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For the first time in his 22 years, Abdi Ibrahim is living in luxury. But his new residence isn't a mansion with a million-dollar view. "I have my own room," he says, laughing at his good fortune. That's right: a rented room in the small upstate New York city of Utica. A member of a persecuted minority group from Somalia, Ibrahim, who at age seven found an older female cousin after she'd been shot by marauders, spent most of his life in violent refugee camps in Kenya. There he shared a mud-walled hut, scarce food and water with several family members. But in 2005 he heard that he'd be joining dozens of Somali Bantu refugees already settled in Utica. For decades, the city has opened its doors to some of the world's neediest people. In exchange, the newcomers bring the kind of energy and drive that most cities would pay recruiters to attract.Utica has long been a city of immigrants, with waves of Irish, Poles and Italians working its factories in its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But refugees didn't enter the picture until the late 1970s, after Utica had begun a plunge into economic meltdown. By then, major employers had begun downsizing, and most would eventually leave town. The city's population dwindled, and some streets were lined with homes sitting empty. A bumper sticker seen around town read "Would the last person to leave Utica please turn out the lights?"
Then, in 1978, a farmer's wife living just outside Utica sponsored a family from Vietnam. Roberta Douglas's husband was a medic in the Vietnam War, and the couple had been riveted by heartbreaking stories of people fleeing the conflict. Douglas decided to open their home to a family of boat people. Through a Catholic charity, she arranged for a Vietnamese couple and their children to share her farmhouse until she found permanent housing for them. Once they were established, Douglas helped settle a family -- 12 people in all -- from Laos.
After that, things snowballed. If Douglas could assist this many people, why not more? She teamed up with a resettlement agency the State Department uses, wrote grants and, in 1981, incorporated. "Everybody was willing to help -- the county manager, the churches," she says. There was a wing-and-a-prayer feel to the work; her group might have only 36 hours to find housing for an incoming family, but somehow they provided everything necessary. "It was like it was meant to be," Douglas says.
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