AG shows community engagement in Lynn

LYNN – Fatna Mohamud is unemployed, she lives in a homeless shelter and she endured beatings in her homeland that resulted in back injuries. But she was glad to hear what state Attorney General Maura Healey told her on Tuesday.”She told me, ?Here, people are treated equally.’ I am very happy with her explanation,” said Mohamud.Healey spent an hour in the New American Center on Wheeler Street, telling Mohamud, a native of northeast Africa’s Darfur region, and 60 other people from a dozen countries living in Lynn why part of her job involves helping and protecting refugees.”There are people out there who want to take advantage of you, who want to take your money. I need your help: Don’t be afraid to come forward with your problems,” she said.Since taking office in January, Healey has refocused her office’s mission to include a newly created “community engagement division” that encompasses refugee rights.Refugee agencies arranged for 500 people around the world to relocate from their homelands or refugee camps to Lynn in 2014. The International Institute of New England handled most of those relocations, according to Ashley Wellbrock, an Institute refugee resettlement coordinator.More than 80 percent of recently arrived immigrants are from Iraq, Wellbrock said, and other refugees include Afghans who worked for the United States government in their native land.Lynn resident Mani Biswa came to the United States from Bhutan, a small Asian nation, in 2008 after spending 17 years in a refugee camp. He credited the New American Center with guiding him to English-language programs and job and education assistance.”The way to our U.S. life was through this center. We have a place to live, food to eat. We are very happy,” Biswa said.Mohamud is not as fortunate. She lived in a village fought over by warring factions 10 years ago. A severe beating left her with a back injury and she fled with her family to a refugee camp in Kenya. She lives in Lynn with her four daughters and two sons, but not all of the children go to school or hold jobs.”The most important thing now is to settle down,” she said through translator James Modi.Modi told Healey how his fellow southern Southern refugees and Congolese, Somali, Russian, Cuban and other refugees work together to get housing, job assistance and education help.”The beauty of what we have here in the New American Center is cooperation. We all pull together,” Modi said.Healey told Mohamud, Biswa and other refugees her office is on the watch for housing and wage discrimination against refugees.”Some of you didn’t exactly want to come here, but you had to flee and leave behind people you loved. I want you to know we are here to think about ways we can help,” she said.