New lives, new lessons

EVERETT – In Africa, Bantu families squat in a circle on a dirt floor and reach into a communal pot of chicken and rice with their hands at mealtime.

When everyone is finished, the scraps that have fallen on the floor are swept away, often out the door toward the fields where the families work each day.

It’s how the tribes have eaten for as long as anyone can remember.

Now, everything must change.

Most Somali Bantu refugees have been in the United States for two years or more, but they’re still learning the basics of how to run a household here.

Asha Mohamud, a refugee who came to the United States in 2004, said the children don’t know that they can’t spill milk on the floor anymore.

“In Africa, it’s just dirt,” she said.

But the government-subsidized apartments in north Everett’s Grandview neighborhood have carpeted floors. It wasn’t long before they were covered with bits of pulverized food, Mohamud said.

“We had orientation before we came here, but it’s more difficult than we thought,” said Mohamed Mehale, a Bantu refugee who acts as an interpreter for his community. “People are a little bit confused about some things, but they are learning.”

The Bantu women weren’t sure which types of food needed to be refrigerated, and whether dry goods needed special storage containers. The confusion may have led to a series of rodent infestations in the apartment complex, said Teena Ellison, Family Services Coordinator for the Everett Housing Authority.

“Instead of getting anyone into trouble, we want to help solve the problem,” Ellison said.

Ellison held a special informational meeting about food storage at the Grandview Community Center last week.

Mohamud nodded her scarf-covered head toward a stack of sealable plastic bags.

“Where can I get these?” she asked.

The women each clutched a handful of the plastic bags when they left the center and led their small children back toward their apartments.

“After supper, if you have something left over, even if it’s not a lot, you can put it in a Ziploc bag and make sure it closes, and put it in the refrigerator,” Ellison said. “If you leave it out and open, you can get very sick.”

Bantu tribes were kidnapped from west Africa during the 18th century to toil as slaves in east Africa. More recent Bantu generations isolated themselves in Somalia’s southern Juba River Valley to try to escape persecution from Somalis. When civil war broke out in that country, the Bantu became targets for violence.

Countless Bantu died before they could flee. Those who escaped are haunted by the memory of torture and rape. Thousands ended up in refugee camps in Kenya, where they lived hand-to-mouth, some for a dozen years or more, on meager food rations they stretched into meals for their families in tiny mud huts.

Their rescue came in 2003, when 12,000 Bantu refugees were approved to move to the United States.

Nearly a dozen Bantu families have settled into apartments in Everett. They’ve set about learning how to change a light bulb, speak into a telephone, cook on a stovetop.

“Most families have figured out how to send their kids to school and men have found work,” said Dan Van Lehman, deputy director of the National Somali Bantu Project at Portland State University in Portland, Ore. “They’ve made their way past some of the most difficult hurdles.”

Now, it’s a matter of fine-tuning skills that may have been lost in the shuffle of a transatlantic move to a society where the everyday basics are items that are considered luxuries in their homeland.

“Sugar, flour – you’ll get ants or cockroaches or lots of flies in the house,” Ellison said as she placed bags of the baking goods into plastic bins.

The problem must be that African Muslim women cook every day for their families, Mohamud said, adjusting the pink scarf that covered her head. Americans seem to go to restaurants for every meal, she said.

But Ellison assured the women that even Americans sometimes encounter bugs in their kitchens.

“It’s not just you ladies,” Ellison said. “This happens to other people, too.”