BLAINE, Minn. – (Nov. 5, 2015) – This week, a fire station in Blaine hosted a Culture Competence event geared at educating professionals who work in schools, public health, and law enforcement about cultural differences. The day primarily focused on the Somali culture. “We have a good number of Somali families who are moving to the Anoka County area enrolling in Columbia Heights School District, enrolling in Anoka-Hennepin, enrolling in Elk River, a variety of districts. So we want to make sure we know our families and our students,” said EL Cultural Liaison Kari Xiong.
Nearly 50% of Somalis that live in America live in Minnesota, and most have immigrated here in the last 15 years. In addition to a growing Somali culture, Xiong says that she sees people from many different cultures who speak a wide variety of language every day in the Anoka Hennepin School District. “We do see a variety of different families come through and we have up to 70 languages that we see for Anoka Hennepin and I work at our family welcome center, which means their is a variety of families that come in complete their ESL assessment. The assessment is reading, writing, math. That way we can place them appropriately in the language classes they need for support and additional support if needed, but with that we see a variety of families, Arabic speaking, Hmong, Spanish speakers,” said Xiong.
As they learned about difference across cultures, they also highlighted some simple and basic ideas that everyone can easily keep in mind. “Generally we tend to think we would extend our hand to shake hands with someone that is brand new here and someone you’re just meeting…but not every culture necessarily do touch so I’m also really mindful even though I’d like to shake their hand it’s really being careful. Taking my hand and acknowledging that I see you and I recognize you without actually touching the individual. So that’s a cultural piece I’m learning and a lot of my colleagues are learning as well,” said Xiong.
Along those lines, they said to keep in mind that familiar behaviors may have different meanings depending on who you are interacting with. The Anoka County Immigrant and Refugee Committee hopes to be able to offer more training to more professionals in the future.
