Three Somali Vermonters Tell Their Stories in 'Deep North' 

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• Courtesy
• Deep North: Stories of Somali Resettlement in Vermont by Shadir Mohamed, Fardusa A. Abdo and Abdihamid A. Muhumed, edited by Brad Kessler, Onion River Press, 71 pages. $14.

Mohammed Abdulaziz hadn't heard his mother's most traumatic stories about fleeing Somalia until she began recounting them in a series of interviews for a book. Then in his mid-twenties, he served as her translator.

"I was definitely shocked," he said in an interview last week. His mother, Fardusa A. Abdo, was among hundreds of thousands of people who streamed out of Somalia after rebels overthrew autocratic president Mohammed Siad Barre in January 1991, sparking a civil war.

Abdo was 16 years old when her family fled their hometown. Safety in the desert lasted a few weeks; then attackers arrived before dawn, firing into the air, shooting at people and kidnapping girls. Everyone scattered. Abdo ran with her mother and younger brother. Her aunt, she learned later, was captured and raped.

The trio returned to their home city, found it destroyed and joined hundreds of others in walking to Mogadishu, where Abdo's grandparents lived. But the capital city wasn't safe, either. Armed men entered her grandparents' portside home. "My cousin Mohamed tried to stop them," Abdo says in the book. "They shot and killed him."

Abdo's is the second of three accounts in Deep North: Stories of Somali Resettlement in Vermont, published in September by Onion River Press with support from Vermont Humanities. Authors Abdo, Shadir Mohamed and Abdihamid A. Muhumed speak simply and candidly as they recount their happy earlier lives in Somalia, the brutal violence they witnessed, the years of hardship and uncertainty as they awaited resettlement, and their confusing early days in Vermont.

Mohamed hadn't even heard of the state until he was en route. When someone told him he was going to Vermont, he thought they were mistaken and replied, "I am going to America."

The Deep North project sprouted from North, Sandgate author Brad Kessler's 2021 novel about a Somali refugee who finds herself in a Vermont monastery while trying to get to Canada. In the course of developing his Somali character, Sahro Abdi Muse, Kessler consulted Abdirashid Hussein and Laurie Stavrand, who worked at the Colchester office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.

Stavrand read Kessler's manuscript and told him that Sahro lacked believability. "She's somebody who would appear in fiction but not in reality," he recalled her saying. Then she introduced him to Abdo.

His novel had already sold, Kessler said. But after getting to know Abdo, he asked the publisher to hold off for a year so he could rework his Somali character. Abdo had shown him that faith and "fierce attachment" to family and community were the strengths that had sustained her — and, Kessler realized, the strengths that would have sustained Sahro. The arc of the character didn't change, Kessler said, "but the essence of who this person was on the page was made real, and flesh was put on the bones."

With those conversations, the storytelling project that became Deep North had begun. In 2019, Kessler, Hussein and Stavrand set out to record Somali Vermonters' stories, hoping to preserve them and to raise other Americans' awareness and increase their understanding of the people living in refugee camps today.

Kessler conducted hours of interviews over three and a half years, then condensed and edited them into the 71-page book. His wife, photographer Dona Ann McAdams, made black-and-white portraits of each storyteller, and Abdulaziz, Abdo's son who had translated for her, designed the cover.

The book peels off the label "refugee" to reveal the rich and varied lives of three Vermonters. Hussein selected them to represent the diversity of Vermont's Somali community, Kessler said. Mohamed is a Somali Bantu who grew up along the lower Juba River in southern Somalia, where his family had farmed for five or six generations. They owned land and houses. "I never seen hunger before the civil war," he told Seven Days.

Muhumed was a camel herder whose prosperous family owned 100 camels, a sign of prestige. "There were many names for people like us," he says in the book. "But the name I like best is qoraax joog, which means something like 'people who stay outdoors in beauty.'"

Abdo grew up in Bardera, a small city in southern Somalia. Her dad drove a truck, delivering produce. Because she was a girl, she didn't get a formal education, and she had to cook and clean. But she enjoyed sneaking into movies with friends, swimming in the river and listening to music on the Panasonic National radio her dad gave her.

Abdo, who is now 48 and a custodian at the University of Vermont, said she told her story to share knowledge, to help people get to know each other and to give hope to those enduring hardship.

She endured years of challenges to reach the Winooski apartment where she curled up on a decoratively stitched Arabian couch to talk about the book in early December. After her cousin was killed in Mogadishu, she and her family ran to the port there, along with thousands of others, and got separated in the chaos. Abdo, her mother and her younger brother crowded onto a Yemen-bound livestock boat that stank of manure and urine. Many passengers on the level below them suffocated and died.

Her family was reunited in an apartment in Sana'a, a strange and beautiful city in the eyes of young Abdo, who thought Yemen must be the richest country in the world. She married there, had seven children and stayed for 23 years. In 2006, her Somali husband, who has a bullet lodged in his back from the early days of the war, lost his job as a bus driver. He slipped over the border into Saudi Arabia to find work, leaving Abdo alone for the next 13 years to care for their children, including a daughter with a learning disability and a son who relies on a wheelchair.

For years, Abdo didn't know if her husband was dead or alive. She was "mom and dad and moneymaker."

Sambusas became her lifeline. She made 500 of the savory pastries for a nearby restaurant seven days a week while also working in a school cafeteria. In spring 2011, when the family's relocation to the United States appeared imminent, war broke out in Yemen. Abdo and her children waited three more years. They arrived in Burlington in November 2014.

Abdo's husband, who had been caught in Saudi Arabia and deported to Somalia, arrived five years later and saw his youngest child, then about 13, for the first time.

"If you see my story, you'll be strong," Abdo said, "and you'll know that this challenge one day's going to end."

Inspiring others was not among Mohamed's list of reasons for sharing his story, though it could be. The Somali Bantu farmer was 19 years old when gunmen shot and killed his brother in front of him. On their way home from working on a family farm, the brothers were unarmed. Another brother and Mohamed's stepmother were also killed.

Mohamed was forced to move from refugee camp to refugee camp in Kenya until he landed in Kakuma, whose name means "nowhere" in Swahili.

In Marafa, his second camp, he married Amina, a 17-year-old girl from his village. Two of their children died of malaria, and two others contracted it but survived. They were a family of six, the youngest just 8 weeks old, when they flew from Nairobi to Burlington with a single bag in December 2004.

The couple had five other children in Vermont. Now 52 and a supervisor at Williston's Environmental Hazards Management, Mohamed said he must tell his story because his children, their children and his great-great-great-grandchildren need to know where the family comes from.

He wants Americans to understand Somalia — the good, stable life it once offered — and Somalis, who came to the U.S. only to find peace. He also hopes to educate readers about Islam, which he believes is misunderstood in this country due to Al-Qaeda founder and terrorist Osama bin Laden, who was Muslim. But, Mohamed said, bin Laden did not adhere to Islamic teaching, which condemns killing for no reason. "The faith I believe and the faith Osama bin Laden and his group believe is different, totally different," he said.

Muhumed, the 58-year-old former camel herder, said he loves people of all faiths. He had not met Jewish people before coming to Vermont, and they gave him winter clothes shortly after his 2009 arrival. "I always tell them, 'You're my brothers, my sisters,'" he said, speaking through a translator.

An animated conversationalist, Muhumed exuded joy as he spoke in Somali, tossing in occasional English words to express his affection and gratitude for Vermonters: "I say, Vermont people I love!"

Accustomed to walking in his previous life, Muhumed does the same here, making large circles from his home in Burlington's Old North End to the Shelburne Road rotary, greeting people he meets. "When you smile, they smile at you," he said.

Walking lifts the sadness he carries. When war erupted, gunmen stole his family's cows, sheep, goats and camels. Other attackers killed his father and brother in front of him. When one of his brothers refused to leave their cousin, who had been shot in the leg, both were killed.

As Muhumed fled, an attacker cut him with a knife, leaving a long, jagged scar on the side of his neck. His brother carried five bullets in his body. When their group approached Kenya, fighting broke out in the border town where they planned to camp for the night. They chose instead to sleep in the bush near the lions, which they viewed as the more manageable threat.

"That's why I love here, because there's law and order," Muhumed said. Vermonters take care of each other, he added. His chapter of Deep North is a message to Vermont, explaining why Somalis are here and thanking Vermonters for their kindness, he said. As he put it, "You get relief if you tell your story to other people."

From Fardusa A. Abdo's Account

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• Courtesy of Dona Ann McAdams
• Fardusa A. Abdo

I have good memories of my childhood in Bardera, the warm embrace of the small city, the dusty streets, the red roofs, the palm trees along the river. It was a time I've never forgotten, the feeling of safety and family, the fruit trees, my aunts and uncles. Us kids were young and full of energy, and I was, to be honest, a bit of a troublemaker. My girlfriends and I would swim in the river, even though there were alligators and females weren't supposed to. If my parents were coming back, we'd rush into the house and pretend we hadn't been swimming. I'm not sure we fooled anyone.

The war changed everything. How much my parents knew beforehand, or anyone knew, I don't recall. Only that one day we kept hearing terrible things on the radio. People were trying to kill the President. Then it was suddenly not safe anywhere. We listened to the Panasonic National. Everyone was afraid. In the afternoon we started to hear shooting and explosions around town. We heard that gangs of men were going around Bardera targeting young people, killing the boys and taking the girls captive. Any girl older than 12 was taken and raped. The sun went down and night came. We didn't sleep. We stayed in our house. The gunfire got louder. Around three in the morning, before sunrise, we decided to escape. We took whatever we could and left the house.

Who were the people attacking us? The gangs, the militias, the soldiers. We didn't know them. They were Somalis but from some other place. It's hard to put together now. I was so young and have been through so much since. My father didn't own his truck so we had to go on foot, along with everyone else — neighbors, friends, people we didn't know. We walked into the bush. For ten hours we just walked.

From Shadir Mohamed's Account

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• Courtesy Of Dona Ann Mcadams
• Shadir Mohamed

When Siad Barre was overthrown by the rebels on January 26, 1991, I was 19 years old. Honestly, it is not easy to talk about what happened at that time when our world turned upside down. We'd been living peacefully in our village. I'd been going to school, learning the Koran. I played a lot of soccer. I worked on the farm. Everyone welcomed the news about the rebellion at first. Nothing happened in our village right away. The capital was far away. The president went into hiding. The rebels ran after him. Soon the situation got worse. People started killing and looting. It began in the capital. Then Siad Barre and his army fled Mogadishu, south toward Kenya. On their way they passed through the Juba valley and gave weapons and vehicles to his supporters in the Darood clan. That's when things got bad for the Somali Bantu and for our village. Unlike other Somalis, we weren't given guns or vehicles. We had nothing to fight with. We were sitting ducks on our farms.

When the fighting spread to our region, the militias came with their new weapons and killed people. They raped women. They looted homes and stores. No one was safe. One day that February we were working on the farm in Bandar Salama. I normally would be working with my brother Mahdi but he was sick that morning and stayed at home. So Abdulkadir came out instead to work with me that day. It was a Thursday. We were quitting work early because it was the start of the weekend, which begins Thursday nights in Muslim countries. It must have been around two or three in the afternoon. It's too hard to remember now. I can't tell you the specifics. Only that we were attacked on our way leaving the farm. We were both unarmed. They shot Abdulkadir. They killed him right in front of me.

From Abdihamid A. Muhumed's Account

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• Courtesy Of Dona Ann Mcadams
• Abdihamid A. Muhumed

I'm especially interested in the elephants. I look them up on the computer to see how they are doing. Before the war, thousands of elephants lived in Somalia. But when the war came most of them fled south across the border to Kenya — just like us. They knew it was too dangerous to stay on their own grounds and migrated to Kenya. Somali elephants are different than the Kenyan elephants in how they look and act. But most were able to survive in Kenya in ways they couldn't across the border. If you go to Kenya today, you can see the Somali elephants. Scientists have been tracking them with radios over the years. They are very smart animals. They want to return to their homeland but can still sense the danger across the border. They can hear things hundreds of miles away. They can smell the war. The guns, the ammunition. They know when and where men are armed and where it isn't safe to go. They can feel the bad things, the places where their parents or brothers or sisters were killed.

Yes, thousands of elephants once lived in Somalia but none has been there in over 20 years. Recently I heard this: A few years ago one of the Somali elephants the scientists were tracking in Kenya left his grazing grounds along the Kenyan coast and headed north to Somalia. The elephant was an older male, around 30 years old. He walked 137 miles in 18 days. He traveled at night and hid in the forest during the day from poachers. He made it all the way to Somalia. No one expected it. No one had ever seen that before. Because of his age, the scientists thought he'd recalled the old route back home, the old migration path that had been disrupted by war. He was the first recorded elephant to return to Somalia in 20 years. But he didn't stay. He must have known the country was still not safe.

In less than 24 hours, he headed back to Kenya.

Are You Nancy?

Abdihamid A. Muhumed is searching for the Vermont woman who helped him out three or four years ago at John F. Kennedy International Airport when he missed his flight to Burlington. On his way home from visiting Africa, he had flown 15 hours and had no money. Another Vermonter saw him sitting at the gate. Sensing his distress, she asked if he was OK and bought him something to eat.

Her name was Nancy, her husband had passed away shortly before, and that's all he knows about her. He lost the phone number she gave him. In a conversation about his life, Muhumed focused on his love for Vermonters and repeatedly returned to the story of Nancy.

"I will never forget Nancy's name in my life," he said.

— M.A.L.