Somali refugees resettled in Pennsylvania, US by Church World Service are featured in a four and a half-minute “webisode” as part of Odyssey Networks’ Million Minutes for Peace Campaign.
The campaign is working to collect pledges from a million people to join in one minute of prayer for peace at noon on 21 September 2009 in observance of the United Nations International Day of Peace. CWS, an ecumenical development NGO, is a campaign partner.
“Prayer is a powerful thing that can bring the world peace, testifies Abdikani Abdi, aged 19, in the webisode, entitled ‘Messengers of Peace - the Abdi Family’ and posted in the Peace Video Festival section of www.odysseynetworks.org.
Abdikani’s brother Suleban, aged 17, and their widowed mother Halima also are featured. The video also includes a sequence on refugee sisters from Guinea, who tell their own story and then interview the Abdis.
After fleeing civil war and persecution in Somalia, Halima and her children took refuge at Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya. “We spent our life as refugees in Kenya, [for] 17 years,” Abdikani explained.
The Abdis - including two more brothers, Aden and Ahmed - were accepted into the United States refugee programme and arrived from Kenya on 11 September 2007. They were resettled by Church World Service to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“When they arrived, Aden and Abdikani were severely malnourished, and Ahmed had suffered nerve damage for lack of proper medical care at the camp,” reported Barbara Witmer of CWS-Lancaster.
“A lot of people in the camp (were) so hungry,” Abdikani says. Sick and weak, he weighed 110 pounds when he arrived in the United States. Now he weighs 140. As he gained weight, “I got stretch marks,” he observed.
The family relocated to Buffalo, New York, from Lancaster, and now live in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where Aden is working and Abdikani, Suleban and Ahmed are in school.
The boys’ sister had to stay behind in Dadaab. Halima currently is engaged in an intensive effort to get her daughter, now aged 14, over to the USA to be with them.
“Every time I see her picture, I’m crying,” Halima says.
Odyssey Networks is US’s largest coalition of Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith groups dedicated to media production and distribution. It is a service of the National Interfaith Cable Coalition, Inc., established in 1987.
For more information, visit www.odysseynetworks.org.
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