we can do. There’s nothing we can do.’ Then, all of a sudden, I hear a gunshot in the house. And I look back over my shoulder and my uncle is on the ground. They shot him in the head. And we took off.”
There was no way to know that the next two years — a time when surviving required strengths she didn’t know she had — would also set Sayah on a path to tackle some of the world’s biggest medical problems.
Life as a refugee
“We would usually go at night. Then during the day, we would find a place to sleep. You don’t want to stand out too much. We traveled like that for two weeks. People would stop and help us — give us food and water, but we would always go at night.”
After two weeks, Sayah and her family crossed the border into Nairobi, Kenya, where the government had set up refugee camps for Somalis fleeing the civil war.
“It was dirty. It smelled. There was poop in the water. Whenever it rained, you’d have to try to find anything that’s plastic, garbage bags, stuff to put on the ground because it was mud. My mom was ill constantly. In and out of sickness. It was hard for her to get up. It was hard for her to move. Later on I found out she had multiple different diarrheal infections, one of which was shigella, because she had it at the time of departure, which is a killer. You know, you die. A lot of people died from illness in the camps.”
Sometimes she would see Red Cross workers come into the camp. They might set up a booth to treat basic medical ailments. They would sometimes drop off some food. But Sayah says because she was so small, it was hard to get the help she needed.
“People are walking away with multiple bundles or stealing each other’s bundles. Or maybe you have it in your place and then someone sees you have it and comes and steals it from you and if you don’t let it go, they’ll kill you. No one is helping. You can drop off whatever you want. But if there is not police or security to help ensure that people actually take these things home, then what are you really doing? You’re just causing more chaos. I avoided it at all costs.”
So, at 6 years old, Sayah became the sole provider for her sick mom and her 3-year-old brother.
During the day, she would stand guard, yelling and making noise when anyone walked by who might be looking to take advantage of a vulnerable woman and kids.
“At night, I would cover her with whatever I could find — garbage. Just make her look like a pile of garbage.”
Sayah would take her toddler brother and walk through the back alleys of Nairobi, collecting food thrown out by restaurants.
“Some days I wouldn’t have anything. Some days I would come back and I would have two loaves of bread that this bakery gave me. Those days I would come back, I felt like the king of the world. I was like, ‘No one can stop me.’”
She was wary. Stuck to herself. She thinks it’s what got her through — that she didn’t trust anyone but herself.
“I would look inside someone’s eyes and if I felt, you know, there’s not really a good person in there. The eyes don’t lie. I remember there was one situation, I was out by myself in the early evening. I was going through the alleys, kind of digging through things, and there was this man who saw me and called me over and I was like, ‘No thanks.’ Then he pulled out this tray of meats and it looked so good, it smelled so good. And he was like, ‘You can have this.
You can take it home.’ He was like, ‘Who do you live with?’ You know, things like that. And then, I got a little bit closer because I wanted to smell the food a little bit more and kind of like see him, but right when I looked into his eyes, I was just like, ‘I can’t trust you.’ So I ran.
I booked it, in the other direction. Ran as fast as I could. I didn’t have food that day, and I didn’t tell my mom that it was someone with food because she would get mad. But I was just like, ‘I don’t trust him. So, it’s not worth the risk.’ I’d rather be hungry than not come home.”
“The time went by, I feel like, the slowest in my entire life.”
An immigrant in Arizona
“Two years later, in the camp, someone came by and said, ‘There’s someone looking for you.’ And I said, ‘Who, you know?’”
She’d been on her own for so long that the memory of her father had faded. But her mother was hopeful.
“She was like, ‘Who? Is it Omar?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah’!”
He’d been looking for them since they fled Mogadishu. Everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, he would call around to different refugee sites near Somalia, asking if his wife and two children were registered at one of the camps. But because the sites were understaffed and overfull, it took two years for someone to find his family’s names on the list.
Soon after he found them, he sent them airline tickets and visas, and they flew to New York.
“We landed in New York. And, my father was at the airport with my older brothers. I was anorexic. I was extremely malnourished. Same with my brother. Same with my mother. We were all sickly. And my father and my brothers were just so big and hearty. And I was like, ‘What? This is another world.’”
In the camp, Sayah had developed a bad case of asthma and doctors said she needed to live in a warmer climate or she might die. So, her parents scraped together enough money for a beat-up car, loaded in their four kids and moved to Arizona. Her dad chose a small apartment in the suburbs of Phoenix.
“He wanted us to have a good chance at a good education, and for him, a good education is wherever the white kids go to school.”
But Sayah, who was now 7, was different from her classmates. She was the only kid with dark skin at her elementary school. And she’d experienced a lot of trauma. She found it hard to connect to kids her age.
“I had done so much living in my few years of life that it was hard for me to play with the other kids. So I didn’t have a lot of friends and I was definitely bullied a lot.”
Instead of disciplining the bullies, the school administration had Sayah sit in the nurse’s office during recess, where she spent a lot of time reading.
“I was killing books right and left. It was the best way to escape.”
Everyday, she’d walk to the library every day after school, check out a stack of books, go home, lock her bedroom door and read.
But in eighth grade, she caught a break. Her parents bought a house in Maricopa, a city far enough from Phoenix that Sayah could reinvent herself.
“I got to be in a school where no one knew me. Or knew my past. I could make my own story. I could make my own reality. And I did. I used that year to open up more — to talk.”
Aiming for citizenship, then medical school
Sayah Bogor always knew that getting an education was the way she was going to have opportunity. As she got closer to high school graduation, she wanted to leave Arizona and make a fresh start.
“I had big dreams. I was like, ‘I’m gonna go out of state. I’m gonna leave. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want a new life.’”
That’s when her mom told her she didn’t have a Social Security number. It had been too expensive for her family to apply for green cards for all of the kids. Her older brothers already had them because they needed them to get jobs. But her parents hadn’t gotten around to it for Sayah yet.
She had two options: She could apply for a green card and wait three years, then apply for colleges out of state. Or she could transfer her high school transcripts to an Arizona school without any questions being asked.
“So I decided I wanted to go to school. I didn’t want to take time off. I felt like school is what I love and that’s what I’m going to do.”
At Arizona State University, Bogor majored in genetics and cellular development. She wanted to understand the rampant sickness she saw in the refugee camp.
“I’ve always been, since I was a child, just seeing people getting sick, seeing things you don’t even see that can kill even more indiscriminately than a person could, fascinated me. So, I wanted to learn how it works. How does our body work? What are our defense systems? How do things enter? How do they manipulate our body to use our body against us to kill us and to kill others?”
After she graduated with a bachelor’s in science, she wanted to know more. So, she applied to UC Berkeley’s master’s program in public health and started in 2015. She received a full fellowship from the School of Public Health that paid for her tuition and gave her a stipend to pay her rent. (The fellowship has since been discontinued — Bogor was the last to receive it.)
“Coming from needing to work 40 hours to pay tuition. Coming from, you know, reading in the dark in my parents’ place, it was just like, ‘Wow, Berkeley, one of the top schools in the entire world, wants me.’”
During her time at Berkeley, Bogor started to investigate some of the infectious diseases that afflicted those living in the refugee camp in Nairobi. Many of the illnesses were diarrheal infections.
“There are so so many now I know. Just like, people dying from too much diarrhea, which happens all the time in developing countries. It’s hard to tell what it was.”
As part of her research, Bogor traveled to Bangladesh with the help of a fellowship, where she studied at the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, an institute committed to solving public health problems facing low and middle-income countries through innovative scientific research. Sayah worked at the center’s clinic, where she saw people with a number of diarrheal infections, including cholera.
“That’s why I was so excited to go to that center and just be able to see how they work. And be able to meet the patients who wait in line all day in the heat to have their children or their parents be looked at. In America, or in any developed country, you would be fine. If you have diarrhea, eat some bread and have a Gatorade, or something like that, and you’ll be okay. But, if you’re already malnourished and then you get a diarrheal illness, and you don’t really have access to a lot of water or food, then you die. It’s the number one killer of children, especially.”
In Bangladesh, says Bogor, as in a lot of developing countries, patients are prescribed antibiotics without being tested for their sickness. You can even buy antibiotics at the local corner store.
“In America, it’s a huge worry. With MRSA and all of these other infections that can’t even be treated with antibiotics anymore. The biggest fear, in the future, there’s definitely going to be a day when antibiotics don’t work anymore. This is a problem that’s going to be for the entire world.”
Now, two years later, she’s about to graduate with a master’s in public health with a focus on infectious diseases and vaccinology.
Her dream is to be a doctor, but she doesn’t have citizenship yet. She has a green card, so legally she can do anything but vote, and next year she is eligible to apply for citizenship. That’s when she also plans to apply for medical school.
“I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to get citizenship. Honestly, I think that’s all I can do. I think if I tried to think about the possibility that I won’t… I think it just hurts too much to think about that because it’s something I can’t control, you know? I just gotta do everything on my part and if it happens, yes. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll keep waiting. I want to be a doctor. It doesn’t matter how old I am. A doctor is a doctor is a doctor. I’ll make it happen no matter what.”
The eyes have it
Bogor is now engaged to a man who looks at her with eyes she can trust. She and Shane met as undergraduates in Arizona.
“Immediately I looked into his eyes and I just felt this kind of warmth that I actually hadn’t seen in anyone else other than my father. I was just like, ‘Woah.’ I was taken aback by that. You know how guys will come up and say, ‘You look good,’ and all this other garbage. He just shook my hand and was like, ‘I don’t want to sound weird, but I saw you a few weeks ago on campus and I just wanted to come over and introduce myself.’ And I was like, ‘That’s a very genuine thing to say,’ and his eyes matched. So I was like, ‘Wait, I’m interested.’”
Shane grew up in a poor part of Phoenix with an alcoholic dad and a single mom. Now, he works as a financial adviser for a firm in Berkeley.
“Sometimes the best people, they come from the worst situations. It really tests you — your soul, your character. It really tests you. If you’re able to be tested over and over and over and you make the right choice each time… yeah.”
She says being at Berkeley and having the support of a fellowship has allowed her to relax in way she couldn’t before.
“I feel like I’ve grown up so much during these two years. I’ve really come into my own. And just my confidence has grown and I’m just so happy. I’m so happy!”
She’s a graduate mentor for a program called “Getting into Graduate School,” which helps underrepresented undergraduate students apply to graduate programs. She’s worked with three young women, all of whom have been accepted to their top schools.
“Aahhh. Just like that. It just feels like, Aaahhh. Life is good, you know, and I haven’t had to worry about anything. Like, truly worry about anything. I can just have normal problems, right? Like, what do I want to do after graduation?”
After she graduates with a master’s in public health, Bogor is looking to work for a nonprofit that helps people who need it. Maybe an organization that helps families find affordable housing or healthcare.
“I’m sure I’m not going to be rich from it. But rich in soul, right? That’s what I would love to do.”
This story was first published by UC Berkeley on May 9, 2017.
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Diaspora
Heritage Moments: From a cubicle on Swan Street to the presidency of Somalia
Published
2 hours agoon
Jan 15, 2018Three world leaders have called Western New York their home. The first two, the American presidents Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland, are well known to people living in the region. The third is less celebrated here.
But the story of Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed — the Buffalonian better known as Farmaajo, elected president of Somalia in February 2017 — is every bit as incredible, and momentous, as that of practically any leader anywhere.
His ascent to the presidency touched off ecstatic celebrations, both in war-torn Somalia and in the Somali diaspora around the world. The first year of his presidency has been dangerous and difficult, as was always expected in a country riven by violence for so long – “There is a daunting task ahead of me, and I know that,” he said upon accepting the position – but his reputation for honesty and good governance has so far remained intact.
Farmaajo, the son of a civil servant, was born in Somalia in 1962. He earned his nickname for his childhood love of cheese (formaggio in Italian, the language of the country that colonized Somalia in the early 20th century). From 1985 to ’89, he worked at the Somali embassy in Washington, but like so many of his generation, he was forced into exile by the collapse of the central government at home and the rise of warlords and disintegration of civil society that followed.
In 1989, he moved to Buffalo and enrolled at UB. His long stay in Western New York had begun.
Farmaajo graduated with a degree in history in 1993 and over the next 16 years worked at the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority, the Erie County Division of Equal Employment Opportunity and the New York State Department of Transportation — a hat trick of civil service jobs with the city, county and state. Throughout this period Farmaajo was known to his American friends and colleagues as, simply, Mohamed A. Mohamed, a smart, nice, soft-spoken guy who lived with his wife, two sons and two daughters in their homes, first on the West Side, then in Amherst and finally, on Grand Island.
But in Buffalo’s growing Somali community he was recognized as a man of prominence who might play a role in the future of his war-ravaged homeland in the Horn of Africa. He conferred with other notable Somalis living in Western New York, like Abdiweli Mohamed Ali Gaas, an economics professor at Niagara University, and Gaas’s wife, Hodan Isse, a UB economics professor. He taught his job specialty, conflict resolution, at Erie Community College. And he earned a Master’s degree in American Studies at UB. His thesis: “U.S. Strategic Interest in Somalia: From the Cold War Era to the War on Terror.”
Suddenly, in October 2010, Farmaajo was appointed Somalia’s new prime minister, the second most powerful post in the government. It seemed like a bolt from the blue to his Buffalo friends, but the Somali community was not surprised at all; they knew he had met with the Somali president at the United Nations in New York.
Still, Farmaajo’s task seemed impossible — the Somali government controlled only parts of the capital, Mogadishu, and little else in the chaotic country.
“Every morning when I was brushing my teeth I heard bullets hitting the metal over my window,” he told The New York Times. “It was like, pop pop pop pop. The first day I was shocked. But after that I knew the bullets would not get through, so I continued brushing.”
Farmaajo quickly earned a reputation for honesty and transparency in government, winning international praise for creating stability in notoriously unstable Somalia. But infighting among factions of the government forced him to resign in June 2011. Protests broke out across Somalia and among Somalis living abroad, from Nairobi to London to Toronto. (He was succeeded as prime minister by his deputy, Gaas, the Niagara University professor, who lasted only four months in the job.)
So it was back to Buffalo for Farmaajo, back to his job at DOT, and back to his old cubicle, with its window facing Swan Street.
“It’s a different feeling when you’re heading a whole nation and you come back to your normal life,” he told The Buffalo News. “It’s a little awkward, to tell you the truth.”
And yet, five and a half years later Farmaajo was back in Somalia, this time to run for president.
The election was held in a secure zone at Mogadishu airport. The voters were the members of the Somali parliament; the majority of them, like Farmaajo, had lived in North America or Europe for many years and were familiar with the protocols of good government. The voting was monitored by international observers. Security was provided by troops of the African Union.
Farmaajo won on the second ballot, on Feb. 8, 2017. Eight days later he was sworn in. As president, he would put to use some of the skills he developed in Buffalo.
“Violence comes from conflicts, and I’ve learned how to resolve conflicts,” he once said in his old office, gazing out over Swan Street. “That’s exactly what I do here.”
Diaspora
Lewiston makes strides towards embracing its immigrant population
Published
23 hours agoon
Jan 14, 2018PRESS HERALD — LEWISTON — “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
These words of Martin Luther King Jr., spoken half a century ago, are relevant today as Lewiston continues to grow more diverse.
Citizens here have made strides in creating an atmosphere of races co-existing, said Phil Nadeau, a retired deputy city administrator who for years was the city’s leader on immigrant relations.
Somali residents agree that race relations have improved, but they say more work needs to be done. Black individuals still face hatred on a daily basis, said Jama Mohamed. “But this does not mean we should accuse one group,” he said.
“Private citizens and immigrants alike have made strides to integrate and coexist in this beautiful community,” said ZamZam Mohamud. However, she added, there’s still some prejudice, still some hardship.
Key to overcoming such barriers, she said, is “people assisting others with a hand, or even advice.”
Growing numbers
These Lewiston residents are part of a surge of African immigration that began in 2001. In 2000, Lewiston’s black population numbered a couple of hundred. Today, it is between 6,000 and 7,000, among a total of 36,000 residents, the majority of which are Somali families, Nadeau said.
Over time, many more immigrants have come to Lewiston from other African nations. In one of the nation’s whitest states, Lewiston has become a global community.
The number of English language learner students in Lewiston schools has skyrocketed, from a handful in 2001 to 28.4 percent of the student population in 2017. At the high school, the student population represents 38 nations, said Aspirations Coordinator Doug Dumont. He said the diverse student population “is a tremendous asset to Lewiston High School.”
Twenty years ago, there was little diversity in the city, Nadeau said. “Anyone who lived here knows that. Everybody knows the story of how things changed,” with the first wave of Somali immigrants arriving in 2001 escaping their war-torn country and refugee camps in Kenya.
Unlike other immigrant resettlements, “they chose us,” and came to Lewiston to escape the noise, crime and higher costs associated with larger cities.
But it was a rough start.
‘Part of a global discussion’
Soon after Somali immigrants began arriving in February 2001, the attacks of 9/11 occurred. The movie “Black Hawk Down” was playing. People feared Muslims. The community, Nadeau said, “didn’t understand who our new residents were. It was a very different time.”
Racial slurs were hurled at local Muslims, a pig’s head was tossed into a mosque, white supremacists visited Lewiston. And all of this generated national and international news coverage.
Due to the work of many – black and white, immigrants and locals, public and private organizations – race relations have improved and changed Lewiston’s story, according to Nadeau.
By 2010, Steve Wessler of the former Center for Preventing Hate said Lewiston-Auburn’s efforts to snuff out prejudice had made it a leader in the nation. Lessons learned here were being shared with other communities.
“The eyes of the world were on us, and that was not by design,” Nadeau said. “It continues to this day. We still have global interest in what goes on here. It’s extraordinary.”
Nadeau said media outlets from across the country and planet, including Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and China, have come to Lewiston to learn how the city has improved race relations.
“I continue to be blown away by conversations I have with people from around the country who know the story about Lewiston,” Nadeau said. “We are now part of a global discussion.”
Some of the stories include:
• Lewiston High School’s soccer team, which has won the state title twice with a roster that includes many Somali immigrants.
• A growing number of immigrant students are graduating from high school and college.
• Lewiston’s Fatuma Hussein, founder of Immigrant Resource Center, was given an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 2017. Her organization started as the United Somali Women of Maine. What began as just volunteers has grown to a full-time staff.
• The Maine Immigration and Refugee Services, which began as the Somali Bantu Association of Maine. Led by Rilwan Osman, it started with volunteers who worked out of a van to improve the behavior and education of youth through soccer and tutoring. Today, it has also grown to a full-time staff.
• ZamZam Mohamud, who moved to Lewiston in 2001, is considered one of the area’s most beloved residents. A translator and health care worker, she was the first Somali to hold public office, having been elected to the Lewiston School Committee in 2014. She was featured in a 2015 cover story in Down East magazine that described her as one who united people.
• Tree Street Youth Center, a private, nonprofit, drop-in education-and-enrichment center founded by two Bates College graduates, expanded both its building and programs in 2017. It operates through community support and, largely, grants and donations.
Coming together
Lewiston Community Resource Police Officer Joe Philippon said he has noticed more people making efforts to know their neighbors during academies involving residents and police.
Last year, the Lewiston Police Department hosted two academies.
“Both had a very diverse group of participants,” Philippon said, adding that it was refreshing to watch people introduce themselves, ask questions of each other, learn about other cultures and experience ethnic foods.
The final session features potluck suppers. The next academy is scheduled for Feb. 13.
Bonnie Washuk can be contacted at:
Canada
Canada failed Abdoul Abdi but it’s not too late to do the right thing
Published
24 hours agoon
Jan 14, 2018The Somali refugees life is a tragic story that highlights the gaps in Canadian institutions and systems that disproportionately and negatively impact Black Canadians.
“If it was your son, would you do anything to stop this?”
This was the question posed directly to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by Fatouma, the sister of Abdoul Abdi, at a town hall event in Halifax this week.
Abdi’s is a tragic story that highlights the gaps in Canadian institutions and systems that disproportionately and negatively impact Black Canadians.
Abdi came to Canada as a child refugee from Somalia in 2000 with his sister and aunts. His mother died in a refugee camp while awaiting the three-year process that eventually landed his family here.
Under uncertain circumstances, of which his family continues to seek clarification due to language barriers at the time, the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services removed a 7-year-old Abdi and his sister from the care of their aunt. Over the next decade the siblings were separated and Abdi was shuffled between 31 homes.
Abdi’s aunt never stopped fighting for guardianship, and while she obtained her own citizenship she was denied the opportunity to apply for citizenship on behalf of her niece and nephew. While under child protection, Abdi was provided insufficient support to navigate the process of becoming a Canadian citizen on his own.
He was failed by the very system that was meant to protect him.
For child welfare advocates, Abdi’s story and path from care to the criminal justice system is a familiar one. For the crimes he committed in his youth, which included aggravated assault, time has justly been served. At the moment of his release, as he prepared to reunite with his family and reintegrate into society, Abdi was detained once more.
Without his citizenship in place, Abdi was left vulnerable to the immigration process that could possibly lead to deportation.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder to speak truth to power, advocates across Canada have spoken out with a resounding roar on Abdi’s behalf, garnering attention and seeking immediate remedy for his case.
In response to Fatouma’s question, Trudeau emphasized compassion and empathy while outlining the ways in which he recognized Canadian systems failed Abdi.
“It opened our eyes to something that many of us knew was ongoing in many communities but we continue to need to address,” he said.
While his response was well informed, I would have liked to hear the prime minister name systemic anti-Black racism as a key factor to be addressed.
We need to directly acknowledge the cracks in our government systems through which Black Canadians are falling through at disproportionately high rates so that we can proactively tackle them.
South of our border, the president of the United States has continued his divisive political agenda anchored in anti-Black racism. After hearing of his comments this week I wonder how his defenders continue to uphold him as a leader.
Characterizing Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “s—hole countries,” in an immigration meeting Trump reportedly asked, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”
As thousands of Haitian families look to Canada in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to rescind deportation protections from nearly 60,000 Haitian refugees following the devastation of the 2010 earthquake, I hope Canada will show the compassion and empathy our prime minister talked about in his town hall this week and take them in.
Canada should be aiming for nothing less than global leadership in the steps we take to address anti-Black racism. To do this successfully we will need active engagement from Canadian political leaders.
They should be proactively partnering with Black communities to identify priorities, set goals, communicate them publicly, and track progress toward success.
It’s difficult to engage in dialogue about policy while Abdi and his family live in crisis, facing this terrifying uncertainty. I hope this nightmare is over for them very soon.
But how is it fair that his story be used to advance public policy before his own livelihood is restored?
It is time for him to be reunited with his family so they may begin the long journey of healing from these painful experiences. That is what’s fair.
And I hope once that happens we can dive deeply into rectifying the systems that failed him, and map our way forward.
Tiffany Gooch is a political strategist at public affairs firms Enterprise and Ensight, secretary of the Ontario Liberal Party Executive Council, and an advocate for increased cultural and gender diversity in Canadian politics.
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Somalia regional forces fight over northern sool region
New international airport launched in Puntland
TRENDING
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Terrorism Watch14 hours ago
Somali Jihadist Killed in Syria
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Puntland23 hours ago
Somalia military working to push terrorists out of Puntland
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KENYA24 hours ago
Two years after El Adde, kin of missing soldiers tell of misery
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KENYA14 hours ago
Somali militants “lecture” frightened Kenyan villagers before escaping
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Canada24 hours ago
Canada failed Abdoul Abdi but it’s not too late to do the right thing
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Briefing Room24 hours ago
Kenya: Cost of the war in Somalia
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Turkey14 hours ago
Plane dangles off cliff after skidding off runway in Turkey
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Diaspora23 hours ago
Lewiston makes strides towards embracing its immigrant population
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