In this turbulent political year, we’ve been exploring the stories of immigrants and their families in Maine. Today, we take you to Lewiston, where a community of African migrants is writing a new chapter in the story of Maine by breathing new life into old farmland.
It’s an unusually hot, hazy and humid day, as the sun beats down on an old hayfield in Lewiston. The grass is dry, brown and overgrown. A hundred years ago, this field would have been lush and green and dotted with dairy cattle.
A group of men, women and children is celebrating in the middle of this 30-acre field, which they’ve just acquired. They are African migrants, mostly from Somalia, and they have come to turn this hayfield into a vegetable farm, producing food for the migrant community and for local sale.
And the people who work the land are rewriting their own stories.
Omasombo Katuka, or Omasombo, as he prefers to be called, arrived in the country about 6 years ago to escape one of the bloodiest civil wars the world has seen, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some estimates put the death toll at more than 5 million.
Millions more Congolese men and women have suffered war crimes, including mass rapes and the displacement of whole communities, despite a peace treaty in 2003.
In those days, Omasombo was a teacher, but as threats grew, he became scared for his family’s safety and fled with them to Tanzania. From there, he came with a wave of immigrants to resettle in Nashville, Tennessee, where he got a night job in a hospital laundry.
But he didn’t like the city. He’d heard about Lewiston and its growing community of African refugees. The family eventually made it to Maine, and he says they plan to stay here and pursue farming, a skill he picked up at the refugee camp.
“I feel good because I’m in the peace, with my family,” says Omasombo, who has been an American citizen for about 6 months. “Here, you have a lot of support, they have community, when you have some idea, they can help you grow it up.”
As a new citizen, Omasombo says he’s not sure if he will vote in the upcoming election, or how he might vote. He says he has been so busy trying to make his farm successful to pay too much attention.
At the moment, Omasombo farms about a quarter acre just over the town line in Lisbon with the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project, which provides land and opportunities for newcomers and refugees like him.
For now, he’s focusing on corn and African eggplant, which looks more like lumpy tomato than the purple vegetable found here.
Omasombo says growing eggplant - and anything else in Maine — has required some adjustment.
“The only problem is here, the season is too short. In Africa the season is so long. You can grow anytime,” he says.
The majority of the people at the gathering to bless the new land are Somali-Bantus. Men wear embroidered hats called taqiyahs and the prevailing dress for women are the colorful shash and garbasaar — the head scarves and shawls that fulfill the Islamic requirement of modesty in dress. The air is redolent with spices from the little meat-filled pastries known as sambusas.
The paperwork says the new acreage is owned cooperatively by four Somali-Bantu farmers, and it gives their names. But given the communal nature of the immigrant farming community, it’s hard to say that the land actually “belongs” to anyone.
It’s an important thing to understand about Somali culture, says Hussein Muktar, a Lisbon-based farmer who is helping out with the new farm site. Multiple people will work the land side by side, plant it, weed it, carry water by hand until a well can be dug, and they’ll share in the harvest.
“Family and friends — important in our culture and religion, so that’s why we come together to live and support each other,” he says.
That’s the way many remember it back in Somalia. Muktar says he thinks on those early years when things were still peaceful, with warm nights in their village beside a river, fishing trips and rows of corn and sorghum tended by the community.
“When the civil war happened in 1992, or in 1990s, we left the country and came to Kenya,” he says.
Muktar describes himself as “about 32.” He spent most of his youth in a Kenyan refugee camp before following the growing tide of migrants toward Maine. He says he will stay here, because with the farming opportunities, he can be what his farming ancestors wanted him to be.
“This is not something we just started. Our great-grandparents choose us, choose for us this hard work,” he says.
Muktar has been a citizen of America for a few years now, and he says he’s looking forward to voting in the upcoming presidential election. He won’t say who he is planning to support, but he says he is frustrated by some of the political rhetoric surrounding not just immigrants, but Muslims as well.
“We are from a country that has a civil war. We don’t want to get into a fight. For us coming here, we feel like it’s safe and home,” he says.
