The men and women working the soil are refugees from Somalia, ethnic Bantus who fled a brutal civil war more than a decade ago and found their way to an unlikely home in Lewiston, a former mill city 35 miles north of Portland.
They clung together in tenements, strangers in a wary city where their reception ranged between chilly and hostile. But now, after years of gradual acceptance, they are emerging to rediscover the joys of an agrarian past.
The Somalis were looking for land to grow vegetables, the Wilcoxes were looking for help with their property taxes, and a lease was signed this spring for about three acres, which have been divided into plots of one-tenth of an acre each.
It’s a life that continues to expand from the crowded Lewiston apartments where many Somali refugees, drawn by word of mouth and low-cost housing, arrived from 100 American cities in 35 states. Lewiston officials estimate that between 4,000 to 5,000 Somalis live in the city, which has an official population of 36,000.
At first, Lewiston residents worried that they could not afford a large influx of impoverished African immigrants. The city’s mayor wrote an open letter in 2002 urging Somalis, nearly all of whom are Muslim, to slow down their migration. And in 2003, a white supremacist group based in Wyoming traveled across the country to stage an anti-Somali rally in Lewiston.
As late as 2012, Mayor Robert Macdonald offered this advice for Somali immigrants in a 2012 interview with the BBC: “You come here, you come and you accept our culture, and you leave your culture at the door.”
Macdonald has since changed his perspective.
“The Somalis are becoming a part of the community now, and there are no problems that I know of,” he said. “They’re farmers. That’s what they do, and they do a very good job of it.”
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/08/16/somali-refugees-find-farming-oasis-maine/Q8LwE2N7eKRD1ytgmtlU2I/story.html?p1=Article_Related_Box_Article
= new reply since forum marked as read
