CHRISTOPHER CHUNG PHOTOS/THE PRESS DEMOCRAT - Former Somalia orphan and current SRJC student Mohamed Jaffar applauds after being sworn in as one of the United States newest citizens Friday on Angel Island.
By
SAM SCOTTTHE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Even now Mohamed Jaffar marvels that he owns an Apple laptop. Until he was 13, he never owned a pair of shoes, or even a change of clothes.
But since coming to America in 2004, Jaffar has acquired many things that a Somali orphan living on the streets of Kenya could only dream of — a bed, a television, even his own car.
On Friday, the 19-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College student got something to beat them all — his U.S. citizenship.
Jaffar was one of 25 immigrants who took the oath of citizenship at a special ceremony on Angel Island commemorating Citizenship Day and Constitution Week, and the 100th anniversary of the opening of the island's immigration station.
“I never thought I would have this opportunity,” said Jaffar, who was joined by England native and Petaluma resident Kate Berry, as well as new citizens from the Philippines, Kenya, Taiwan, China, India, New Zealand, France, Italy, Burma, Germany, Pakistan, Ukraine, Spain, El Salvador, Vietnam and Somalia.
Before the ceremony, the group toured the island's detention center where immigrants were interviewed before entering the country from 1910 to 1940.
Poems on the wall written by people who were detained on the island for days or sometimes years due to the Chinese Exclusion Act underscored the solemnity of the day, Berry said.
“It was a lovely way to start our ceremony and realize the magnitude of our swearing-in ceremony,” said Berry, Petaluma Valley Hospital's surgery business coordinator.
But the day wasn't only significant for Berry, who was born in England and has lived in the United States since 1996.
Her citizenship extends to her daughter, Megan Berry, 15, a sophomore at Casa Grande High School who was born in South Africa.
“Whenever I tell my friends I'm not an American citizen, they say, ‘Oh my gosh are you illegal?” Megan Berry said. “Now I can say, ‘I'm a citizen.'”
Jaffar said Friday afternoon that he was still in disbelief that the ceremony was over, reflective of the long journey he's been on.
“This is my new nation,” he said.
He's contemplating a professional future ranging from working as a police officer to FBI agent to immigration services. But whatever he does, it's going to be in the service of the United States of America, he said, the country that plucked him from destitution.
A member of the oppressed Bantu minority in Somalia, Jaffar said he fled his war-torn homeland as a small child, living on the streets and in the largely lawless Dadaab refugee camp in northeast Kenya. The only focus was survival, he said.
Once he didn't eat for so long that when a restaurant gave him a bag of table scraps, he ate everything down to the cigarettes extinguished in the food, he said.
His life transformed in 2004 when he was selected as part of the U.S. government's Somali Bantu relocation program, which is the largest relocation of an ethic group since the Vietnam War era, according to Kenneth John Menkhaus, a political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina.
The size of the program was based on the Bantu's precarious position in Somalia, Menkhaus said.
“They were the weakest social group in one of the most conflict-ridden places in the world,” he said.
Jaffar arrived in Phoenix in June 2004 with only the clothes on his back, a 13-year-old unable to write even his own name. He'd never been in school. And he lived with other Somali teenagers just as unprepared for American life.
But he had a will to learn, and as importantly, a strong ally in his corner. Glenn Schoeneck was an apartment manager in Phoenix who met Jaffar soon after he arrived, using the youngster's basic English skills to help translate for Somali tenants.
Schoeneck pushed Jaffar into programs that kept him busy and involved: Junior ROTC, the Phoenix Police Explorer program, even undercover work with the Arizona Attorney General's Office, where Jaffar would try and buy cigarettes from stores to see if they were selling to minors.
America isn't always the nicest or easiest place to live, Schoeneck told Jaffar, but it is a place of opportunity.
“The best thing you can teach them to do is not to mess up those opportunities,” said Schoeneck, who became Jaffar's legal guardian, and who now goes by “Dad.”
Jaffar didn't waste anything, winning awards for the most volunteer hours in the tobacco program and getting his photo taken with Janet Napolitano, then the governor of Arizona, now the Secretary of Homeland Security.
As Jaffar's high school graduation neared, the two researched criminal justice program, an interest of Jaffar's. They relocated to Santa Rosa largely because of the strength of SRJC's offerings.
Jaffar, who also works as a cashier at Dollar Tree, admits struggling in his college classes last year, ultimately deciding to focus on SRJC's “English as a Second language” courses before rejoining the academic mainstream. His effort, though, is unquestioned.
“You can always bet that Mohamed is going to put his hand up in my classroom every day,” said Raquel Rodriguez-Rasor, one on of his ESL instructors. “He always wants to know why.”
His American journey hasn't been without setbacks. Last year, he said he was denied entry into a volunteer program with a local law enforcement agency after officials said he had failed a background check.
Jaffar declines to name the agency, but said they made the decision after asking questions about his religion, his views on the War on Terror, and his political activity in Africa, which he left as an adolescent.
“That let me down for months,” he said.
But he resolved to move on. He's been reading President Obama's book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
One day he hopes to write his own. He already has a title — which doubles as a personal motto — “Life Is Too Tough, but Don't Give Up.”
Source: THE PRESS DEMOCRAT