Mankato’s new American Dreamers.

Bartamaha  (Nairobi):- What compelled Lero Odola to move 7,000 miles from Akobo, Sudan, to Mankato, Minnesota?

“I want to raise my kids in a small town,” he said. “My kids can get lost in big cities.”
He’s attending Minnesota State University seeking degrees in ethnic studies and law enforcement. He watched law twisted by the Sudanese government, which he said used oil money to buy Russian helicopters to kill the helpless. The very notion of law was abandoned altogether in a refugee camp.
“The weaker is always the loser,” was the camp’s law.
Asha Ahmed’s family traveled around Africa and the Middle East before coming to south-central Minnesota.
The young woman says she wants to stay. “I haven’t heard so much ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ in my life.”
“It’s a very peaceful place.”
Victoria Salas was 6 or 7 when her family moved from Texas to Blooming Prairie, Minn., then to Blue Earth. While she wasn’t an immigrant technically speaking, moving from her predominantly Latino community to Minnesota had a similar effect.
Having lived here for decades and helped countless families as head of the Mankato nonprofit La Mano (it means “the hand” in Spanish), Salas has a different perspective.
She’s fascinated by questions of identity, about both the institutional racism that she believes keeps immigrants from integrating as well as the forces that push them to shed their culture.
“I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to our culture” if it forgets its past, she said.
People come to Mankato for “really the same reasons that we live here,” said Jessica O’Brien, who helps refugees and immigrants find jobs for Blue Earth County through a contractor, MRCI WorkSource. Those reasons include safety. Schools. Higher education. A small-town atmosphere.

From 2000 to 2006, the percentage of foreign-born residents in Blue Earth County rose from 2.9 percent to 3.7 percent, according to Census data. Watonwan County has no data more recent than 2000, when 8 percent of its residents were born outside of the United States.

The Free Press is publishing an ongoing series on diversity — religious, ethnic and cultural — in the Mankato area. This overview story will be followed in coming months with profiles of immigrants and refugees as well as stories about the immigrant experience, including their efforts to find a place to live, go to school and start a business.
The grade-school culinary metaphor on immigration asks whether new Americans are turning the country into a melting pot where different cultures disappear into a uniform soup or into a mixed salad where cultures co-exist.
The comparison illuminates the boundaries of the issue, but conversations with immigrants and refugees reveal they want both.
A popular conception of immigrants as walling themselves off and refusing to learn English is simply incorrect, O’Brien said.
“Assimilating is what they really want,” she said.
Even so, foreign-born Americans are watching in disappointment as their children show little interest in learning their mother tongue.
“We want to preserve our culture,” said Odola, who has five children ages 3 to 19.

Jobs are key

The new arrivals need to be taught how to navigate American institutions — schools, churches, law enforcement,  government services and the rest — but employment is the ideal way to help them be self-sufficient.
Employers say there are barriers, especially English fluency and cultural divides, but there are success stories.
Take AmeriPride Uniform Services, which has contracts with restaurants and other companies to have their linens washed and maintained.
The Mankato company has hired perhaps 30 people from O’Brien’s work program.
Key to the program are the job coaches, who come with the employee, and the try-before-you-hire system, whereby the program pays the first few weeks of the worker’s salary.
Ameripride Production Manager Tom Blaido is a believer.

“It’s a real neat part of the program … more often than not, almost always, that person settles into that job and is able to perform those duties.”

Only one person wasn’t right for the position, and most of the people he hired four or five years ago are still there.
“That’s pretty cool. To have to train a new individual is quite expensive,” Blaido said.
Rehema Munye emigrated from Somalia in October of 2003 and stayed in Arizona for two years. She saw snow for the first time when she came to Mankato.
She started to learn English, but the single mother of four had a difficult time getting a job considering her total lack of formal work experience. Informal experience she had plenty of: She’s helped deliver babies in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp.
Eventually, Munye got an interview at AmeriPride.
“Then I came here, and it was hard, hard,” she said. Eventually, she became a supervisor.
But don’t even think of calling it a case of affirmative action.
“Somebody once said that was a smart move to have a Somali lady in a supervisor position,” Blaido said.
“That’s unfair. She came in and she earned that position. It wasn’t given to her for any other reason than she did the job better, knew the job better than anyone else,” he said.
There are cultural divides, but Blaido said they can be crossed with good communication. His Muslim employees needed a place to pray, so he put a prayer rug in his office.
Some Muslim women wear long, loose clothing that can interfere with machinery.
Blaido found the women could wear short scarves that go to the top of their shoulders rather than long ones that hang to their knees.
Hy-Vee has also found long-term employees through O’Brien’s program.
Hilltop store director Dan Olson is candid about the company’s past efforts to hire diverse employees.
“It didn’t work out. Cultural differences made it difficult to train them,” he said.

The stumbling block was the lack of a third party intermediary with whom the company could work out problems like punctuality and clothing issues.

The job coach, who comes to work with the employee every day at first, solved that problem.

Some of the problems arose from the fact that some refugees had never seen a grocery store. One woman had no idea how to steer a grocery cart. Another had very limited experience with frozen food.

“Anything that we’ve been used to all our lives, you can’t think that’s going to be normal to them,” Olson said.
The company has tried out six employees through the program, and the four they’ve hired are “A” students, said Nicole Blekestad, human resource manager at Hy-Vee.
One of them is Nyanachiew Kuany, a refugee from the southern Sudanese city of Nasir. The camp she eventually moved into consisted of mud-and-wood huts, but it was an improvement — there was medical care, no artillery bombardment and food rations.
Kuany can speak English, but for this interview Odola is translating.
A reporter asks her about her life in Mankato, what is familiar and what is different from life in Nasir or the refugee camp.
She talks for a bit, shakes her head, and Odola translates: “There is no comparison.”
African refugees are familiar with abject poverty and violence — many have spent five or more years in camps — but other new Americans came here by choice.
Janeth Fisher-Romero was born in the Colombian city of El Carmen de Bolivar, which she described as similar to Mankato in population but much smaller. They still don’t have any running water.
She met her future husband, part owner of a tour company, while she was three years into law school in Cartagena, and moved to Minnesota in 2008.
While she moved to Mankato for love, she didn’t have to love the weather.
“It’s too cold for me. Too long and too cold,” she said.
Fisher-Romero, 22, hesitated to offer her opinions about America. She is a permanent legal resident, though not a citizen, who has lived here for nearly two years but does not consider it “her” country.
The American response to her home country can be summed up: drugs. Drug kingpins. Drug wars.
She knows the popular media has framed Colombia in those terms, but she wishes it weren’t so.
She works as an intern at La Mano, but has trouble finding a job given the companies she’s talked to only hire citizens.
“I understand why citizens have preference. That makes sense to me. At least I would like to apply,” she said.

How to be American
Mankato’s Lincoln Community Center is the epicenter of the new immigrant experience in Mankato.
A walk down its corridors on any given day reveals a mix of that ethnic salad and soup — new Americans learning English while often wearing their traditional clothing.
On a bright Friday morning in May, about a dozen African immigrants in the “New American” class are getting a visit from acting fire commander Scott LeBrun, as well as the three highest-ranked public safety officials in the department.
Trudy Kunkel, an acting deputy director of the department on the fire side, writes “14 weeks training” and “volunteer” on a chalk board.
The four older women in the class are veiled and sit together, while most of the younger women are not.
LeBrun explains to them that he works in 24-hour shifts, and says he sometimes sees people on the worst day of their lives.
“My goal is to try and make that day better for that person,” he said.
The class learns they need to have a driver’s license and be a U.S. citizen to be a volunteer, which will prevent most of them from joining up for a while. They also learn the subtleties of being an American.
“We always have forms in the United States,” a teacher says, as she passes around a release-of-information consent form.
A thermal imaging camera, used to locate victims in a fire, is passed around the group and one of the young women tries on hazmat and firefighting suits.For these new Americans, the idea of a community solving its own problems — like volunteer firefighting — is nothing new.
But navigating centralized bureaucracies is.
“They don’t come with much systems knowledge,” O’Brien said. “There’s always some initial confusion. For the most part, they welcome the help.”
She said there are two big myths about immigrants and refugees — that they are freeloaders and refuse to learn English.

O’Brien said refugees have to pay for their flight to the United States, a cost of $1,500 to $3,000.
“When they first start work they are repaying that,” she said.
“We really aren’t that different. We do want the same things,” O’Brien said. “Our new Americans are very proud to be American.”

Source: MANKATO FREE PRESS.