Abdi Mohamed

Abdi and his soccer team


Abdi was born in Somalia, grew up in Kenya, and currently lives in Utah. His most significant experiences with community were in Kenya and at the Hartland Apartments in Salt Lake City, Utah. He currently lives in Murray and attends Salt Lake Community College. He is of the Islamic faith, and is an employee at the University Neighborhood Partners (UNP) office at Hartland.

Family
I have 23 brothers and sisters from age 43 to 5 months. Not all of them are from my mother, but I consider them all family. We are very close. My family eats together, prays together, and plays together. Everything we do, everybody knows. It is an open, safe, and comfortable environment. Say someone wants to purchase a car, then we all chip in to help. We support each other in every way possible. That is one of my communities.

I grew up in Kenya, but I was born in Somalia and came to Kenya in 1991. I lived there until 1999 before coming to America. My family left Somalia because of war – tribes were fighting against other tribes, and we were in danger. We traveled through Ethiopia and went through many hard months before we were able to reach Kenya. That is the best stage of my life. We moved into a house and went to school. We learned Swahili and had friends.

Kenya
In Kenya the community is open, like one family. You can go to anyone’s house anytime you want. The door is always open. At the same time it is a little bit challenging because some of the people don’t have money to live, so you have to help them because you are their neighbors. In Kenya, let’s say you don’t have sugar for tea. You just go to your neighbor and get some sugar. It was that kind of neighborhood. It was welcoming, comfortable, and safe.

As soon as we moved in, the community welcomed us by bringing food. We got to know everyone better. Sometimes we played hide and seek and you just go to any house. It’s not in one house, you play in the whole neighborhood. It was very open. Say a dad gives his son some money, he has to give everybody some money. It was that kind of community. I was free. I didn’t have to worry about anything. Here, the children don’t have freedom. Over there (in Kenya), you could go anywhere and no one worried about you. There, if a neighbor saw you doing something bad, that neighbor has every right to beat you up. So you have freedom to do anything you want, as long as you don’t do anything bad. You can go anywhere, you don’t have to worry about a child getting kidnapped. Let’s say in your neighborhood you have a dog, but it’s not your dog – it belongs to everybody. That’s how it is.

The community feeling in Kenya was way different from when I moved to Maryland. I was 14. It went from open, welcoming, and friendly to closed. Nobody usually knew each other. I didn’t speak any English so I just went to class, sat, and then went home. Then Tennessee was after that – it was way different because we lived in the projects. It was difficult and unsafe; there were gunshots everyday and drug problems.

Hartland
My mom moved to Utah in 2002. I lived with my aunt in Nashville to finish high school and then came to Utah in 2003. We lived in the Hartland Apartments from 2003 to 2007. The community at Hartland wasn’t safe at the beginning. It was like back home but different – everyone wanted to be in a gang, everyone wanted to fight against a different group. It got better when some people moved out, so we stayed. It was safer and UNP-Hartland came in 2004. They really helped the community. At first I just went to school, came back home, and got on the internet. Never went out. But we lived just above the UNP office and one day my dad talked to Kim. We had thought that UNP was just for women because that’s all we saw there, but after we talked UNP helped my soccer team and I began to get more involved.

Now, I talk to everyone at Hartland. If I walk outside, even if I don’t know them, I will talk to them. No matter where they come from I see them as my family. One community, one neighborhood. Now people trust me. They trust me with their kids, they will give me passwords to their email on the computer – it’s that kind of trust.

My favorite thing about the neighborhood is the UNP-Hartland center. Everybody comes together, they aren’t afraid anymore. Now people are comfortable with each other – there is one guy at Hartland who brings me food to take to my family. So that kind of benefit is huge.

One challenge is the English language – not everyone speaks it. Two people can sit in the same room and communicate, but they can’t understand each other. But, since they are part of the community they can still come together. One day there was a lady from Somalia and another lady from Afghanistan sitting in the center, waiting for the English class. I don’t know how, but they were talking to each other. Neither of them could speak the same language, but one lady invited the other to her home and they followed each other. I don’t know how they communicated together, but they did. It was amazing.

Everyone belongs at UNP. One day I was outside and I saw a little boy who was about 8 years old. I said, “How come I haven’t seen you in the center?” He said, “I’m not welcome there because I’m white.” I said, “How about you come in and I will prove it to you that you are welcome there.” The social workers told him he was welcome, I showed him the computers and everything. He started coming. It’s just one effort. It was funny.

I don’t know if Hartland can get to the level of openness that I felt in Kenya, but it’s getting there. It is a place where people can go and talk to each other, but people don’t go to each other’s houses. At the UNP center people talk with each other, they laugh, they relax, go to classes, use the computer - they can feel comfortable. It’s getting there. No matter what you want to do, you are welcome.

I don’t know where I will be in 5 years, or what the community might look like. I never think that far. I don’t know where I will be. I might be dead, I might be alive. I might be in school. The community might change. I might still work there. I don’t know. We say, “God willing.”

 

 

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