Hawa was from southern Somalia,
has been a subsistence farmer her whole life.
She learned traditional agricultural practices from her family
and farmed up until the time that she had to leave Somalia.
Anything planted?
The majority of the participants are Somali-Bantu.
We're a program that provides training and resources to
immigrants and refugees, primarily in Lewiston, Maine.
They weren't resettled here by the United States government, but they chose to move here
and, since coming here, have started farming.
We're only about six miles from downtown Lewiston.
It's one of the only resettlement communities in the U.S. where people can live so close to farmland.
They sell collectively under the name Fresh Start Farms.
In 1991, the government in Somalia collapsed.
The primary thing that led to the collapse of the government was the withdrawal of U.S. and European foreign aid,
which had, for many years, been maintaining a very corrupt dictatorial government.
The Somali-Bantus were unarmed, they were food producers.
Their villages were repeatedly raided. Entire villages were massacred.
So, these various atrocities are what came together to force people to flee their homes.
When I moved to the United States, I kept asking about farming. Where can I farm?
Farming was one of Hawa's only marketable skills.
But there weren't any opportunities to farm in urban Dallas, Texas, where she was first resettled.
When Hawa first arrived in the U.S., she didn't drive. She couldn't speak English.
She couldn't even write in her native language of Mai-Mai. Now she's learning to do all three.
No parking.
Traffic way fall on --
That's may --
Traffic way --
may --
It's been very unusual in the history of the United States,
at least recent history of refugee resettlement,
to have such a large population of illiterate, non-English-speaking refugees.
I come over here four mornings a week from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and tutor
some of the most remarkable people I've ever met in the world.
To come into usually an urban environment, literacy is kind of mandatory.
So, it's a huge challenge.
The United States doesn't accept a lot of refugees.
In the first couple of years after 9/11, we didn't really take any.
In more recent years, it's gone up into the tens of thousands.
I think one of the big challenges of resettlement is trying to understand, how do you fit
a traditional Somali understanding of marriage into an American context?
Those who ultimately got resettled in the United States were lucky,
but they did so having to make a terrible choice of leaving behind those family members
who did not get accepted for resettlement.
My name is Batula Ismail. I have nine children and three grandchildren.
For Batula, and many of the Somali-Bantu women in Lewiston,
moving to the United States has forced her to become a single mom.
It was quite shocking, I think, to people being resettled to discover that if
a family consisted of a man and two wives, and their children,
he was going to be told he was going to have to divorce a wife, and choose one.
So what that means is that one wife, with her kids, gets sent alone to some city on her own,
while the husband goes with the other wife to another city.
They have had to really be incredibly strong and resourceful to be the sole parent, often of a number of kids.
And re-establish themselves in a foreign place,
apart from their husband, and apart from the assistance of their co-wife.
Many of them were resettled to large urban areas. The kids were just feeling lost.
The parents were very concerned about bad influences on the kids.
A number of Somali-Bantus began looking around for more livable cities.
A lot of single mothers who were disconnected from their families because of our marriage laws
grouped together in Lewiston to provide mutual support.
Lewiston emerged as a pretty livable place.
Lewiston had been a declining mill town, and the population had been declining steadily.
Starting in about 2005, the Bantu community started resettling in Lewiston.
People estimate that there are over 5,000 Somalis, which is over 10 percent of the population.
To have the second-largest city in the state of Maine all of a sudden
become more than 10 percent minority from one particular African community of refugees
is a drastic change.
In 2002 and 2003, [Laurier T. Raymond Jr.] the mayor of Lewiston, Maine,
wrote an open letter to the community, basically asking Somalis to tell their families not to move to Lewiston.
A group of white supremacists out in the West picked up on that and they came to cheer.
From day one, there have been plenty of rumors out there.
That we are assisting the refugees with brand new cars. Those are just total myths.
There are still people who will say, "Go home. Go home. Go back where you came from." Well, they can't.
It's all I can do when I hear those things not to get my fists up.
Having only one working adult on a minimum-wage job just really doesn't cut it.
After about six months, they're cut off from services provided by the resettlement agency.
Regardless of whether or not they're working, they do farm.
For some families, it's the only earned income.
For other families, it's just an additional source of income.
But the reality is, the money earned from farming
barely covers gas money to and from the farmer's markets.
I need savings account, to put my money in. I need a cow and camel and chickens.
I need the same things I had in Somalia.
Although, camels don't like the winter.
Helping people get started and providing them with, on average, U.S.$500 apiece in the first year,
they can make up to U.S.$5,000 or more in profits.
They want to be independent. They want to be self-sufficient. They want to earn their own income.
So, this farming project enables women to be productive. And that's terrific.
Still, without public assistance,
Hawa and Batula would be without homes, food stamps and ESL classes.
Lewiston is seeing a small revitalization.
There are about four or five different Somali-owned convenient stores.
Those small business owners are bringing new face to that part of downtown.
It's up to us to make them feel like this is a home.
It seems to me that it's right on the Statue of Liberty:
Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.
Life in Somalia was easier. In Somalia, I didn't need food stamps or assistance to pay my rent.
But if I save and buy my own farmhouse, that will change.