Somali family with 10 children hopes to find a handicapped-accessible home

Kathryn Marchocki:

The sun rises outside Ibrahim Mohamed’s apartment to the soft hissing of the kitchen gas stove and six of his children gently unstrapping their 9-year-old sister from her leg braces in the living room.

Born with cerebral palsy, Habibo Khamis sits partly upright on the couch as her siblings fuss over her tiny legs, which have never been able to walk, jump, run or play.

She is one of 10 children — ages 3 to 18 — in the Somali Bantu family that resettled with their parents to Manchester in February from a Kenyan refugee camp.

“When we come from the refugee camps, we were very excited to be in the United States of America. It was our dream,” said Mohamed, 40, through interpreter Abdusalam Jama.

But Mohamed said the second-floor 414 Manchester St. apartment where the resettlement agency placed his family has become an obstacle and potential safety hazard for his wheelchair-bound daughter.

He is appealing to the Manchester community to help him find an apartment better suited to his daughter’s disability.

Each morning, Mohamed carries Habibo’s wheelchair into the small landing outside the apartment, hoists it over his head and steps backward down the 14 narrow, wooden stairs. Outside, he descends another flight of eight concrete steps before placing the chair on the front sidewalk.

Mohamed runs back inside and returns with Habibo. He carries the approximately 40-pound child downstairs before placing her in the wheelchair in time for the handicapped-accessible school bus to bring the third-grader to school.

He repeats the ritual at least once more each day when Habibo returns from school.

“We are really concerned about their safety because the winter is coming and if there should be an emergency, like a fire,” said Jama, project manager with the Somali Development Center in Manchester who is studying for his master’s degree in international community economic development at Southern New Hampshire University.

“I am all the time worrying,” Mohamed added. “I cannot imagine falling down the stairs while carrying Habibo.”

Jama produced an Oct. 12 letter from Dartmouth-Hitchcock clinic in Manchester that says it is “medically necessary” for the family to find a new apartment.

The letter also said the second-floor apartment limits Habibo’s “life activities.”

Jama and Mohamed said the apartment restricts Habibo’s ability to socialize with others and often prevents her from playing outside with her siblings.

The International Institute of New Hampshire has been searching for a large, wheelchair-accessible apartment since the agency resettled the family here, said its director Anne Sanderson.

“We haven’t given up. But most of the landlords we work with don’t have apartments big enough to accommodate the family to begin with,” Sanderson said.

“Maybe there is somebody in Manchester with a big heart and a big apartment,” she added.

The U.S. State Department assigned the family to Manchester in order to keep Somali Bantu refugees who came from the same villages and regions together, Sanderson said.

Mohamed, who had a job changing tires on vehicles at a Somali sugar factory, said living in the apartment also means he can’t work since he is the only one strong enough to carry the wheelchair up and down the stairs. Instead, his wife works as a housekeeper.

“That’s my dilemma. I have to work to take care of my family and to take care of my wife, but also I have to take care of my children, especially Habibo,” Mohamed said.

“He is a wonderful dad,” Sanderson said. “He is so good with her. But he is limited (in what he can do).”

The Disabilities Rights Center Inc. in Concord said that it researched federal laws for refugee resettlement and the state’s refugee resettlement plan to see if the International Institute is legally obligated to provide the family with wheelchair-accessible housing.

“I am sorry to say we cannot find anything in the law that requires the International Institute to locate or provide accessible housing,” the center’s outreach advocacy specialist Julie Freeman-Woolpert replied.

She noted there is one public housing apartment that is wheelchair-accessible and large enough for Mohamed’s family. But it is occupied and not expected to become available, she added.

Maybe if they didn't have ten children, it would be easier for them to find a home.

Winter means different adjustments for Somali immigrants