EVERETT — Two men leaned out of the front door of a duplex in north Everett’s Grandview neighborhood.
Swahili words rang out into the dark, and both men — one, a Kenyan Christian and his friend, a Somali Bantu Muslim — looked up as the moon moved through the earth’s shadow.
It was a celestial phenomenon that both men might have seen from their native Africa, but it took 9,000 miles for them to be able to stand and watch it together.
“In Kenya there is a stereotype about these people, because they came to our country as refugees,” said Peter Gatata, the Kenyan.
Abdikar Muhina, the Bantu, remembers Kenya as a place of heartache, where ethnic Somalis and the Bantu, Somalia’s slave class for centuries, clashed and killed one another for water in refugee camps.
“The reason we left Somalia was because of the Somalis,” Muhina, 36, said. “But in Kenya, we just found more Somalis.”
Five years ago, the first of an expected 13,000 Bantu refugees arrived in the United States. Their history fraught with violence and poverty, many Bantu knew only the most rural of lives, first in remote Somali villages, then in squalid Kenyan refugee camps.
Refugee resettlement experts predicted that the group would have the most challenges in adjusting to the U.S. of any group in recent memory. But with five years in one of the world’s most advanced countries — and many Bantu with just two or three years here — their success has alternately surprised and baffled resettlement officials.
“Most of the families have stable housing. It’s low-income, but it’s stable housing, and the men are working and the children are in school,” said Dan Van Lehman, deputy director of the National Somali Bantu Project in Portland, Ore. “By those measures, they’re self-sufficient and making it.”
Muhina earned a welding certificate at Everett Community College and now works as a welder at T. Bailey, a steel manufacturing plant in Anacortes. He bought a car that he fires up each morning at 3:30 a.m. He returns home at 5:30 p.m., exhausted, when his eight children are still excited from a day at school.
The job doesn’t offer a lot of money, Muhina said, but it’s enough. For now.
There are other measures that reflect the changes the Bantu have experienced. One is their friendship with Gatata.
Gatata, 34, came to Everett two years ago with his wife, Martha, as a missionary to Americans. The couple wanted to start a church in this country’s most “unchurched” region.
But when they walked through Everett, the first people they saw were Africans.
“Someone told us there were people from Kenya here, but that they wear long clothes,” Gatata said, referring to the wrapped women’s dresses and tunics that swing below men’s knees common in Somalia.
The Gatatas met Somali Bantu children playing in a park. They asked the children to take them to their parents.
Although Gatata grew up alongside Bantu refugees who had fled Somalia’s civil war for Kenyan cities and refugee camps, it was in Everett that he first had a conversation with a Bantu person.
“At first we spoke English, then we discovered that we share the same language,” Gatata said. “They shared their home with us, and made us a meal.”
Now, Gatata preaches each week at a church he started for the area’s Christian Africans, many of whom are newly-arrived Burundian refugees. To serve the area’s Bantu and Tanzanian refugees, who are primarily Muslim, he recruited nearly two dozen volunteers from area evangelical churches to teach English each Monday evening at the Grandview Community Center in north Everett. The volunteers attended 16 hours of training for teaching English as a second language.
Muhina’s wife, Isha Mbanda, 33, attends each week. English is her fourth language, after Swahili, Af Maay and another Somali dialect.
“I-live-in-Ev-er-ett,” she said in a recent class, pausing between each syllable.
Katherine Ittner, one of the volunteers, smiled warmly and nodded at Mbanda. There were six volunteers who smiled non-stop, eager to lean in and gently correct grammar gone awry from just four students.
“We wanted to share God’s love, and we knew the best way to demonstrate God’s love was to help them learn English,” Gatata said. “We are disappointed that there are only a few students, but we hope that will grow.”
Many Bantu families follow strict patriarchal traditions, Gatata said. Some of the Bantu wives must get permission from their husbands to attend any activity outside their homes.
Long-held traditions and monumental differences between rural Africa and Snohomish County have resulted in some challenges for the Bantu. There are stories of inadvertent 911 calls, and schoolchildren battling snowdrifts while wearing sandals and mesh athletic shorts.
Two years ago, the Everett Housing Authority organized a food storage class for Bantu housewives who had been storing fresh meat in coat closets because they were unfamiliar with refrigerators.
“We had orientation before we came here, but it’s more difficult than we thought,” Mohamed Mehale, a Bantu refugee, said then.
However difficult the Bantu thought their resettlement would be, it’s not nearly what refugee experts here expected.
“They turned out to be a much more self-reliant group than we had anticipated,” said Jan Stephens of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services in Seattle, which received and resettled Bantu refugees on behalf of the U.S. government.
Most Bantu families have been in the U.S. long enough for refugee financial assistance to run out. Next year, many of the families will become eligible for U.S. citizenship.
Gatata says that he prays for the Bantu to become Christians. But for now, he’s reveling in what he calls a miracle: a friendship between Christian Kenyans and Muslim Bantu.
Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.
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