Somali

As America celebrates President-Elect Barack Obama’s historic win, the Somali community in Minnesota is forced to deal with negative press brought about by one of their own. On Election Day, November 4th, stories about Somali volunteers allegedly influencing voters at the polling stations began to appear in the press. MORE »

A mixture of first-time voters, translators, competing community leaders, political issues in Somalia, and clan-based allegiances in the Minnesota Somali community boiled over at the Brian Coyle Center on Election Day.

The controversy began November 5, when Omar Jamal held a press conference in which he asserted that translators were telling Somali elderly men and women to vote for Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken. Jamal, a self-proclaimed leader of the Somali community, is executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul. On Election Day, translators had told me that Mohamud Wardere, a staffer in Republican Senator Norm Coleman’s office, was influencing voters. MORE »

Fadumo Ali spends most of her time going about her house chores or leisurely talking to her neighbors. But sometimes she gets busy with something not new to her: compiling women’s poems for Somali wedding ceremonies known as Buraanbur in Somali. She started the practice of poem-writing a long time ago, when she was only 7 years old. MORE »

Every culture has its fairy tales and storytellers, and in Somali folklore, Egal Shidad is a character known as a “wise fool.” Now Egal Shidad is the star of a new production that focuses on mental health issues in the Somali communities of Minnesota. The program airs Monday, October 6 on both radio and TV. While the program uses the Somali language, it will also be translated into English, and will be available online. MORE »

Freedom of expression and the power to summon your government, the two most important principles of democracy is played out at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in St Paul, Minnesota. Among an estimated 15,000 protesters that took to the streets of St Paul on Monday, September 1 was about 300 Somalis who were protesting against “the U.S. sanctioned Ethiopian occupation of Somalia.” MORE »

2007 Youth News Intern Zahra Farah is already a veteran journalist. She interned at the Somali magazine, Haboon, where she had the opportunity to interview and write. She is a senior at Roosevelt High School this fall in Minneapolis. Zahra has lived across the Midwest. She was born in Somalia, and lived in Nairobi, Kenya before emigrating to the United States. Zahra’s story is about alcoholism in the Somali community. MORE »

The tiny huts, the small latrines and the white tents inside metal barricades looked startlingly familiar even though they were part of a replica of a refugee camp. I felt a little jolt in my heart as I stood in line Thursday to get inside the “camp” set up in Loring Park in Minneapolis. This was one flashback, to my time in a camp in Kenya, which I never thought I’d relive here. MORE »