Huntington News

Issue date: 5/23/07 Section: Focus

Media Credit: News Staff Photo/Eric Baumann

Alieu Sheriff spends most of his free time working as a security guard or studying at the Snell Library. He is new here.

Without family and an ocean away from his homeland of Liberia, Sheriff, 61, tries to make the best of his situation.

Things could be better. He has trouble finding students who will talk to him. He sometimes becomes frustrated with his laptop. And at first, Sheriff found the cold climate unbearable, although no one is at fault for that, he said.

"Equally so, my cultural concerns should be preserved," he said, his voice slow and meditated.

Sheriff recalled recent encounters with "specimens of the ugly American." When working as security guard, a job he finds menial, in a building at Bowdoin Square, one man approached him after office hours, late at night, demanding a computer from the building. He was wielding a clearly fabricated notice of approval, Sheriff said.

"Because of my refusal I was bombarded with all sorts of insults," Sheriff said. "He said, 'You nigger from Africa you think you can come here and boss me around.' Realizing that first and foremost I was alone, I gave him the benefit of the doubt by not reacting in a negative way. I knew he was ignorant."

Sheriff tries to be wiser. But he sees many others being treated the same, like a group of Somali Muslims in Maine who once found a pig's head in their mosque. And he sees his fellow refugees being directed to similar jobs that he finds menial. But seeded in his mind are visionary ideas to reform the present refugee support system, which Sheriff finds inadequate and dysfunctional.


Forced to flee

Sheriff left Liberia in 1980, running for his life, after Liberian President William Tolbert, Jr., under whom Sheriff served, was stabbed 15 times in a coup d'état.

President Tolbert, who took office in 1971, tried to improve relations between indigenous tribal peoples, who constitute the majority of the population, and Americo-Liberians by instituting "vigorous and focused" agricultural programs.

"He realized that people were very, very poor, to the extent in which they couldn't buy basic agricultural inputs: shovels, hoes, cutlasses and such," Sheriff said.

In addition to agrarian advancement, Tolbert encouraged free speech and instituted several social programs.

But by the end of the decade, economic crisis struck Liberia. In April 1980, after struggling to address the country's desperate situation, Tolbert and 12 of his ministers were assassinated in a military putsch led by Samuel Doe, a U.S. Army-trained Liberian leader. Doe declared himself the new president and replaced Tolbert's government with a brutal military regime.

The United States lauded Doe's pro-Western stance and President Ronald Reagan invited him to the White House. It was there Reagan made his historic blunder when he cordially greeted "Chairman Moe" and warmly shook his hand. Nevertheless, Liberia received more political and military assistance from the United States in the decade of Doe's rule than it had ever received, despite an increasingly deteriorating political climate and human rights record.

"For about five years that I stayed after the coup, they were looking for any of Tolbert's government officials," Sheriff said. "I saw a lot of harassment, intimidation, people being tortured, illicit killing, blackmailing, order of the day, outright killing, maiming, the raping of women in the streets and a lot of horrific things that I don't even like to mention."

With groups of friends, Sheriff drifted in and out of Liberia until 1988. He then moved to Guinea for two years, but had trouble adjusting because of the language barrier. In 1990 he left for Sierra Leone, where he remained for 15 years, witnessing another civil war. He survived mostly on rations issued by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and conducted agricultural studies for subsistence funds. Life was hard, he said.

When Catholic Charity officials told Sheriff he would be moving to the United States for resettlement, he was grateful to President George Bush and the American people as a nation, he said. Since landing at Logan International Airport and boarding in Chelsea in 2005, Sheriff has been here trying to make the best of life.

"First thing I did was to engage myself educationally by attending Northeastern University," Sheriff said.


The challenge of resettlement

Sheriff, along with four other panelists representing refugee advocacy groups, discussed many of the problems refugees face during resettlement Thursday, in a forum sponsored by the Center for Community Service.

Seated and sipping coffee at a narrow table in a Curry Student Center conference room, the panelists shared their experiences and deliberated before a group of about 30 attendants.

A major issue, they agreed, was the lack of cohesion between "uncle agencies," organizations that help foster successful resettled lives for refugees in the United States. Some panelists feared refugees are "falling through the cracks."

"The refugee 'uncle agency' gives you an orientation and shows you around," Sheriff said. "You get your social security card, your state I.D. card and they put a grant that is much like unemployment checks. But the sooner you get employed, you don't receive anything and you are on your own."

Panelist Naveed Nour, a photographer and Northeastern service management consultant who fled Iran in 1985, said communication problems among agencies could be solved through better networking.

"You have all these agencies and none of them talk to each other," he said. "They don't even share statistics at the end of the year. They don't even call clients to see how they are doing after their first half year here. There should be one umbrella organization to help refugees."

In 2004, 211 refugees came to Massachusetts from Liberia, according to the most recent report released by the state Office of Refugee Resettlement. They were among 73,851 refugees that resettled in the United States that year. In Massachusetts, most came from the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (543) and Somalia (512).

Abdirahman Yusuf, another panelist at the forum, is the executive director of the Somali Development Center (SDC), a non-profit organization that provides services to Somalis and other African refugees. Despite his official title, he said, he often feels like he's also the treasurer, janitor, accountant and secretary.

"We always help our clients, but never ourselves," Yusuf said. "Understaffing is our biggest challenge."

Agencies like the SDC aid refugees with job placement and transportation to interviews. But Sheriff said "uncle agencies" tend to direct resettled refugees toward menial or entry-level jobs.

"For me, the work in hotels and other menial jobs seem to be unproductive," Sheriff said. "You [Americans] should give us the encouragement. We have a lot of untapped potential."


A solution 'rooted' in past experience

Sheriff was born in Liberia in the tropical village Zogbojaah, whose population of 150 to 200 people lives in large, closely-knit families. He was among countless siblings. His small agrarian village grew vegetables and rice for sustenance.

To help support Liberia's large agricultural population, President Tolbert created a project for self-sufficiency that used cooperative farms and offered credit and training for farmers to grow needed crops. Under Tolbert, Sheriff became head of the Ministry of Agriculture's credit division.

Sheriff conducted demographic studies on the number of families in each region involved in agriculture and the type of crops they grew.

"I knew every region and everyone in that country," he said. "If you had 5,000 acres of land developed for agriculture, the studies we had would probably show for the first year you can grow rice, but year two, after the harvest, it is very possible that the soil might not be good for rice, but rather is suitable to plant coffee, cocoa or palm oil."

At the forum, Sheriff proposed ways for his and many other refugees' agricultural experience to be incorporated into their new lives in the United States.

Nearly 80 percent of refugees who come to the United States have agrarian backgrounds, he said, but the current resettlement system often forces them into jobs and lifestyles that do not accommodate farming.

"It has a semblance to drive people away from what they have been used to doing in Africa," he said. "Instead of leaving refugees on their own after a few months, perhaps a system could be constructed in which a plot can be allocated for refugees resettled here to have the option of going to where there will be a dormitory and training for work on a big local farm."

Sheriff said such work would be an improvement in the quality of life for refugees and an asset to the national economy.

"For me as an individual, I know I want to be more productive, but the system has to give us the chance," he said. "And that way we will be able to be contributors to the GNP."


Greater obstacles

Besides instances of xenophobia, refugees' problems receive little media coverage, forum attendants and panelists said. But the issues they face entering the country are daunting.

For instance, Yusuf cited an intensified screening process for resettlement in the wake of September 11.

In 2000, before the September 11 attacks, the United States admitted 94,222 refugees to the country for resettlement - tens of thousands more than in 2004. The same year Massachusetts admitted 1,961 refugees, 400 more than in 2004.

During a question and answer portion of the forum, Jennifer Guterman, an employee at the Refugee Immigration Ministry, asked about media coverage, and if the panelists saw any "gaps in public knowledge," regarding refugees like she has seen.

"I dealt with refugees from countries I had no idea, and I doubt the public knows, had violent conflicts happening in Cameroon, Congo, Guinea and Zimbabwe," she said.

Guterman, who heard of the forum through a friend who works at Northeastern, said she was upset about these conflicts, but left inspired by Northeastern's interest in refugees.

Some of the panelists, however, expressed a lack of confidence in U.S. relations with countries in which deadly conflicts are continuing.

"If our administrations are getting along, we don't care about their people or the conflicts," said Dr. Kelley Saia, who works at the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights.

Nour said he wasn't as concerned as the other panelists with media coverage of the countries with conflicts.

"Nobody covers the refugee problems we have right here," he said. "People should be getting fellowships for this and writing about this."

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