One Goal

by Amy Bass

  Negeye barely remembers Somalia, but the Kenyan refugee camps where he lived for fourteen years remain rooted deeply in his mind. His family of twelve lived in a one-room hut with a plastic-covered roof. He remembers the long lines for grain rations, and the cries of hungry children with a constant burning in their bellies. On the days that they had breakfast, there was no lunch or dinner. Thieves preyed upon their rations. It was dark at night, and with darkness came danger.

  Negeye took classes, trying to learn English as best he could, hoping if they ever were resettled in the United States, he would be able to speak the language and help his family. And he played soccer to help pass the long days of waiting for life to begin.

  After ten years in Dadaab, Negeye’s family moved to Kakuma, a standard procedure in Bantu resettlement. According to Colby College anthropologist Catherine Besteman, who studied the Bantu in Somalia and then reunited with many of them in Lewiston years later, the identity “Bantu” formed in the camps, marking Somalis who came from the agrarian villages of the Jubba Valley. The UNHRC classified them as especially victimized, with few resources to expedite their resettlement. The persecution of the Bantu, historically poor and without formal education, from villages without schools or electricity, was centuries old, rooted in the days of the Arab slave trade. When civil war spread throughout Somalia in the 1990s, warring parties violently drove them from their lands. Once in the refugee camps, Besteman writes, those identified as Bantu learned how to highlight the right stories to warrant passage to the United States.

  After four years in Kakuma, Negeye’s family headed for Georgia, where everything from the bright lights to the language seemed strange. Despite his English lessons, Negeye couldn’t navigate the southern accent. His first day in Decatur, he tried running errands for his parents. He couldn’t understand the woman at the grocery. Her words didn’t sound like the ones he knew.

  In April of 2006, the family decided to move to Lewiston. They’d been in Decatur only a few months when his older sister, who’d left Georgia to find them a better place to live, called. Lewiston, she told them, was the place. They’d have Somali neighbors, she said. Come.

  The family was unprepared for how long the journey to Lewiston would take. Negeye remembers looking out the window of the bus as it wound northward. The then-nineteen-year-old found the view constantly startling. His mother, brothers, and sisters, just a few packed bags among them, only knew to listen for “Lewiston” on the thirty-plus-hour ride. But when they finally got off the bus, Somali friends were waiting, as was most always the case.

  “We had welcome,” he recalls of the many Somalis who offered them food and housing. “It was a very big relief.”

  Once in Lewiston, the clan identifications that could create conflict in Somalia and the camps often took a back seat to national and religious identities, the emphasis on communality providing support for newcomers. Lewiston’s burgeoning Somali community helped new families settle in quickly. Women shopped together to purchase groceries in bulk to maximize pooled resources and shared big-ticket items like cars. The Somali saying, Ilko wada jir bey wax ku gooyaan—Together the teeth can cut—was central to settling into this new life.

  Education was foremost in Negeye’s mind. He wanted a high school diploma; maybe even a college degree. He talked to one of his friends from the refugee camp, Rilwan Osman, who had also moved to Lewiston. Osman fled Somalia with his mother in 1996 when he was twelve years old. They escaped as soldiers forced his father and others into a river, trying to distract a crocodile that had attacked one of the soldiers’ women. The family never saw him again.

  Osman told Negeye about Loring Jobs Corps at the former Loring Air Force Base in Maine’s northernmost region, Aroostook County. The base closed in 1994, and now offered free residential education and training to low-income students. Its high school equivalency program appealed to Negeye. Within a few months of arriving in Lewiston, he left his family for Loring, where he would live for almost two years. He promised to return. With the years of instability, violence, and war behind him, he hoped, he had ideas for helping his people in their new community.

  Some of those ideas involved soccer.

  The global Somali diaspora began long before the first families came to Lewiston, the product of the country’s longtime political and environmental instability. Located at the easternmost point of Africa—the Horn—Somalia’s landline borders Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean on its eastern coastlines and perpetually unstable Yemen just a short boat ride away. Like much of Africa, twentieth-century Somalia experienced the effects of decolonization and the Cold War, but elections and assassinations toward the end of the century greatly weakened leadership. As borders were drawn and redrawn, catastrophic drought over half the landscape brought famine and reinforced poverty.

  While an internationally backed government installed in 2012 renewed some hope in Somalia, the country remains under the heavy shadow of its history and the perfect storm of events that led to the failed state. Guerrillas sowed the seeds of civil war in the 1980s as they organized to overthrow the military regime of Siad Barre, who had been in power since 1969. In the heat of the Cold War, the United States contributed millions to making Somalia armed and dangerous.

  In the wake of increasingly violent political instability, the first waves of Somalis bolted the country. In 1991, rebels threw Siad Barre out of Mogadishu and full-scale civil war broke out, creating an even larger exodus, particularly from the southern regions. The UN created Kakuma and Dadaab to accommodate those flooding over the border. Somalis who stayed behind faced an almost indescribable humanitarian disaster.

  As Somalia’s civil war raged for decades, increasingly radical Islamist-led rebellions emerged, intensifying the violence. With this, the refugee crisis only grew. In 2007, the UN declared Somalia Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis—a completely failed state.

  “If this were happening in Darfur, there would be a big fuss,” Eric Laroche, the head of UN humanitarian operations in Somalia, told the New York Times. “But Somalia has been a forgotten emergency for years.”

  American perceptions of Somalia rely on a mixture of headlines about piracy and civil war, with Hollywood’s versions of both. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, a Jerry Bruckheimer–produced action film based on journalist Mark Bowden’s account of the Battle of Mogadishu, met with enormous international criticism. The film’s portrayal of Somalia as a place so dangerous that even U.S. special forces couldn’t go in without facing insurmountable violence underscored America’s already frightening perception of the country. Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips, which posed Tom Hanks against first-time Somali actor Barkhad Abdi, fared a bit better. The story of the hijacking of a merchant marine vessel in the Indian Ocean in 2009 by Somali pirates warranted an Oscar nod for Abdi, whose family had landed in the large Somali community in Minneapolis after fleeing the civil war.

  While Minnesota’s Somali population is in the tens of thousands, Lewiston’s is larger per capita. Of the approximately one million Somali refugees in the world, thousands call Maine home. The vast majority landed somewhere else, like Atlanta, Georgia, or Columbus, Ohio, before making the move to Maine on their own.

  Refugee resettlement is complicated. After the UNHCR accepts a family into a camp, the wait begins for a match between a UNHCR request and a country willing to find resettlement sites. Once they get through the UN side of things, the process to gain entry to the United States is a whole other bureaucratic nightmare. The tenuous process is susceptible to the politics of the time. A few months after the first Somali families settled in Lewiston, for example, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, stalled people in the middle of the process and created much greater anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment among many Americans.

  Once in the United States, many Somali families continue their nomadic ways to find a stable community. At first glance, the secondary migration of Somali refu
gees into one of America’s whitest, coldest states seems odd. Maine’s refugee community began in Portland, the state’s urban cultural center. But as the twentieth century came to a close, Portland’s housing market got tighter and more expensive. The historic Old Port district appealed to upwardly mobile professionals and artists who enjoyed its bountiful boutiques and restaurants, picturesque views of Casco Bay, and quirky neighborhoods. Options to house refugees became increasingly limited. Simultaneously, Lewiston, just forty minutes away, hit historically low population numbers, leaving many of its downtown apartments vacant.

  In February 2001, a handful of Somalis that Portland couldn’t accommodate moved to Lewiston. According to Phil Nadeau, Lewiston’s assistant city administrator, those few opened the floodgates. Based largely on word of mouth about Lewiston’s relatively low crime rates and decent schools, busloads of ethnic Somalis made their way there. The Bantu were not far behind. Within a few years, Lewiston’s vacancy rate fell from 20 to 7 percent as the city’s population rate stabilized. Refugees, it seems, had reversed the direction people traveled on the Maine turnpike.

  Nadeau has become a go-to guy in the world of secondary refugee migration, publishing widely about Lewiston’s experience and serving as a consultant to other cities. His grandparents came to Lewiston from Quebec, opening first a restaurant and then a general store. His father took over the business in 1969 and turned it into Friends Deli, a successful catering venture. Working for his father from a young age, Nadeau had a front-row seat to Lewiston’s then-vibrant downtown. His family owned some one hundred apartments amid the lively social clubs and raucous watering holes frequented by French-speaking mill workers.

  When the first bus arrived from Georgia just two months after the initial Somali relocation to Lewiston, city officials were taken aback. “Who are you?” social services staffers in City Hall asked those who showed up at their door, Lewiston city maps in hand. “Portland didn’t tell us you were coming!”

  But they weren’t from Portland.

  By the end of the year, the Somali population reached between four hundred and five hundred, a relatively small group. However, just one family walking down Lisbon Street was enough to raise the eyebrows of longtime residents. Many of the men blended in as well as anyone with a brown face could, often wearing a more Westernized style of dress. Somali women stuck out even from a distance because of their headscarves and long dresses, which critics interpreted as a repudiation of American style. Something as simple as walking down the street became an arduous task for the women, always wondering what people assumed because of the way they dressed, and what kinds of words might be whispered as they went by.

  Inflammatory, bigoted accusations circulated: dirty, uncivilized Somalis were turning kitchen cabinets into chicken coops to keep live fowl in their apartments. Their kids were washing their feet in the school drinking fountains. People remembered that twenty-five-year-old Staff Sergeant Thomas Field, from nearby Lisbon, Maine, was crew chief on the Black Hawk shot down over Mogadishu in 1993. They also recalled the famous images of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets. Refugee Resettlement Watch, the blog created by white supremacist Ann Corcoran, kept Lewiston in its crosshairs, with post after erroneous post about rising crime rates, parks infested with Somali drug dealers, and a refugee population who didn’t try to get jobs or speak English.

  City Hall started getting what Nadeau characterizes as the “Who authorized this?” and “Why are they here?” phone calls, some coming from indignant people in other towns who assumed Lewiston’s refugees were sucking up all the state’s funds. Many were outraged by rumors that illegal Somali families were getting $10,000 handouts upon arrival in Lewiston. “They are here legally,” Nadeau assured everyone. “They can move here, and when they do, they have the same rights and the same access as anyone else.”

  “We work with them,” he told callers, “just like I’m working with you.”

  Lewiston’s city leaders didn’t have time to answer questions. As they scrambled to wrap their heads around Somali culture and customs, it didn’t matter to them why anyone was in Lewiston. They needed to figure out what kinds of supports the new residents needed, and how to fund them. As secondary migrants, most Somalis became ineligible for federal refugee funds when they left their initial landing spots, Georgia or otherwise.

  Catholic Charities, a faith-based nonprofit community outreach group that oversees Maine’s refugee resettlement program, helped with what Nadeau called “Refugee 101.” The group opened an office in City Hall—a national first—to make things more efficient for new arrivals, with signs in English, French, Arabic, and Somali. The Portland-Lewiston Collaborative formed to share resources and knowledge, eventually receiving an Unanticipated Arrivals grant from the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. St. Mary’s Hospital played a vital role in the health and well-being of new arrivals, while the Trinity Jubilee Center, the B Street Community Center, Bates College, and Tree Street Youth, which offers after-school and summer programming, as well as precollege seminars, for downtown kids, eventually filled in remaining gaps.

  Those who balked at the arrival of the Somalis were forgetting the city’s long immigrant history. While an entirely different set of circumstances drove the Québécois to Lewiston, they, too, introduced a new language, culture, and religion upon arrival, dramatically changing Lewiston’s demographic landscape a century or more earlier.

  It is a history inscribed in Lewiston’s very skyline. From the top of Mount David, a glorified pile of rocks, or “granite outcropping,” located in a wooded area on the far corner of the Bates College campus, there is an impressive view for a short climb. To the east lies the college campus, its redbrick buildings outlined in bright white trim, architectural exemplars of the colonial revival style with Georgian touches thrown in.

  Pivoting away from Bates, the orange mass of a Home Depot runs into the small city sprawl of houses and office buildings, the old factories dotting the canals, the giant smokestack of the Bates Mill towering above. The needle-like spire of St. Mary’s Church, now the Franco-American Heritage Center, stands in stark contrast to the gothic façade of the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. Reminiscent of Notre-Dame de Paris, its rose window suggests the famed one in Chartres.

  Sitting grandly on Ash Street, the basilica holds the last remaining French-language mass in Maine, an aide-mémoire of the workforce who saturated the city in its industrial heyday. Built at the turn of the twentieth century, it was the religious and social center for French-speaking Canadians who came to Lewiston to work and live.

  Lewiston is Maine’s second-largest city. When paired with Auburn, its so-called twin city across the Androscoggin, the metropolitan area comes close to sixty thousand people, making L/A, as locals call it, an urban center within south-central Maine. While equidistant from Maine’s mountains and its coast, about an hour to each, Lewiston is an unlikely stopping point for anyone seeking “Vacationland.”

  The Arosaguntacook tribe, a member of the Abenaki nation, first inhabited what is now Lewiston. As English settlers and their infectious diseases came to the area in the seventeenth century, the tribe migrated to Quebec. In the late eighteenth century, a group of New England land merchants, the Pejepscot Proprietors, named the area Lewiston. By the end of the century, it was fully incorporated as a town.

  In its early days of settlement, Lewiston, like most of inland New England, worked an agrarian economy. But as hydropower developed in the nineteenth century, its location on the Androscoggin’s Great Falls assured change was on the horizon. In 1809, Dartmouth graduate Michael Little of the Home Manufacturing Company built a sawmill next to the raging water, hoping to harness its power. Within a few years, a group of Boston investors formed the Franklin Company and created a series of canals and a railroad to exploit the site’s industrial potential. Very quickly, Lewiston became “Spindle City,” a textile hub filled with jobs that paid a low but living wage.

  Benj
amin E. Bates, for whom the college is named, is one of many who climbed on board. Founded in 1850, the Bates Mill fast became the state’s largest employer, the river providing ample power to run its voluminous spinning and weaving looms. According to Mary Rice-DeFosse and James Myall in The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn, Bates’s entrepreneurial foresight led him to purchase large stocks of southern cotton before the outbreak of the Civil War. When cotton’s price went through the roof as the North and South squared off, Lewiston’s mills thrived. The Androscoggin Mill, the Cowan Woolen Mill, the Lincoln Mill, Lewiston Bleachery and Dye Works, and the Lewiston Gas-Light Company joined Bates alongside the tree-lined canals. Across the river, Auburn reaped benefits from the whirlwind, becoming a leader in shoe manufacturing.

  While the canals were built largely on the backs of Irish laborers who followed the Boston capitalists north, others trailed not far behind. Some southern and eastern Europeans, those who dominate turn-of-the-century U.S. immigration history, found their way to Lewiston. But the largest group came from the north, French-Canadians seeking the booming textile industry’s wages. For decades, industry chipped away at the livelihoods of farming families, forcing them into increasingly itinerant ways of life. In 1874, the building of a railroad line between Lewiston and Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway amplified the movement of both goods and people, securing an accessible path to steady pay. Mill managers hired French-Canadians because of their willingness to work for less. In about ten years’ time, the mill workers nearly doubled Lewiston’s population.

  “The Lewiston Grand Trunk station,” according to Rice-DeFosse and Myall, “became the Ellis Island of the Twin Cities.”

  No one needs to tell Florence Rivard McGraw, Mike McGraw’s mother, about the area’s immigration patterns. Born in Lewiston in 1928, she’s lived through many of its transitions, from her own French-speaking childhood to watching African refugees play soccer for her eldest child.