Friday, October 01, 2010

Somalis Adjust To US Life, But Integration And Jobs Still Problems

This San Diego family came here as refugees and are succeeding. But assimilation is always difficult for any immigrants. - - Donna Poisl

BY AMITA SHARMA

It was 2 o'clock in the morning back in 1988. Amina Farah was about to go from a middle-class mother with a house and a job at the Central Bank of Somalia to refugee. Civil war had just erupted. The dark of the morning lit up with firefights. The air choked with smoke. And Farah says she had no choice but to grab her four-year-old son and run.

"You saw the children sitting with dead bodies," Farah said. "You saw injury. You saw no food and no hospital, no light, no doctor, no hygiene, no water."

Farah traveled by foot with thousands of other Somalis to Ethiopia in scorching heat. Each day of the month-long journey she thought would be her last. Farah tried to prevent her young son from succumbing to dehydration -- at times she gave him her saliva.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.

No comments: