For one man well-equipped to help, young people are `at a crossroads' and need to integrate without losing culture
Surya Bhattacharya
Staff Reporter
But it's not hard to find lawyer-activist Abdurahman Hosh Jibril's door. Just follow the steady stream of people filing into his basement office seeking his help: A letter backing a bid to be pardoned for a petty crime. Another to the human rights commission on a wrongful-dismissal case. A phone call to a welfare office to get a woman's cheque released.
As their community development manager, Jibril fields all three in a minute's time.
But his real focus these days is on youth. Fifteen years after a deluge of Somalis fleeing civil war began arriving in Toronto, a whole generation of adolescent Somali-Canadians is "at a crossroads with the community," Jibril said.
He worries that, as part of one of the most disadvantaged communities in the GTA – scoring near the bottom in household income, employment and education levels – they'll fall prey to crime, drugs, gangs and Islamic radicals.
"Our responsibility is to help these kids integrate in a way, without forgetting their culture," Jibril said.
"And getting involved in the civic nature of the country. We don't want a case of France here," he added, reflecting on the disenfranchised black youths who rioted for weeks in the Paris suburbs in 2005.
Jibril has no patience for religious or ethnic leaders who call for "black-focused schools" or sharia law. He'd rather see inclusive curriculum than exclusive schools.
And he worries about the dark side of multiculturalism.
"As an ideal system, it is good. But there are so many communities in the city and they have a lot of problems with multiculturalism as we understand it, and so we see a ghettoization of communities," he said, noting the city's poorest neighbourhoods are filled with people fleeing strife in their homelands.
Early this year, the Toronto Star reported that some members of the transitional government in Somalia were Canadian citizens, desperately looking for international support to bring stability to a country that has been without a proper government for almost 15 years.
Jibril, who serves as chair of the Somali-Canadian National Council, was one of a group that had written to the federal government, hoping it would step into a mediation role.
Despite Canada's lack of action, they continue to hope.
But local issues have been Jibril's focus since the first Somali refugees began to settle in the highrise neighbourhood on Dixon Rd. near Kipling Ave., now nicknamed Little Mogadishu.
Somalis in the area alleged they were being harassed by a private security company that patrolled the buildings. Some put the mistreatment down to a misunderstanding about the gregarious Somali culture; others blamed it on outright discrimination.
Jibril had worked alongside Star reporter Paul Watson in the early 1990s as Watson chronicled similar struggles in the same three Dixon highrise buildings.
"In some ways, (the problems have) changed, and in some ways they've remained the same," he said. "Then, we were publicizing the plight of thousands of refugees and how to settle them, and now we see they've reached critical mass in Canada."
Jibril came to Canada in 1977 to study sociology at the University of Toronto. He never intended to stay but hasn't been back to Somalia.
By 1986, refugees were "already coming in drips and there weren't enough people to help them," he said. So he volunteered, first as an interpreter and then with legal clinics.
"The problems they were coming with were alien to me," he said. "I heard horror stories of civil war, rape and entire families being killed." This led him to study immigration law at Osgoode Hall Law School.
That was followed by an attempt to go home, though his father advised against it because of the civil war.
Instead, in 1991, Jibril found himself standing in the middle of a refugee camp in the Kenya-Somalia border town of Dadaab, greeting his parents and grandmother in the plastic tent where they now lived, covered with flies, displaced by war.
"I am a big man, but I broke down. I cried," he said simply.
Over the next few years, he managed to bring his mother and grandmother to Canada, but his father refused to leave. So he and his siblings resettled him in Somalia and built him a house.
But for now, as always, Jibril dwells on Toronto's Somali community.
The community centre has recently become a youth employment project centre, with teens on computers and job postings on boards.
Walking a visitor to the door, Jibril stops to talk to a 21-year-old single mother, with a small apology for what he's about to advise.
"I am going to lecture you – sorry – but you have to stay in school. Finish it first, build your skills and then think of what the boys say."
Source: The Toronto Star, Dec 27, 2006