Our Somali Community

Deka Ali lives in the northwestern town of East Grand Forks Minnesota.   As a Somali immigrant, interpreter and community organizer, she has gained the respect of her rural community for bringing people together.  In 2025 Deka is working with In Progress to identify and guide families through an intergenerational storytelling project focused on sharing stories of immigration, cultural identity and...

Mohamed Yusaf engaged youth of his community in a light-hearted, fast-moving conversation among Somali and Arabic-speaking community members who weave together jokes, memories, and references to daily life, migration, and cultural identity. Through playful banter Mohamed reflect the energy, humor, and resilience of Somali diaspora life. The exchange highlights how shared language, storytelling, an...

Rashida's Story represents a short interview between two generations of Somali women as they reflect on their experiences as immigrants balancing faith, community life, and the challenges of building a future in America. They speak about the pressures they face and the importance of staying connected to Somali culture, community centers, and religious practices. Despite hardships, they express det...

Anav Ahmed is mother, health worker and Somali immigrant who migrated from the country of Kenya to East Grand Forks Minnesota in 2008.  She shared some of her story with her daughter Najma Ahmed as part of the Waterers Oral Histories Program.

One story that happened to me when I was sixteen years old. We were a group of young kids fooling around. We all do that. We get in trouble. Actually, we went to the Perkins and I did tell this story to my kids because one of them was older than us. She was seventeen and she got the food stamp and she thought the food stamp was the credit card. So she was like, she invited us to the Perkins. And s...

So we fled to Kenya, which is a neighbor to Somalia. So we went there. You have to go through in a lot of process in order to get to the United States. So it's not like that. Oh, I'm just going to get a ticket. I have a passport. No. So you have to go through a lot of process, which is the refugee camp. It's the part of the process. So when we fled in Somalia, I was only nine months. So we stayed...

Basically. I grew up by myself. I have to figure out everything by myself. You can imagine being a fourteen year old because my oldest son and I, we only thirteen years apart, and a parent to myself, I didn't have anyone to give me advice. I didn't have anyone. I can go back to it when I'm going through so much. I didn't have anyone that I can cry to it and go back to it, and I didn't have anybody...

My sister was amazing. She was really amazing woman. She had so much responsibility on herself because she was the oldest out of the eight children, and all of them were younger than her. And you can understand as her being seventeen, having her three children, because when my parents passed away, my sister was only seventeen. And rest of us. We become her responsibility and understand that coming...

My mom was a really well-educated woman, and she was an educational system like me. She used to provide families who were in need with clothing, books and donate all that stuff. So when the civil war happened in Somalia, what happened was a tribe against the tribe. And my mom came from really high, well educated tribe because the president of Somalia at that time related to the my mom and everybod...

I like it here in East Grand Forks because it's very small town and there's not a lot of cars. There's not a lot of hustle here. That's why I like here. I remember one of my sister friend were here a little bit, two years earlier. So that makes things easier for my family. Like where? The grocery. Where's the doctors? How to ride the bus? How to order taxi. So that was really helpful. So she taugh...

When I had my first child. I was only thirteen years old at that time, and I want to be a really good role model for him. I want to be a really good example for him, and I want my kids to look, you know, because you have to model it in order. Like it's the same thing saying that I'm going to do this smoking, but I will not allow my kids to smoke. That is kind of a hypocrite, right? So I want to mo...

And I went to her being a mother and graduating college, and never being a criminal, never did a drugs myself. So basically, I am amazing mother to my kids. And they are amazing kids. But I pushed them because I want to give them the things that I didn't have as a child, that opportunity, I didn't get it. I want to give it to them. But like I said, people take granted in their parents and I feel s...

American culture is a really, challenging and you know, that, as being a child in America and you want to keep your original culture because that's the expectation for your parents. So you have to do something called balancing. The expectation for our parents, they want to keep our original culture. They want to live the way they live. They want to act the way they act, which is as American child,...

I came from a very small town in Kenya. Mainly it was the refugee camp. So there are so many different because there's there's no light, there's not a lot of cars. And when we, get here, United States, it was the summer. So there was it seems really beautiful. So I didn't speak English at all, and my family did not either. So and then we didn't have a lot of opportunity that a lot of people have i...