Ismahan Isse took a job in May as a security guard at the Columbus Convention Center, but she dreams of becoming a Columbus police officer.
Isse was offered another law-enforcement job last year — by the FBI. An agent approached her after they both attended an anti-terrorism conference on the city’s Northeast Side, she said.
The agent told her he was impressed with her command of English and wanted to know if she was interested in becoming an FBI interpreter.
She declined, in part, she said, because she was concerned how the Somali community would view her if she helped put someone in prison.
“I would be looked at as a bad guy,” Isse said.
Image, many Somali immigrants say, is everything in the tight-knit community, and fitting in to day-to-day life in Columbus while retaining their Somali identity can be a tightrope walk.
It has been two decades since civil war began to tear apart Somalia, causing tens of thousands to flee.
Local Somali leaders are concerned about their homeland, but also about unemployment and school dropout rates here.
Young people become immersed in American culture. They watch television and listen to pop music. They wear jeans and sneakers. But many, such as Isse, who wears hijab, remain close to their Islamic faith.
Isse, who is 24 years old, is divorced and has a 10-year-old son, Mohamed, and two daughters, Samiira and Amina, ages 7 and 5. She was 14 when she was wed in an arranged marriage.
She wants to be a police officer to help people.
When she attended Mifflin Middle School in the late 1990s, she sometimes saw Somali and African-American boys fighting, Isse said. “I was always the one who reconciled problems.”
She didn’t score highly enough on the police entry exam last fall but hopes to pass it the second time around. Having a member of the Somali community on the Columbus force would be groundbreaking, and she wants to be that trailblazer.
“It would speak volumes of what we can do here,” Isse said.
The Somali community in Columbus has asked the division to hire Somali officers, as authorities have done in Minneapolis, home to the country’s largest Somali community.
Isse said she interviewed for a job as a corrections officer in Delaware County in July. She specifically wants to help Muslim women who find themselves on the wrong side of the law, she said.
“I want to help them adjust to life outside jail and to find God.”
On the wall of her modest Cassady Village apartment on the Northeast Side hangs a diploma from Brown Mackie College in Kansas City, Kan. Her associate degree is in criminal justice.
In a cabinet are four Qurans as well as personal journals and motivational books. Inspirational messages dot the walls of her living room. One reads: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”
Isse said she is so goal-oriented that she did not take off a Friday night in July to see her brother get married. She was still on her 90-day probationary period for her convention-center job and didn’t want to make waves.
She has lived in her apartment for six months, paying $550 a month, to be close to her mother and aunt, who also live in the complex. Her aunt watches her children while Isse works.
Many Somalis live in the 40-year-old complex, and Isse said she has called police about Somalis and others congregating in the parking lot to smoke marijuana. She doesn’t want drugs around her children.
Isse is not alone in wanting to improve her life and become a community leader.
Isse Ali, who grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., leads Somali Unified Youth, a group that teaches leadership skills to young people.
Ali, 24, who is studying computer engineering at ITT, said young Somalis still feel isolated and lack confidence.
“They need someone to motivate them and inspire them,” he said.
Some young Somalis are being lured by drugs and gangs, he said. “It’s just a loss of hope.”
To help counter that while trying to build leaders, a group of Somalis hosted a ceremony in July 2010 for high-school and college graduates at the Hilton Columbus at Easton Town Center.
About 119 Somali youths attended. In June this year, 200 graduates attended the ceremony, said Jibril Mohamed, the executive director of the Somali Community Access Network.
Sahid Ali, an English-as-a-second-language coordinator for the Columbus school district, said no one person speaks for the Somali community here.
Leaders, he said, have competing agendas.
Some say clan divisions in Somalia still play a role in Somali life here. “Clan division affects everything we do here,” said Abdulkadir Ali, who once ran the Somali American Chamber of Commerce. “ That’s very sad.”
If the community spoke with one voice, it would receive more help from local, state and federal governments, he said. “Because of our divisions, nobody pays attention to us.”
Others downplay the role of clans, saying that old rivalries mean nothing to the generations born here.
Columbus is majority Darod, the clan of Mohamed Siad Barre, the last president of Somalia, who was ousted from power two decades ago. But within that clan are sub-clans, including Marehan, Majerten and Dhulbahante.
Younger people don’t hold on to the old clan divisions as their elders do, said Ahmed Adan, a 30-year-old Ohio State University student who runs an online newsletter for the Somali community. “ They would like to see clans disappear.”
Hassan Omar, the leader of the Somali Community Association of Ohio, said some of the hundreds of Somali youths who attended a May 6 talent show wore anti-clan T-shirts.
Jibril Mohamed, 31, the executive director of Somali CAN, said he doesn’t even know the clan affiliations of the 30 or so young people he deals with as part of a Somali youth group his organization sponsors.
“I don’t know which tribe they come from, and I don’t care,” he said.
The immigrant population in Westerville, where Abdulkadir Ali’s daughter graduated from, has exploded during the past 20 years, as it has in many other area school districts.
In 1990, 32 children were enrolled in the Westerville district’s English-as-a-second-language program. Today, there are 1,264 students, about one in every 12.
The district has close to 350 students who were either born in Somalia or born here to Somali parents.
Two of those students are Zakia Mohamud, 7, and Amal Hassan, 8, who were second-graders last year at Wilder Elementary School.
Both say they want to become doctors one day.
Both girls were born in Columbus, and both speak English with little trace of an accent. They’re also fluent in American pop culture. Zakia likes iCarly books, which are based on the Nickelodeon sitcom of the same name. Amal enjoys Beezus and Ramona stories.
Their English-as-a-second-language teacher, Ann Engelhart, said they’re in the class because both still struggle with vocabulary and comprehension when reading. Many students speak Somali at home and have few, if any, English books.
Lula Mohamed Barnes, the English-as-a-second-language parent liaison for Westerville schools, said it takes six to seven years for Somali refugees to learn English. That makes it difficult and frustrating for teens who arrive in this country and are placed in high school.
Newly arrived 15-year-olds are asked not only to learn English but also to understand it well enough to pass history and science classes and ultimately the Ohio Graduation Test, said Marlene Torrez-Graham, another parent liaison. “We’re asking them the impossible.”
mferenchik@dispatch.com
Source: The Columbus Dispatch
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