New immigrants: Glad to be in the land of the free

New immigrants: Glad to be in the land of the free
By Jamie Hughes • jahughes@stcloudtimes.com • July 4, 2009

Read Comments(49)

Ahmed Abdulle doesn’t need July 4 to celebrate living in the United States. He does it, on some level, 365 days a year.



“When I sleep at night, I think about the life I was in and the life those people are in and are having there,” he said.

Abdulle is originally from Somalia. He fled his home country in 1996 because of its violent unrest, spent a decade in a refugee camp in Kenya, then came to the United States in 2006.

Abdulle, a 27-year-old electrical engineering student at St. Cloud State University, said security is the best gift the states has given him and other refugees.

“First of all, if you don’t have security, you can’t work and if you can’t work you won’t be able to have a life,” he said. “As a human being you need security. Another thing is we see war every night. You don’t know when you will die. This problem will get you. Right now all we worry about is the people who stay there, who are in the refugee camps.”

He said security also offers the mind a rest.

“If you don’t have security you won’t be able to function in a peace of mind,” he said. “You won’t be able to be creative. You won’t be able to do anything.”

Although he’s grateful for what the United States has given him, Abdulle said he was a bit naïve about the land of opportunities that awaited him before he left Kenya.

Abdulle said the weather is what shocked him first and foremost.

“The first time I landed it was January, so it was snow all over the place,” he said. “We use ice over there to cool the water so we can drink so I thought ‘what’s going on here?’ There’s ice all over the place so the first that scared me was the ice, the snow, the cold weather.”

But aside from a large climate difference, Abdulle said he was too optimistic about finding a job.

“When I came here I didn’t have relatives here so what happens is you have to stand by your own,” he said. “You have to go out and find a job, you don’t know how to search (for) a job, you have to sustain your life ... you don’t have a penny. So life was also tough here in the first year.”

Local Somalis will mourn victims

Local Somalis will mourn victims
By Lawrence Schumacher • lschumacher@stcloudtimes.com • June 27, 2009

Read Comments(21)Recommend(3)

St. Cloud-area Somali residents today will publicly mourn victims of renewed violence in their homeland. Unrest has claimed hundreds of lives and made thousands flee the country in the last two months.



Hundreds of Somali refugees living in St. Cloud have lost friends and relatives in the latest wave of violence, said Mohamoud Mohamed, executive director of the St. Cloud Area Somali Salvation Organization.

“Almost everybody in the city has lost somebody he knows, and just in the last month or so,” he said. “They are doing barbaric things, mutilating body parts in the name of Islam.”

Somali families who have lost loved ones in the renewed fighting decided to show their grief publicly at an open gathering set for 1:30 p.m. today at Salem Lutheran Church, 90 Riverside Drive SE, Mohamed said.

“These are international terrorists that are behind this, and we are opposed to everything they stand for,” he said.

Since May 7, fighting between Islamist insurgent groups and government forces has killed at least 225 people, and displaced nearly 170,000 from their homes in the capital, Mogadishu.

Warlords and Islamic al-Shabab militants control the countryside, which has become a growing base for al-Qaida terrorists arriving from Yemen and South Asia, U.S. officials have said.

An estimated 300,000 Somalis have fled to neighboring countries in the last two months to escape the violence, which is another concern for St. Cloud-area Somalis, Mohamed said.

Somalia has not had an effective government since 1991.

The Obama administration has decided to bolster efforts to support Somalia’s embattled government by providing money for weapons and helping the military and neighboring Djibouti train Somali forces.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.