Sunday, January 09, 2011
“To just point fingers when the community faces challenges is not responsible leadership,” says Ahmed Abdullahi, who works at the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers and helps run various programs for Somali youth at Queen Elizabeth High School.
The reluctance of witnesses to the New Year’s Day shooting at an Edmonton restaurant to come forward is not the fault of the police, Abdullahi points out.
Neither, he adds, is the Somali community’s lack of trust in the justice system the government’s fault.
“The (Somali) community needs the police and the police need the community in solving a lot of these problems,” he said in an interview Friday. “So blaming doesn’t help anyone. It’s counterproductive.”
For several years, he has helped run programs at Queen Elizabeth High School to help Somali students better integrate into Canadian society.
The programs including a homework club, a culture group and, most recently, a lunch-hour workshop for Somali girls to address issues of specific concern to them.
Woven through these programs is an emphasis on civic responsibility and an overview of the Canadian legal system. There are visits to the Legislature and meetings with the school police resource officer.
Abdullahi’s message to Somali-Canadian youth? “Canada is your home now and you need to make it a better place.”
That sort of proactive engagement should be practised within the Somali community as a whole to ease the adaptation process, he says.
“The initial responsibility is with the community and its leaders.
It needs to start there first,” says Abdullahi, who immigrated to Canada with his family two decades ago when he was a child, in the first wave of Somali immigration. “(Somali leaders) need to start grassroots programs and then the police and the government will support them.”
They also have an obligation to stress to community members the importance of going to the police with information about recent killings, he says.
“You don’t hear that type of discourse,” says a frustrated Abdullahi.
“You don’t hear them encouraging the rule of law, encouraging participation in the process. It’s disappointing to many of us.”
He attributes the lack of faith by some in the Canadian legal system to the breakdown of the rule of law in Somalia and the country’s subsequent descent into anarchy.
Exacerbating the community’s troubles is marriage breakdown and the cultural/generational divide between parents and teens, says Abdullahi.
The stress of starting life over in a new country with few job skills has been a death knell for plenty of relationships, he explains. “There’s an overwhelming (number) of single-mother households. These mothers have no educational or training background to deal with all this.”
In other instances, women whose husbands died in the civil war in Somalia are struggling to raise children here alone.
“The youth, especially the male youth, don’t have male role models … who are successful, who integrated well and are contributing members of society,” he explains.
So some of them drop out of school and get into drugs. Identity confusion adds to the difficulties.
“If youth are … disconnected from their culture, disconnected from their families, they’re looking for belonging,” says Abdullahi.
And sometimes they look for belonging in the wrong places, he says. “Let’s put our minds together,” he pleads, “and come up with a solution.”