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>Refugees poured into my state. Here’s how it changed me.
By the beginning of 2003, more than 1,400 newcomers had come to the city. They settled into triple- and quadruple-deckers. When I came north that spring to visit friends, women in hijabs were shepherding kids down streets that for years had been all but empty. It was an incongruous, surprising sight. On Lisbon, a few closed stores had reopened under Somali ownership. I went into one, bought cardamom, and wondered at signs offering translation and money-wiring services, and – back out on the sidewalk – at the palpable energy. In a place where businesses rarely stayed open after 5 p.m., these were still lit at 8:30.
Refugees kept coming. People I knew in Lewiston responded to the changes in accordance with their nature: curious or suspicious, or holding off on judgment. In 2006, The New Yorker bluntly called what was happening in Lewiston a “large-scale social experiment.” There were, after all, now several thousand African Muslims in an overwhelmingly white town not known as a liberal outpost.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Yet I was seeing a slow, quiet shift – Somalis stocking shelves at the supermarket; white and black kids sitting together at the library; white people buying goat meat on Lisbon. A high school acquaintance who had a daughter in kindergarten with Somali children was happy about the new diversity. “I only knew white kids when I was growing up,” he said. After one member of a Somali kindergartner’s family came home to find “Get Out” scrawled on their apartment building, longtime residents helped paint over it. They worked late into the night, he said, so the message would be gone when kids left for school in the morning.
If there was a hostile undercurrent, and if some complained Somalis consumed the city’s resources, other Lewistonians were reaching out and seeking accord. In 2006, a man rolled a pig’s head through the doorway of a mosque. Residents rallied around the city’s Muslims. The deed was denounced, the offender criminally charged. But the act spoke to a bitterness that remains.
Lewiston today has one of the highest per capita Muslim populations in the United States, most of it Somali along with rising numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers from other African nations including Congo, Djibouti, Sudan, and Chad. What’s happening here is isbeddel, the Somali word for transformation.
In spite of occasional news reports to the contrary, things have mostly gone well. But Lewiston is not Utopia. The city’s challenges mirror those in other places with large refugee communities. It has struggled financially, especially early on as the needs for social services and education intensified. Joblessness remains high among the older generation of refugees; many elders still speak little English. The trauma of wars new immigrants escaped – loss of loved ones, sexual assault, years of privation – means that many bear heartache. For some in Lewiston, the long-term effects of trauma hinder acculturation, both for them and for their children.
Yet Lewiston is more vital than it was two decades ago. Of the city’s 36,000 residents, 6,000 are now African refugees and asylum-seekers. New immigrants work in health care, retail, industry, and food service. The first Somali American kids born in the city are high school juniors, and a new elementary school opened in September with a 900-student capacity – among the largest K-5s in Maine.
I’ve been reporting on Lewiston’s transformation for more than a decade now. Early on, the narrative I embraced about Lewiston’s newcomers was of passive refugee-victims. The life they fled in Africa did leave considerable scars, but over time I came to see that the new immigrants were not passive. Their resilience has moved and inspired me. One early acquaintance, Fatuma Hussein, founded United Somali Women of Maine to promote gender equality. She’d come to the U.S. at age 13 from a Somali refugee camp. The first line in my Lewiston notebook was hers: “We are making new lives here.”