The San Diego school district (like all school districts) is trying to find some budget cuts and one they have proposed is to cut a Somali translator’s time from full time to half time.  The reporter for Voice on San Diego sets up an article to play on our sympathies and gives Ahmed Abdille an opportunity to say why his hours shouldn’t be cut.  Reporter Emily Alpert begins with a recitation of his previous difficult life in Africa.

The 55-year-old translator fled Somalia two decades ago, leaving his job as a linguistics lecturer at the University of Somalia to escape warlords and killings in a country roiled by civil war. In a Kenyan refugee camp without running water, he translated off and on for foreign agencies and collected Somali oral poetry before coming to San Diego just before the new millennium.

Alpert goes on to ask Abdille about his job clearly in an effort to help show how unfair this cut is, but I had to chuckle because Mr. Abdille is so honest (and not at all politically correct) that he tells us much about the Somali culture clash that we have come to know so well at RRW and convinces me they should keep him ( but, not because he had a tough life in Africa).

Most Somalis are illiterate:

The documents that come from the central office are intended for someone who can read and write. But most of the Somalis here are illiterate. I have to put it in common language they can understand.

My child does not have a problem:

When a kid has got some kind of disability, most Somalis, when it comes to special education, they see the (assessment) teams coming together — the school psychologist, the nurse, the teacher, the administrator — most of time they say, “No, my child is not sick, they do not have a problem.”

In Somalia, the only responsibility the parent has is to feed the kid:

Some of the parents cannot understand the system and they get very mad. In Somalia, you send the child to the school. So they think that the teacher, when it comes to behavior, when it comes to teaching, every responsibility is on the teacher. So the parents do nothing, except feeding them.

In America the kids have lots of assignments and parents have to come to school:

When they come to this country things are different. They’re being called to meetings, not like in Somalia. The students have got lots of assignments that the parents have to help.

Somali 14 and 15 year olds can’t hold a pen when they get here (yikes, but they end up driving cabs):

The kids when they come to here, some of them they are 15 or 14. They are placed according to their age. They go to high school even though some of them have never been to school. They start in tenth grade with no knowledge of English or the subjects or even how to handle the pen. It is very hard for them to finish high school. Most of them drop out from school. They just end up driving taxis.

The mother can drive (yikes again!), but she is a little emotionally unstable:

I remember a single mother who was living here. Her boy was disabled. Every time when she came to the school, she was shouting and yelling and nobody understood her. She doesn’t speak good English. Nobody could help.

She can cook and drive, but she’s a little emotionally unstable. It was a culture shock for her. She’d say, “You don’t teach my child well.” She believed the school was picking on her child and mistreating him.

The article says there are an estimated 30,000 Somalis in San Diego.  I think Mr. Abdille should keep his full-time job and help keep us all a little safer.