By the end of October, the firings had started to take a visible toll. Imam Omar Mussa, of the Greeley Islamic Center on 8th Avenue, estimated that 70 to 100 Somalis had left his mosque. "Not by choice," he wrote in an e-mail to Westword. "They left the mosque because they had to leave the city in order to make a decent living."
The only African/Middle Eastern restaurant in town had closed too. Dhies and a Somali business partner, Mohamed Farey, had bought a restaurant on 8th Avenue called the Burrito, where they served a mix of burritos, chicken shawarma, spicy basmati rice and sweet, milky tea. But it only lasted five months.
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Isse and several current Swift workers say that Swift officials, while hiring some new employees, have stopped hiring Somali applicants. "Nobody stays here if they don't have jobs," Dhies says. "It's hard to get a job here in Greeley."
At the Aspen Apartments on 29th Street Road, the mood is warm but subdued. The two-story complex, with balconies designed for chatting across the courtyard, had been completely filled a few weeks earlier. But six of the 24 apartments were vacated after the firings, according to the manager, who identifies himself only as David. He expects two more to be empty soon. "It's just been tough," he says. "We were full, and then, after all the firings and stuff like that, people just couldn't afford to pay their rent."
A lanky, grinning sixteen-year-old soccer fiend named Hajir Abdi bounds out onto the balcony to join the conversation. He's a junior at Greeley West High School and moved here a year ago from Kansas City. But both his mom and dad were fired from Swift, and their lack of English skills made it nearly impossible to find another job in Greeley, so this morning, he had to say goodbye to his dad, who left to work at a Tyson Foods plant in Nebraska. Hajir stayed behind with his mother, hoping to finish school.
Mary-Ann Adow, Hajir's nineteen-year-old classmate, is in an even worse predicament. She grew up in a crowded Kenyan refugee camp, sleeping in a hut made of tree branches and plastic covering, standing in endless lines for food and water. There were no jobs in the camp, so her parents sold wood to earn money. Still, it wasn't enough to pay for school for their fourteen children.
When they finally made it to America in 2005, her family was resettled in Minnesota. Adow didn't speak any English and found school to be a constant challenge. In July, she moved to Greeley to live with her uncle and try the schools here. She's since become the de facto mayor of the Aspen apartment complex, strutting around in a red, white and blue headscarf, chatting with everyone and proudly showing off her English skills by translating stories. She talks of going to college and becoming a lawyer to help people like the Swift workers, and "to show the people the right thing; they have to do it."
But even Adow's future in Greeley is uncertain. When her uncle was fired from Swift, he moved to Denver to look for a new job. Adow wanted to stay in Greeley and finish school, so she tried to apply for a subsidized apartment. But there were none available, and she couldn't find a part-time job to earn more money. So now she's planning to apply for subsidized housing in Denver and transfer to a school there.
This is far better, she believes, than working at a meatpacking plant. Her friends who still work at Swift have almost nothing good to say about it.
"[It's] very screwed up, a lot of shit going on there," says a neighbor named Jamal. He works the late shift at the plant while also taking pharmacy classes at Aims Community College and doing part-time translation work. He believes that new non-Somali workers are being hired daily at Swift while Somalis are being told there are no jobs. "This is very wrong," he says. "It is against the law."
Muna, a tiny, shy woman who keeps wrapping her scarf more tightly around her head as she talks, says that Somalis have to ask permission to use the bathroom, while other workers can just leave. Once, when one of her friends was praying on her knees with her head on the floor, someone put a foot on her friend's head, Muna says. Zuheyra says that one day a Hispanic woman hit a Somali woman in the face with a piece of meat.
"If I find another job, I will leave," Muna says through Adow's translation.
On the first truly cold night of the year, several Somali women gather in a friend's apartment, trying to keep warm. Adow introduces them all as her aunties and cousins. They are relaxed here, out of view of the men, sprawled on colorful rugs, some without their head scarves.
Zuheyra looks especially young in her gold earrings and gray sweatpants, her auburn-streaked hair exposed. She is one of the Somalis who returned to Swift the Tuesday after the walkout, so she still has a job. But it's not one she enjoys. There are nights when cries at the thought of going back to work the next day, and times when she feels as if she's still fasting because the lunch breaks are so short — barely fifteen minutes, she says — so that by the time she removes her safety gear she doesn't have time to eat.
Back home, Muslim women aren't even allowed to work. Here, only the desire to earn money to support her family keeps Zuheyra motivated. "I see the check and [think], 'Maybe it's easy tomorrow.' But it's not easy still," she says.
