There is no sign, nothing to indicate this is a place of worship, just an open door in an alley near the Goodwill store and the sound of Arabic crackling over a tinny sound system.
The mosque is behind a real estate agency on Main Street in Fort Morgan. On Fridays, the Somali men come — standing, kneeling and pressing their foreheads to the floor in the rhythms of Islamic prayer.
The imam, or spiritual leader, does not have time to talk after his sermon. He has to hurry off to work second shift at the Cargill meatpacking plant.
The latest wave of immigrants to remake the face of this rural agricultural community of 12,000 is black, Muslim and scarred from experiences in a failed state.
An estimated 900 to 1,100 Somalis — most of them refugees — now live here, drawn by employment at Cargill in the past six years.
Their arrival has provided a test for both them and the town in an era of economic uncertainty and raised tensions after 9/11.
The police chief, school superintendent and other community leaders have smoothed the waters by attempting to counter fears with facts and build bridges with a Somali community that is fragmented.
Still, difficulties have arisen over the accommodation of Muslim prayer at school and in the workplace, the support they get from the government, their loitering and poor driving — and a murder.
The Somali people are steadily finding their way. They are learning English — if they can find the time — and the meaning of a one-way street. They are catering to their people’s needs for halal meat and hijabs in a budding business district.
They are attempting to balance the demands of their faith with the expectations of America.
* * *
One day in 1991 in rural Somalia, Yussuf Matau Jumale went for a walk and came home to find his wife dead of a gunshot wound.
She had been caught in the crossfire of clan warfare in the country’s civil war, cut down by a stray bullet.
The couple’s infant son was at her breast, unhurt and still trying to feed, when Jumale discovered her.
Shortly thereafter, he took the boy and fled to a refugee camp in Kenya.
After 13 years of waiting — and security screening, medical tests and other paperwork — the U.S. State Department signed off on relocating Jumale, his new wife and their growing family to the United States.
One of the private resettlement agencies working with the government determined Colorado was the best match.
The spread of Islam in the U.S. is very much a story of immigration. College students, doctors and engineers came decades ago. The latest migration from poorer African nations is different, creating a new Muslim underclass of plant workers and cabdrivers.
Back in the camp, Jumale envisioned America as a place of vast riches where children came home from school with pockets overflowing with money. What he found was that working two part-time jobs — on a Coors Field cleanup crew and at a rental-car agency washing vehicles — was not enough to pay the rent.
Word had been spreading in the Somali expatriate community about work at the Cargill plant in Fort Morgan, where wages that start at $13.25 an hour, plus benefits, beckoned — and English and experience weren’t required.
So in 2007, Jumale started work on the fabrication floor, basically a giant butcher shop. The employees wear mesh metal vests that resemble medieval armor and cut-resistant gloves. The room is 38 degrees and loud.
The jobs can be dangerous. Some Cargill workers have tattoos of wedding rings instead of actual ones because of the risk of hands getting caught in equipment.
Jumale, 55, is proud to say he has never called in sick or come back late from a break.
“America wants someone who works,” he said through an interpreter. “I don’t like to sit idle. From Day One, I have been working and don’t want to stop.”
His wife, Faduma, 20 years his junior, also works at the plant. One of them works first shift and the other second so that someone can watch their four children, all 10 or younger.
Sitting in the living room of their apartment on a recent Sunday, Jumale asks his oldest daughter to retrieve the family Koran and a notebook filled with her handwritten Arabic.
She reads a page in a soft voice. The movie “The Matrix” is playing on TV.
“I want them to continue the religion and learn the culture of America,” said Jumale, who sends his children to Islamic school at the mosque each weekend. “It is my obligation to teach them my religion. But it is up to them. They can learn Christianity, and if they leave for Christianity, it’s up to them.”
Jumale said he wants to learn English and become a citizen. He wants to build a house, maybe see his children become doctors or “big guys in the U.S.A.”
Maybe it will be the boy who was too young to remember seeing his mother killed in front of him.
His given name is Abdi. He is 20 now, living with family in Denver and hoping to get a GED certificate because he never graduated from high school.
His teacher in Fort Morgan remembers him as a class clown whose command of speaking English masked an inability to read or write.
In the U.S., he goes by Tony.
* * *
The first Somalis arrived in Fort Morgan in 2005 — young men at first, there to feel the place out.
The meatpacking industry was struggling to find workers at the time, said Nicole Johnson-Hoffman, the manager of the Cargill plant in Fort Morgan. So company representatives fanned out to workforce centers across the country offering relocation packages, temporary lodging and food vouchers.
The company, which employs 2,000 in Fort Morgan, does not target particular ethnic groups, Johnson-Hoffman said.
But Somalis, like others before them, were willing to do work others would not. As the first wave of men contacted friends and relatives, families began arriving.
“It was like, all of a sudden, boom, here they are,” said Steve Dunn, the owner of a downtown shoe store.
Police Chief Keith Kuretich started to field complaints: Groups of 30 Somali men were loitering and littering outside a store. Somalis were haggling over prices at Walmart and holding up checkout lines. Their driving was dangerously bad.
The police department historically hasn’t taken a leadership role integrating immigrants, instead reacting to problems, Kuretich said. He has sought to change that through outreach and partnerships with other agencies while trying to break through Somali mistrust of law enforcement.
“You don’t have to look like the people you police,” Kuretich said. “You just have to care.”
Kuretich has been at the forefront of refuting falsehoods about the newcomers. He recently discredited an e-mail that claimed two Somali men had attempted to abduct a child from the Walmart parking lot.
Real problems, however, do exist, including two or three domestic violence cases. Abdinasser Ahmed, a college-educated Somali who works at the middle school, said beating one’s wife is accepted in Somalia and the community here must discourage it.
“We still have our culture, but there are a lot of things we have to follow,” he said. “We have to know the law. We have to know American culture. We discuss these things at the mosque, at home.”
On Nov. 3, 2009, a Somali man from Greeley fatally stabbed his 27-year-old Somali ex-girlfriend in a Fort Morgan apartment hallway — the eighth homicide in the city since 2000 at that time.
An out-of-town website that is critical of refugee resettlement spun tales of an honor killing. Kuretich dismissed that characterization, describing it as a domestic incident unrelated to religion or ethnicity.
The killing, however, provided fuel to those already unhappy about their new neighbors.
If there is a go-to voice for anti-refugee sentiment in Fort Morgan, it is Candice Loomis, owner of Frankie’s Coffee House. In 2009, Loomis crafted a petition that chided the government for giving refugees financial support and portrayed Somali refugees as lazy freeloaders who refuse to learn English and talk rudely on cellphones.
She said about 630 people signed it. It was a symbolic gesture.
“It scares me that it only took a few radical Muslims to bring down two buildings, and we’ve brought hundreds of thousands of them here (to the United States),” Loomis said in a recent interview.
She still has complaints. She criticizes refugees for fleeing their country’s problems and blames them for driving up car-insurance rates.
But when Somalis come in to buy lattes, Loomis said, she starts conversations about U.S. citizenship. She avoids touching men’s hands when giving change out of respect for the Muslim prohibition on physical contact between the sexes outside of marriage or family.
“I’ve come to the realization that they’re here and we’re going to have to do the best we can,” Loomis said.
* * *
When the new faces started arriving at Fort Morgan High School, Karen Liston found herself teaching kids how to hold pencils, form letters and raise their hands.
The simple task of opening a locker turned into a 20-minute tutorial on numbers, the sequence of turning left and right, and combinations.
The sudden influx of Somali families — and, later, other East Africans — tested a rural public school system with limited resources. Some students had been schooled in Kenyan refugee camps. Others, especially older ones, were illiterate in their own language and had little formal school background.
Most, if not all, Somali students are struggling to find an identity and fit in — a trial for any teenager, let alone a refugee coping with dislocation, a strange language, racial divisions and a religion not well understood by classmates.
At age 17, Yahaye Haret is about to begin his sophomore year. He already behaves like a typical American teenager, giving fist bumps and swearing.
In an interview at his family’s apartment, Yahaye said he likes school and some teachers but not others. Some Mexican and white guys at school, he said, once told him to “go back to your (expletive) country.”
“This is the United States,” he said when asked how that felt. “Everyone can come.”
Yahaye has struggled with adjustment, said Liston, who taught him last year. The tough-guy routine, she said, is a defense mechanism for a boy who eventually was earning A’s and B’s in vocabulary class.
“He can cuss like a sailor, cuss like any rapper in a rap song,” Liston said. “But I have really seen growth in him, from speaking out in class and being blatantly rude to really buckling down.”
Morgan County schools Superintendent Greg Wagers said the district has sought “a proactive and reasoned approach” to an African-refugee population that continues to grow.
By the end of the 2010-11 school year, the district counted 62 students who spoke Somali, 13 who spoke Swahili, six who spoke Tigrigna (an Eritrean language), two who spoke Amharic (predominantly Ethiopian) and one who spoke Kinyarwanda (Rwandan).
This year, the district shifted around resources to start a “newcomers center” with accelerated English courses and remediation for “over- age and under-credited” middle and high school students.
Like other school districts with large numbers of Muslim students, Morgan County also sought to strike a balance accommodating midday prayer.
The high school set aside auditorium balcony space, segregated by gender, during lunch to ensure the school schedule was not disrupted, Wagers said.
Some citizens complained that the district was endorsing Muslim practice or giving Muslims special treatment. That prompted Wagers to write a three-page memo to the board of education and the community that included a primer on Islam and the legal framework for the district’s approach.
The scrutiny revealed that some teachers were wrongly letting students out of class to pray, Wagers said. Since then, he said, “it’s been quiet. We just had to find the middle ground.”
* * *
Amina Barkhadel, 27, lives in a one-story, red-brick apartment building near the post office.
A pot of rice and beans sits on the stove. Every lighting fixture is a bare bulb and a string.
She splits the $550 monthly rent bill with three male roommates, also Somalis.
This is where Barkhadel wakes up at 4 a.m. each day to prepare for study and work.
Back in Somalia, she worked in a little shop. In 2008, men in masks with guns came in and killed her 25-year-old brother and hit her.
Her grieving mother gave her $8,500 to pay an English-speaking man to pose as her husband and get her out of the country — to Dubai, Guatemala and Mexico.
She ultimately made her way to the U.S. border and, after spending time in Mexican and U.S. immigration jails, won asylum status in a court hearing.
She worked as a hotel maid in Southern California until friends told her about work at Cargill in Fort Morgan.
Barkhadel, shy and quiet, rises early to attend classes through a workplace-education program largely paid for by Cargill and run by Morgan County Community College. There, students are taught English, basic math and computer skills, as well as the mysteries of tax preparation and direct deposit.
The head of the program, Shirley Penn, said her goal is to one day produce a plant manager. So far, not a single Somali has risen into management, even though Somalis make up one-fourth of the workforce.
Barkhadel hopes to be a nurse one day. She saves money to send home to Somalia, where a devastating famine brought on by drought has caused a humanitarian crisis.
One of her beneficiaries is her husband, who hauls goods on his back and in a wheelbarrow for a living. He could not afford to flee Somalia with her.
Living with three men is not a problem, Barkhadel said. They do not enter her bedroom. When it is time to pray, she closes her door and prays alone.
What does America mean to her? She was asked a similar question when she showed up at the U.S. border: Of all the countries in the world, why the United States?
“It is good,” she said. “Safe.”
* * *
The leadership of the local Somali community is in constant flux. A request to visit the mosque or speak to someone will invariably get back to “The Committee,” a group of about a dozen self-appointed elders.
Others are trying to wrest control from that group and hold a meeting of all Somalis to elect leaders. There is competition to be in charge and to control information, complicated by the same clan divisions roiling Somalia. It can make life difficult for everyone.
“The truism ‘Wherever you go, there you are’ kind of applies,” said Paul Stein, the director of the Colorado Refugee Services Program, part of the state Department of Human Services. “People bring some of the dynamics of the failed state here.”
It falls on Brenda Zion, a 37-year-old former child-protection worker and substitute teacher who grew up on a dairy farm, to make sense of it all.
Zion heads OneMorgan County, a nonprofit that coordinates driver’s education classes, community forums and other programs to help immigrants integrate.
“I have faith,” Zion said. “But sometimes, in the middle of it all, you wonder if you’re making progress or moving backwards.”
Zion has watched well-educated Somalis with good English burn out and leave town, unable to balance their own lives with demands from both their countrymen and the broader community to translate and fix problems.
She wonders whether it is happening with Abdinasser Ahmed, who spent the summer helping Somalis with doctor appointments and workplace disputes but isn’t picking up his cellphone anymore.
“He is like so many people who get access to education,” she said. “They are very much torn.”
Slowly, other Somalis are putting down roots.
The handful of Somali-run businesses on Kiowa Street near the post office and a couple blocks away on Railroad Street are visible examples.
There’s Luul Ahmed, a tall, elegant mother of eight who runs The African Grocery Store, which is much more than that, with ornate upholstered couches from Saudi Arabia and vases of silk flowers. Her family operates outposts of the business in Denver, as well as Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.
There’s Asha Abuukar, 41, who was a medical assistant in Somalia. She runs her own market in the morning and relies on out-of-work Somalis to mind the store in the afternoon when she works at Cargill.
Her shelves are stacked with adzuki beans, sesame oil, Kenyan-made butter, dates wrapped in plastic, perfume from the Emirates and spaghetti, a legacy of Somalia’s status as a former Italian colony.
There’s Abdiwahabi Salah, the 26-year-old owner of a halal meat market who drives his van to Somali markets in Minneapolis twice a month to restock his shelves.
“As long as the company is here,” said Salah, referring to Cargill, “we will be here.”
At the end of the month, hundreds of Somalis will gather for Eid ul-Fitr, a celebration marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The city allows them to use Riverside Park on the banks of the South Platte. There, refugees in robes and head scarves will spread rugs on the grass and, following custom, pray for God’s forgiveness, mercy and peace.
Eric Gorski: 303-954-1971 or egorski@denverpost.com
