This is a wonderful story about a group of African refugee immigrants who are helping each other so they can all be successful in America. They have a great sense of community. DP
By ROBERT L. SMITH. The Plain Dealer
ohio.com: A caravan of minivans approached Joseph Gallagher School in the darkness of a rainy fall morning, headlight beams piercing the mist to spotlight a yellow school bus as it rumbled away.
Five late-model vans turned into the school yard and parked side by side. Doors slid open. Forty boys and girls from Africa spilled out.
As the children swarmed toward the glowing windows of the school, the van drivers, mostly fathers just off third shift, stepped out to admonish them to zip up coats and to listen to the teachers.
Speaking in Maay Maay, the language of the Bantu of Somalia, they reminded the children to watch out for one another until they returned to get them. Only then did the men depart, one task finished in a daily, exhausting progression of making it in America.
The vanpool emerged last year, after Bantu parents realized their children were being bullied on the bus to school. Mothers, who in Africa wrapped children on their backs to carry them through risky camps, devised a plan to move them safely through Cleveland.
It's one of several quick, innovative actions taken by a surprising refugee group. Nothing in Somalia, it seemed, prepared the Bantu for northeast Ohio. But a poor and often bewildered immigrant group is finding its way, in part, by tapping cultural traditions that were not supposed to work here.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
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