Somali-Bantu refugees start their lives over in Rochester Diocese

Published: 2004-09-20

BLOOMFIELD, N.Y. (CNS) -- Six Somali-Bantu refugees have started their lives over in the Rochester Diocese after finally escaping the oppression and fear they had known for more than a decade in their homeland. Mohamed Mohamed, 24, was resettled in Bloomfield this spring along with his family with the help of Catholic Family Center of the Rochester Diocese and a team of volunteers from St. Bridget-St. Joseph Parish in East Bloomfield and other local churches. Mohamed arrived in the Finger Lakes region April 29 with his brothers, Abukar, 17, and Omar, 11; his sister, Fatuma, 21; his mother, Binto Abdulle, 42; and his niece, Halima Hassan. 10. Prior to coming to the United States, Mohamed and his family spent 12 years in a refugee camp in Kenya, where they fled when civil war broke out in Somalia in the early 1990s. "It was very terrible. There wasn't as much security as here; it wasn't as stable. The police weren't 100 percent in control of the situation," Mohamed told the Catholic Courier, newspaper of the Rochester Diocese.

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