The classroom was loud with chatter and giggles. Instruction was underway in the ESL class at Barron High School. The energy in the room seemed misplaced for 8 a.m. but the colorful headscarves and traditional Muslim robes worn by the students added to the lively environment. They said they don’t dress this way everyday—only Fridays, the day of worship.

The teacher, Mr. Frandsen, told the students to move to the back corner of the room to answer questions from student journalists from Milwaukee. He arranged an area for them to sit across from them in chairs and the surrounding desks. They were not informed of the visit from the students prior to this moment, hence the side-eyes and hesitant glances back and forth.

They answered with mostly short, one worded responses. After each question, there was silence and then a couple boys against the back wall would respond with an inside joke to their friends only, paying no attention to the journalists in front of them.

It was only when the English aid Isaak Mohamed showed up that they became more serious. He’s from Somalia as well and when he spoke to them in their native language they listened.

The Store

Fadumo Hassna tidied up as she welcomed the student journalists guided by Isaak into her store.

The walls were lined with patterned scarves and clothing, and there wasn’t much room to walk as the floors were covered in miscellaneous clothing and beauty items.

She agreed to an interview, but warned that her English wasn’t very good. Instead, she communicated through her products. While some students interviewed Isaak, Fadumo walked a group of other students over to the wall of perfumes where she took the dropper out of each bottle and said to smell. She dropped the product on their skin and smiled as the musty floral scent filled the shop.

Shortly after, she helped a couple students pick out a headscarf so that they could go into the mosque next door. She grabbed a stack of scarves in plastic wrapping and said she would give them to them at a discount of $5. One student chose a scarf with a pink and white paisley pattern. Fadumo asked to show the student how to wear it. She placed the silk over her head, wrapped it around her face and placed the excess fabric behind her shoulders.

“It’s your color,” she said.

The Mosque

The men in the mosque stared at the female journalism students as they removed their shoes at the door.

Women are typically only allowed in the basement of this mosque.

It wasn’t an intricately designed or beautifully decorated building, just a room with curtains placed randomly about on walls without windows. One student asked their purpose and Isaak said they were just decoration.

Isaak led the group to the room where the men wash before prayer. It wasn’t like washing your hands after using the restroom. It was a religious practice that could be sensed from the intensity of Isaak’s movements as he demonstrated.

He splashed with face with the water and scrubbed with his whole palms, even making certain to rinse out his ear drums. He’s probably done this a thousand times.

The VFW

Stares here weren’t unlike those in the mosque. The only difference was these ones were from white people, like the two female students, but who still noticed that they didn’t belong there.

The bartender knew the woman sitting at the corner, who knew the man across from her who said he couldn’t give the students his name.

A bar is usually a place of conversation, but at 1 p.m. the two students had to break the ice with a vodka soda and a Miller Lite.

The students introduced themselves and the bar patrons skipped over them with their eyes and looked to one another for approval.

Elaine, a woman probably in her 60s or 70s, sipped a Diet Coke from a straw while she told them about how she feels bad for the Somali women who she says are oppressed by the men.

The post An Afternoon in Barron, Wis. appeared first on Welcome to Barron.

Johnson was an older woman, with chunky silver rings adorning each of her fingers, and she was talking about the Somali immigrants in her town, a town that was once almost completely white.

It was a Friday afternoon in October when Elaine made one of her daily visits it seemed to the bar. It was clear she was a regular, because each person who trickled in throughout the afternoon said the same thing:

“You got your husband’s truck today, huh?”

She told them hers was in the shop.

There were only five to six people in the bar, including the bartender, but that was enough to understand the kind of town Barron is.

As it was proven from Elaine driving her husband’s truck, everyone knows everyone. They know what kind of car her and her husband drive, and they knew they would find her sitting at the corner stool at the VFW, closest to the door.

But the people they don’t know are the ones who share a separate part of their town with them, “Somali-ville,”as Johnson called it. She said that’s what they call the apartment complex where a lot of the Somali people live.

For Johnson, who grew up in the Midwest her entire life, this influx of people in her town may be the only exposure she’s had to a culture outside of a small rural Wisconsin town. So, of course, she has a hard time understanding some of the things she sees a lot of the Somali people do that are different from what she’s used to.

One thing she took particular notice to is the way she perceives the Somali men treat women.

She said they don’t allow them to drive and specifically noted the women’s clothing as a form of repression. She said they are forced to cover themselves and she just didn’t understand it.

After talking with Somali women, the student journalists learned that the women can indeed drive.

Elaine didn’t know that.

What she also probably doesn’t know, is that Somali clothing, the flowing robes, or ‘jilbab,’ is actually a form of safety for the woman in Somalia. It’s part of their religion.

It’s likely that she doesn’t know much about the religion of the Somali people, or that it’s Muslim. She probably doesn’t know that men and women pray separately in the mosques, and the women have to go basement for this reason.

And, in the community tea room, women aren’t usually even allowed in, but none of this seems to offend them.

Elaine wasn’t trying to talk bad about the Somali people;  in fact, she had nothing but positive things to say about their children, but a man who wished to remain anonymous was sitting two stools down from Elaine and realized how she might be making herself sound.

He chuckled a little bit at her comments in a way that said, “she has no idea that she’s making herself look bad right now,” but the feeling in the bar didn’t turn to tension when he offered a viewpoint on the Somali people separate to that of Elaine’s.

“They’re just like any population, really,” he said. “A lot of people don’t realize what they had to go through to come here.”

And he’s right.

Somalia has been in a civil war for over 20 years. The people who live in Barron now came there from refugee camps all across Africa in Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, etc.

But Johnson remained focused on their hygiene and the “odd” things she thinks they do like on days like that one, Fridays, when they fill the streets to go to the mosque and pray together.

She seemed to take what she sees as fact, without verifying her conclusions at the source.

She said she and her husband ate at the Somali restaurant once and that it was good, but aside from that, the only interaction she has with the Somalian people in her town is the one man who stops at the VFW to get drunk, and the kids who go to Barron Elementary with her grandchildren.

It seems odd that in a town of only 3,000 people there is a large population who seem to be, for the most part, unknown to each other.  

The post A Regular’s Take on ‘Somali-ville’ appeared first on Welcome to Barron.

Once through the doorway, the eye first notices a glass display case with slightly fewer desserts than one might expect to see at a bakery. The wall behind is a disheveled collage of various beauty and healthcare products available for purchase, and on the counter are two tip jars: one ripped on the corner and secured with Scotch tape and the words ‘Al-Rahma Mosque’ in typed font, the other is handwritten with Sharpie with the words ‘Al-Toqwa Mosque.’

Past the counter is an area with tall shelves stacked with rice and other ingredients that make up the only Somali grocery store in the entire town.

There’s another room lit by the sunlight that comes in from a window facing the street. The menu is on the wall opposite of that with a display of pictures of various Somali dishes. There’s a soccer game on the TV in this room and two men are at a table watching.

The dining and kitchen area is pocketed away in another area of the establishment. The whole place belongs to Kaltuma Hassan, but this is the room she seems to spend most of her time.

Hassan was a businesswoman in South Africa before she moved to Barron in 2015.

“Problem in South Africa,” she said, is “in the morning, you are rich, by the afternoon you are poor.”

She said she never felt safe or stable as a restaurant owner in South Africa, but still it was more safe than her homeland of Somalia.

She said that because of the civil war in Somalia, she left the country when she was just 11-years-old.

“If there is war and fear how can you live?” she said.

Fast forward to 2015, and she was finally able to leave the continent of Africa as a refugee and come to America.

She is the 33rd person to own this space in Barron and to run it as a restaurant. It’s clear that this is a family business from the open kitchen window that has a view of her and her two children preparing meals for customers.

Hassan says she has no regrets of starting her restaurant in Barron, and that since opening business has been good.

“Your food is really good,” a patron tells her.

She smiles and thanks them.

This restaurant, and the people who come in to eat, are a small reason why she says she enjoys living in America.

“Barron is our home,” she said. “I’m glad America gave me a settlement here.”

Hassan stressed over and over the sense of community she feels with her Somali neighbors but also with everyone around her.

“In America, if you don’t become part of the community you suffer a lot,” she said.  “A community is a friend, it is everything to you. A community is important. It is very, very important. It is where you share happiness or badness.”

So, that is what it means to be a business owner in America for Kaltuma Hassan. She invites the people of Barron and welcomes outsiders from other areas into her community by providing a place for them to sit and to eat food that her family crafts for them.

It’s this sharing of culture that allows Hassan to feel at home in a town 8,000 miles from her birthplace.

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