Living between two worlds: African refugees battle cultural isolation as they try to adapt to their new home in Portland

On a toasty Tuesday afternoon, Suleqa Ismail wears the trademarks of two different continents: her dark, shoulder-length headscarf reflects the tradition of her native Somalia, while the purse she carries — white with a sequined Minnie Mouse appliqué — is classic American. The split runs through her family, too: The oldest of Ismail’s four children, 9-year-old daughter Fartun, was born in Africa, but her 17-month-old son, Fuad, is a stateside native.

There’s even some ambivalence to her experience in the United States. Although Ismail and her husband, Saleman Adan, are infinitely grateful that they were able to leave war-plagued Somalia and come here as refugees four years ago, the challenges they’ve faced since have made their transition less than smooth. They’re one of many African families in Portland who’ve run across serious housing hurdles since arriving in the U.S.

Since January of 2007, Ismail and Adan have lived with their children at the New Columbia, the Housing Authority of Portland’s sprawling low-income housing complex in North Portland. They pay a third of their income for rent, which was adjusted down when Adan was laid off from his job with a rental car company in February of last year.

This spring, they received a letter stating that the clutter in their yard was in violation of their lease, but because they can’t read English and speak only a Somali dialect called Maay Maay, they didn’t realize the notice was important, and it was forgotten.

In July, to their surprise, Ismail and Adan received a final eviction notice. The couple was baffled.“We just never understood what the problem was,” Adan explained through a translator. “When I got the eviction notice on my door, I didn’t know what it was — I thought maybe I didn’t pay a ticket.”

As it turned out, the couple had already missed court dates, and they were on the verge of being thrown out of their four-bedroom home. They were able to stave off eviction only with the help and mediation of the Center for Intercultural Organizing, or CIO, which isn’t usually involved in housing issues.

CIO Executive Director Kayse Jama, who also came as a refugee from Somalia and worked frantically with HAP to keep the family in their home, said the situation demonstrates a distinct communication failure.

The cluttered yard was “an issue, but not an issue that should have gone to that level,” Jama said. “It has to be worked out — more culturally appropriate ways of communicating and explaining the rights and responsibilities of the families.”

Now Adan and Ismail are having trouble determining how much money they owe New Columbia, since their bills were put on hold during the eviction process they weren’t aware of. At one point, as he showed Jama a flurry of English-language documents that he didn’t understand, Adan raised his palms in resignation.

“We came from a war-torn country, and we tried to work hard and get jobs and help ourselves and our family and our children,” Ismail said, also through translation. When they discovered that they faced eviction, she said, she briefly thought, “Why not send me back to Africa? I don’t have anywhere to live. Please send me back to the war-torn country that I came from.”

According to Portland’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, Oregon is home to about 20,000 African immigrants and their families. Many came as agency-sponsored refugees from conflict-ridden nations like Somalia, Eritrea, Burundi and Liberia, and their numbers keep growing. In 1990, one in 30 black Oregonians was born outside the U.S.; now it’s one in 10, according to the recently released State of Black Oregon report.

Yet the African population’s increasing prominence is not necessarily reflected in Portland’s services or its public consciousness, says Evelyne Ello-Hart of the African Women’s Coalition.

Ello-Hart, an impassioned advocate originally from the Ivory Coast, says the African immigrant and refugee community is too often lumped in with the African American community, when in reality the two groups’ needs can be very different. She says the city does little specific outreach to the African community, so that even when there is assistance available to struggling African families, no one knows it’s there.

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