Community spirit

A few years ago, in a previous job, I worked as a community development worker with our local Somali community.

There's been a fairly significant Somali presence in Liverpool since the early part of the 20th Century owing to the amount of Somali merchant sailors who settled here. But the community expanded considerably following the start of the civil war in 1988 when refugees naturally migrated towards existing Somali communities in the UK.

The community faces all kinds of obstacles in terms of education, employment, housing and health and of course all the difficulties related to their experiences of war, the asylum process and ongoing lack of resources.

And today the UN has declared a famine in parts of Somalia which, understandably, is a huge cause of additional concern...

Merseyside Somali Community Association has been running since 1979 and provides a crucial hub for the community, offering information, advice, lunch for older people and a social gathering space. I have spent many, many days of my life in this building! And most of them were spent working closely with this wonderful woman, Insaf.

Insaf is actually from Sudan, not Somalia, but she's been absolutely instrumental in keeping this Association running - fundraising, organising and getting involved in wider community initiatives. She deserves some sort of award! Instead she gets this write up...

I stopped by to see her this morning when I was early for another meeting in the neighbourhood and managed to have a good chat about how she and her children are doing (one solicitor, one doctor and one just back from a gap year teaching in Sudan and about to start a dentistry course at Leeds University - all of them a credit to her!) and to ask for her thoughts on the official partition of Sudan earlier this month. It was good to catch up with her.