Deseret News | 'Here is better,' refugee from Somalia says of Salt Lake

'Here is better,' refugee from Somalia says of Salt Lake

Deseret News

Published: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 12:16 p.m. MDT

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Downstairs, the clock on the living room wall says 10:30, but that's just wishful thinking. The real time is 4:30 a.m. Downtown, in the Little America Hotel, the guests are still sleeping.

Daud Eftin rises in the dark, does his morning prayers, washes up, puts on his uniform: black pants and vest, a crisp white shirt, a tie. He goes into the shed outside the apartment, gets his bicycle, says goodbye to his mother. Now he is riding swiftly through the apartment complex, his white helmet and the sleeves of his white shirt barely visible against the dark blue sky.

At 18, Eftin is helping to support his parents and six siblings by working at the Little America, where he vacuums the halls and cleans bathrooms.

Hotels and vacuum cleaners and bathrooms were among the long list of things Eftin had never seen before arriving in Salt Lake City last December. Eftin and his family are Somali Bantus. Like other Somali refugees, his family fled his country's civil war 11 years ago. But the Bantus, who were captured as slaves from other parts of Africa and taken to Somalia 200 years go, have long been the most marginalized of all Somalis, discriminated in jobs and formal education. In Somalia they lived in remote rural regions, where even doors were a luxury.

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Bantus like Eftin and his family have lived in refugee camps in Kenya for more than a decade, where there was no electricity, no running water, no doorknobs. So the learning curve has been huge for the 100 Bantus who have been relocated to the Salt Lake Valley so far.

But here is Eftin, sitting in the employee break room of Little America on a recent Saturday morning. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cell phone.

"Probably I was so excited when I got a cell phone the first day," he says.

That's how things are. One day your family leaves a third-world life, boards an airplane, arrives in America, and before you know it you can't imagine your life without text messaging. If you're the mother, you soon long for a washing machine, when before you had never had running water.