September 10, 2009

Somali refugees resettled to Pennsylvania by Church World Service are featured in a four and a half-minute "webisode" as part of the Odyssey Networks' Million Minutes for Peace Campaign.

The campaign is working to collect pledges from a million people to join in one minute of prayer for peace at noon September 21 in observance of the United Nations International Day of Peace. CWS is a campaign partner. For more information and to pledge your participation, visit http://www.odysseynetworks.org.

"Prayer is a powerful thing that can bring the world peace," testifies Abdikani Abdi, 19, in the webisode, titled "Messengers of Peace – the Abdi Family" and posted in the Peace Video Festival section of http://www.odysseynetworks.org.

Abdikani's brother Suleban, 17, and their widowed mother Halima also are featured in the webisode. The video also features refugee sisters from Guinea, who tell their own story and then interview the Abdis.

After fleeing civil war and persecution in Somalia, Halima and her children took refuge at Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya. "We spent our life as refugees in Kenya, 17 years," Abdikani said.

The Abdis – including two more brothers, Aden and Ahmed – were accepted into the U.S. refugee program and arrived from Kenya on September 11, 2007. They were resettled by Church World Service to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

"When they arrived, Aden and Abdikani were severely malnourished, and Ahmed had suffered nerve damage for lack of proper medical care at the camp," said Barbara Witmer of CWS-Lancaster.

"A lot of people in the camp (were) so hungry," Abdikani said. Sick and weak, he weighed 110 pounds when he arrived in the United States. Now he weighs 140. As he gained weight, "I got stretch marks," he said.

The family relocated to Buffalo, N.Y., from Lancaster, and now lives in Mechanicsburg, Pa., where Aden is working and Abdikani, Suleban and Ahmed are in school.

The boys' sister had to stay behind in Dadaab. Halima currently is engaged in an intensive effort to get her daughter, now 14, here. "Every time I see her picture, I'm crying," Halima said.

Odyssey Networks is the nation's largest coalition of Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith groups dedicated to media production, and distribution. Odyssey Networks is a service of the National Interfaith Cable Coalition, Inc., established in 1987.

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