March 3-9, 2005

cover story

Hotel ACANA

THE ASSIMILATOR: Voffee Jabateh wants to make sure immigrants have more help than he did upon arriving from Liberia 15 years ago. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

A West Philly group helps African immigrants reach for their American dream.

By Hamida Kinge

Early on a cold Saturday evening in February, at the door of a small gray rowhouse in Southwest Philadelphia, an elderly woman in a green patterned scarf answers the door. She is Katourah Kegbeh, a 70-year-old Liberian refugee. As soon as Voffee Jabateh, a tall, affable social worker and the founder of the African Culture Alliance of North America (ACANA), walks in and says hello, Kegbeh's face lights up, as do those of the house's other three residents.

Though they barely know him, they greet Jabateh with hearty hugs and offers of food. It's their way of saying thanks to Jabateh and ACANA, both vital figures in the African immigrant and refugee population in Southwest and West Philadelphia.

As the group eats fufu soup, a West African stew, Kegbeh, who came to the U.S. four years ago, speaks lovingly of ACANA in a Liberian patois.

"They are my mother. They are my father," she says of the only African immigrant-operated social services organization in the region. . "They helped me with [finding clothing], with hospital. ACANA put food in this house, bread, milk. They take me everywhere, even to [the] immigration [office]. Nothing is too good that they can't give us."

Back home, Kegbeh didn't need others' help: She worked as a matron for Internal Affairs, which meant she helped arrange lodging for visiting politicians, before war forced her to flee. Now, she is cut off from her relatives but lives with a surrogate family of Liberian refugees, including a quiet, elderly husband and wife, and a bright-eyed woman in her 50s named Sophie Sirleaf, a student in ACANA's adult education classes.

"Before ACANA, the needs of Africans who settled in the region were not being met," explains Jabateh. He founded ACANA six years ago as a cultural establishment, but because of his social work background, "we started drifting into social services."

"ACANA is culturally sensitive," he says. "Our program is the only program here that the people can come to with the level of comfort because we share the same experiences as Africans."

Aloysius Jappah, ACANA's executive director and a Liberian asylee, adds, "We have a preferred affinity with this specialized population of being able to provide the kind of services needed to transform them into very productive citizens."

Much like the Hotel Mille Colinnes in Hotel Rwanda (and in the real-life circumstance), if you are an African and you walk into the ACANA office, you will not get turned away, no matter your issue, age or country of origin. And you need not make an appointment.

The ACANA office sits on Chester Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia between 55th and 56th streets amid a corridor of small businesses, including a discount wig shop, a Caribbean eatery, a place to buy every oil and incense fragrance imaginable, and Chinese takeout joints.

Each night, as neighborhood businesses owners pull down their steel gates, the brightly-lit ACANA office stays open. On weeknights after the administrative staff goes home, it's converted into a makeshift classroom. In the center of the moderately sized mauve-colored room at a conference table sits a group of African women participating in an adult-education class. Meanwhile, in one of the handful of office cubicles, a group of African teens learns about film production.

For Jabateh, ACANA is doing for others what no one could do for him when he arrived from Liberia 15 years ago. Back home, he was an entrepreneur; he owned JITCO, an import/export company and used-car business that employed 25 people. But none of the rules that applied there applied here. His first job in the United States was washing dishes for KFC, "because, at that time, I didn't know where to turn."

Luckily, he didn't resign himself to menial jobs. He quit KFC after a few weeks, and not long after, having brought over a degree in sociology, found work as a mental health counselor. Five years later, he met a Liberian woman who informed him he was eligible to work for the Department of Human Services, where he's been a social worker for 10 years. He'll also receive a master's degree in social work in May from Temple University.

Today, ACANA serves nearly 800 clients per year, a little over half of which are refugees and asylees. Their services include coaching clients on how to interview for jobs and providing them with job listings. ACANA connects clients with health-care services; housing, utility and food assistance (through their food bank); and certified people to help them apply for their green cards and family reunification. The group also guides immigrants through mortgage and student-loan applications, finding scholarship information and enrolling children in local schools.

John Kidane recently left his position as communication director at the Nationalities Services Center, a local agency that resettles immigrants from all nations, to become deputy director at ACANA. Friendly but direct, Kidane was once a refugee from Ethiopa. After taking part in the Eritrean independence movement, Kidane fled to Sudan in 1980, where he worked for Chevron Oil until his resettlement application was approved. His daily work at ACANA involves going the extra mile — literally — to ensure Africans get what they need.

"Say someone wants to apply for social security and doesn't know the rules," explains Kidane. "I will often go to the office with them."

He holds up a large sketch of a basement that he drew for a Mauritanian asylee who was opening a store and needed the sketch for city code purposes.

"The man didn't know how to draw the floor plan," Kidane says.

The greater Philadelphia area is home to tens of thousands of African immigrants and refugees. According to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, community-leader estimates from a few years ago placed the population between 40,000 and 55,000. For the most part, they settle in West and Southwest Philadelphia, with Nigerian and Sudanese enclaves in the Northeast. Of these immigrants, more than half are refugees or asylees, the largest of those numbers being from Liberia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Sierra Leone. The professions of local Africans are incredibly diverse. They include doctors, parking attendants, restaurant owners, taxi drivers, engineers and braiding-salon workers.

In fact, African immigrants are one of the fastest growing immigrant populations in the U.S. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, New York City draws the most Africans, with a population of more than 100,000. Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Boston and Los Angeles are not far behind.

Statistically, Africans have the highest educational levels among all immigrants to the United States. On average, they have more than three years of college, and more than half are college graduates upon arrival. Still, many Africans experience a decrease in job status because their credentials from home are not accepted here. Jabateh uses cab drivers as a prime example. "There are so many Africans who are driving cabs. Ask them and they will tell you they have a master's degree or a Ph.D., but why are they driving cabs? Once you sit there and make your first hundred bucks, you say, "Well, why do I need to look for a job? This is my job.' And then one day you look around and you're stuck."

If African immigrants in Philadelphia are passing up unskilled work for more advanced positions, ACANA is at least partially to thank. And children are no less a priority to them than adults.

"We just don't allow ourselves to turn kids away when we know all of them need attention," Jabateh says.

Witness the after-school program. Funded by Children's Investment Strategy to cover 50 kids, ACANA has registered about 80. The program, which takes place at Shaw Middle School, provides intensive tutoring to children who may have missed years of school from living in refugee camps.

Another children's program is crisis treatment. Those who have issues of trauma from war can talk one-on-one with a Children's Crisis Treatment Center (CCTC) counselor. Refugee children experience added trauma being teased by peers for lacking age-appropriate education.

"Because many of the children have lost schooling, they can get ridiculed, even beat up," says Jabateh.

The ACANA/CCTC collaboration started when an African student was beaten so badly by an American student that a teacher had to take him to the emergency room. From then on, ACANA knew that an on-site counselor was essential.

Jabateh and Kidane say there are reasons African resettlement has not been easy in the U.S. and other Western countries. Until 1980, the U.S. did not accept African refugees. That year, Congress passed the Refugee Resettlement Act, which allowed 900 Africans to make their lives in America. Staggeringly, around the same time, 55,000 European asylees were flooding in. More than a decade later, after the genocide in Rwanda left nearly one million Tutsis dead, the U.S. allowed only 27 Tutsis to resettle here.

A few years later, genocide was developing in the former Yugoslavia. President Bill Clinton allowed Kosovar refugees easy access into the U.S. According to Kidane, a recognized national expert on Kosovar refugees, they were processed quite differently than arriving Africans.

"The Kosovars were allowed to bring acquaintances," whereas Africans could not, he says. "The Kosovars weren't even processed until they got to Fort Dix. And I was happy they got that treatment, because I'm an advocate for refugees, but Africans weren't given that kind of priority."

Nevertheless, before the end of his second term, Clinton would push African refugee resettlement to 21,000.

"Have you seen Hotel Rwanda?" asks Jabateh, citing U.S. apathy toward the massacre of one million Africans. "The United States has not had a set policy on black African people. There is a cultural factor, part of that is that the criteria that define foster care are completely different in Africa than here."

The guiding principles behind the often-used African proverb, "it takes a village to raise a child," are very much alive on the African continent.

"For example, if I raise my sister's daughter and put her through school, [when I arrive] here, I am not allowed to say she's my daughter. U.S. immigration has not been fair in trying to understand this cultural dynamic," says Jabateh.

As a result of this broader sense of family, cites Jabateh, "Immigration looks at the African cases as flawed. They just throw them out. They don't believe those being interviewed and no one has warned applicants of this." In a dire situation where African children have lost one or both of their parents to war and a guardian tries to bring them over here, the INS may not honor the relationship.

If you ask Aloysius Jappah, executive director of ACANA, about the challenges of securing adequate funding, he will answer your question frankly. Jappah arrived in Philadelphia in 2001 as an educated Liberian refugee. He has since acquired a master's degree in criminal justice from Saint Joseph's University and a master's certificate in project management from Villanova.

"Firstly," says Jappah, "as an institution between the infancy and intermediate stages of organizational development, ACANA does not have all the tools that funders require. They [want] you [to] have a strategic plan, a fiscal policy, an employee manual. Now, to acquire this, you must have a well-designed fiscal management system, and as a new institution that is very difficult."

The second challenge, Jappah says, is one specific to the African population.

"When it comes to writing credible proposals, you need empirical data," he says. "Now, unfortunately, there's no data specific on the target population we serve. [The U.S. Census] will label you "black' or "African-American.' There's no specific classification for Africans. You can find Asians, you can find other classifications, but not African."

Currently, the organization receives funding from the state to serve 80 refugees per year. But their policy of not turning clients away has them serving hundreds more. Jabateh testifies to Jappah's statements on funding efforts, saying, "We keep giving funders hard facts on who we're helping, names and addresses, and even inviting funders to come out and see for themselves the acute need."

ACANA hopes to increase federal funding by registering with the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, founded in 2002, is another new immigrant social services organization in the city. Kidane says they should work closely with ACANA.

"Local agencies, like the Welcoming Center and others, should utilize ACANA's insight into the African experience and consider collaborating with us in the areas of funding for refugee services," he says.

The Nationalities Services Center in downtown Philadelphia is a well-funded, established local resettlement agency. It has been around for 80 years and serves immigrants and refugees of all nationalities. Another resettlement agency, which has a specialized program for arriving Africans, is Lutheran Children and Family Services. They've been in the Southwest Philadelphia community for 50 years. But, according to Jabateh, many of Lutheran's clients are leaving and coming to ACANA for help because of its familiarity with and sensitivity to clients' experiences.

"If [a client has an issue that] made them lose sleep the night before, they want an answer right away," he says. "They don't want somebody to tell them, "Fill out a form and come back next week.'"

City Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell has been a strong political supporter of ACANA's work. With her help, the next two years will be all about expansion.

"We want to create a marketplace. Back home we have something like Reading Terminal Market where some of the older women sell their products. But here, they're not used to selling on the streets," he says. At 52nd and Chester, a new ACANA structure, an annex, will be built over the next two years. ACANA was recently awarded a grant from the Community Design Collaborative for the building's architectural engineering. The project involves a marketplace, an arts and culture center that seats 300 to 500 people and a recording studio for African artists. There will be a business development training center, including job training and a whole floor for social services.

"We have overgrown this space," admits Jabateh, "If we are going to survive, we have to plan to expand."

This comes as welcome news to Katourah Kegbeh, who says, "Back home, we are together. I'm not used to being alone. I'm a mother with nine children, 27 grandchildren."

With ACANA quickly becoming an anchor in Southwest Philadelphia, women like Kegbeh will get a chance to regain the sense of community they recently lost.

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