Already facing health and education gaps, refugees in San Diego banded together during the pandemic to define their own challenges and create their own solutions.
Jama Ahmed Mohamed was 2 years old when his family fled the civil war in Mogadishu, Somalia, and escaped to a refugee camp in Kenya. This became his precarious home, where his family faced alienation and violence as displaced outsiders in the borderlands of two countries. “There’s this feeling of never being settled. …We would build homes, which were set on fire, and move again,” he says. “There is no childhood in a refugee camp. You grow up fast.”
After seven difficult years in several refugee camps in Kenya, Mohamed’s family received asylum from the U.S. and moved to San Diego in 1996. This offered a pathway for safety, while also revealing challenges to starting a new chapter in a Western culture. Mohamed learned quickly that being Black, Muslim, and a refugee was not going to be an easy transition in the Golden State. “We faced different obstacles—low-income housing and language barriers. You have your own identity, and there’s also American culture. There were drugs, alcohol, and gangs,” he says.''
Today, Mohamed manages Dur Dur Market, a halal meat and produce store in City Heights, one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in San Diego, which is home to many refugees. For Mohamed and many members of the refugee community, the global pandemic has revealed the intersecting inequalities they face, which have been exacerbated by COVID-19.
Dur Dur Market became an information hub for refugees who had questions on accessing COVID-19 benefits; Mohamed helped fill out complicated unemployment forms. Imams, too, began offering counseling services to congregation members navigating mental health crises and other breakdowns because of the ripple effects of the coronavirus on their personal and professional lives.
“Our community is over-researched by external experts, and our voices are underrepresented in decision-making,” says Amina Sheik Mohamed, the founding director of the Refugee Health Unit at the Center for Community Health, University of California, San Diego. As a refugee herself, she is a respected leader in the Somali and East African refugee community. “We felt it was important for us to build our own shared power and vision for equity.” That’s why, in the face of this public health crisis, front-line refugee groups united to form the San Diego Refugee Communities Coalition.
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