While mamba drug dealers, pimps and hookers circle outside by a U.S. flag on a fence, young refugees placed in one of Denver’s toughest neighborhoods have taken over a basement hangout for violent men and are building a unique brotherhood for escape and success.
Up to 50 refugees a day flock to this basement Street Fraternity along East Colfax Avenue, aged 14 to 25. They box and work out in a gym. They reflect in a meditation room on brotherhood principles of self-respect, respect for others and treating their place right. They study in a library. They horse around and play ping-pong. They prepare their own food and eat together five nights a week, carrying leftovers home to their families.
“I want to do computer programming — god willing,” said Eugene Karekezi, 23, whose mother carried him as a child out of war-ravaged eastern Congo. He languished for 12 years at United Nations camps in Rwanda. He uses crutches or a wheelchair to navigate the Community College of Aurora. “I’m getting A’s,” he said.
This nonprofit hangout has emerged as an innovation in an increasingly migratory world, where 25 million refugees, who cannot go home due to violence, face rising barriers. It began in 2013 on a mission to get teenagers out of gangs, lost foundation funding, yet now thrives on less than $200,000 a year in donations. Most of the participants are refugees — 40 percent of refugees sent to Colorado are under age 18 — at a time when President Donald Trump has targeted refugees as potential terrorists, which has kindled community fears.
The ailing U.S. government system for resettling a now rapidly shrinking flow of refugees plunks them into deadly urban pockets where perils often rival those they fled overseas, making it harder to assimilate as immigrants traditionally have done. Here in a vice zone straddling Denver and Aurora, gunshots crackle at night.
The Street Frat brotherhood meets, foremost, refugee newcomers’ need to belong somewhere. But these young men also are seizing the safe space to do what they say they can’t do at public high schools – deal with the trauma of what happened to their families back in Myanmar, Liberia, Syria, Congo, Somalia, Afghanistan.
College-bound achievers sorting out the difference between a weighted and unweighted grade-point average gather as equals with kids battling depression in a cannabis fog. And gratitude infuses their activities.
“We were in camp for a few months. I was lucky,” said John Oo, 17, whose family village in Myanmar was burned down by troops before they came to Denver a decade ago. A burning bamboo log fell on him, which has left burn scars on his feet, back and wrist. His father got him out of the fire and later was shot in the head — luckily, Oo said, with the bullet passing through.
His mother, who had fled previous violence to Thailand, already had endured horrific trauma when a drunk man attacked her, snatched Oo’s infant sister, Shin, and stabbed the baby to death.
Oo’s mother has struggled to get back to health while his father commutes to work in Greeley at the JBS meat slaughterhouse. “She’s getting well now. She’s trying to get a job. She’s happier now. She loves cooking. She always makes us taste it, which is something I love about her. She is uneducated, but with her skills she could be doing a lot more than worrying about how all the bills will get paid.”
Meantime, Oo has mastered English and is applying to several universities including Harvard, suddenly voracious in his desire to learn. He’s grown more confident since his family first was resettled in an apartment on Xenia Street and he headed daily to Denver’s Whiteman Elementary School.
“I felt like an outcast. I couldn’t speak English. When the teacher called on me, I couldn’t speak a word. It was embarrassing.” One teacher handed him “tiny little alphabet books” and drove him home after school. At South High School, not knowing other students who could help him navigate, he consistently went to teachers for clarifications after class. “I love learning. I am not going to take education for granted,” Oo said, remembering a skinny boyhood friend from Myanmar who’s been stuck for 10 years in a refugee camp.
After giving a detailed political geography lesson over a map in the hangout, he sits with a laptop to study for finals, comfortable in the noisy multinational mix of refugees.
At South High, Oo hangs out with privileged high-achievers, and says he wants to learn from all perspectives. “But me, I’m an immigrant. I can hang out with them at school. … I want to be able to major in medicine. Then go back to the Karen in Burma and build medical clinics in villages.”
When the hangout opened four years ago to help gang members caught up in violence, refugees who played soccer and basketball on courts nearby became the most active participants. They regularly went to the basement and transformed it into their place.
“These are some of the most driven kids you will find because their families’ future depends on these young men. They want to get up out of here,” said co-founder and program coordinator Levon Lyles, one of two paid staffers at Street Frat. “They’re consumed with doing good in school. A lot is riding on them doing good. These guys are concerned with helping their families.”
Some are close to being able to do that. And many are starting to dream of becoming prosecutors of war criminals, business entrepreneurs, music performers and athletes.
“Where I was born, music is not paid. I would like to be famous, for my country,” said Ram Finisha, 21, whose grandmother brought him from ethnic conflict in Burundi to a camp in Tanzania. His mother stayed in Burundi. His hotel work and shared accommodations in Denver have allowed him to send her $300 a month, hoping it will help her heart trouble, while working here toward making a demo video of his music and dance performances.
Others are struggling to assimilate: Framed photos in the meditation room memorialize two who were shot by police. A few members who were part of a burglary ring and got busted moved to prisons. A couple of years ago, six boys got hooked on synthetic cannabis, known on the street as “mamba” or “spice,” leading to information sessions on substance abuse.
The Trump administration’s tilt against immigration has made U.S. resettlement uncertain just as global demands for safe haven are rising with a record 65 million people worldwide forcibly uprooted. Only about 250,000 of the 25 million who are classified as refugees have been resettled, mostly in poor next-door nations. Trump officials cut the maximum number of refugees allowed into the U.S. to 45,000 a year, down from 110,000 last year. The latest government data show that the flow of refugees has slowed to a trickle — 1,640 since Oct. 1 — even though federal courts have invalidated parts of Trump’s refugee bans.
Colorado agencies anticipated 2,000 refugees would arrive over the next year, starting Oct. 1, but have recorded only 33 new arrivals, state refugee coordinator Kit Taintor said.
The dwindling flows mean less funding for agencies, forcing cuts in caseworkers who traditionally helped refugees assimilate around Colorado. “It creates sadness, that a program you know works so well cannot operate to its full ability,” she said.
Less help from government-backed resettlement agencies translates to greater demand for the Street Frat, where co-founder Dave Stalls and his colleagues are struggling to keep teens safe. It’s gotten to the point they’re considering getting concealed carry permits to carry guns as protection, if necessary, following a recent gun-threat incident outside their door.
“The refugees come from horrific violence and land in refugee camps for years. Then they are plucked up, put here — bam — in the most violent neighborhood in the Rocky Mountain region,” said Stalls, a 6-foot-5 two-time Super Bowl-winning defensive tackle and end for the Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Raiders with experience in city government and running urban gang youth centers.
“This is, number one, just a place to come and be welcome,” Stalls said. “It is a place to grow up. And, if they are in here at night, they are not out there.”
The Street Frat basement, rented for $1,800 a month from Disabled American Veterans, stays open 4 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Mothers who worry about their sons often come in and inspect.
No equivalent has been developed for refugee girls, and some of them come here and occasionally are fed. One whose brother came here continues to make it her second home.
Refugee social work expert Westy Egmont, director of Boston College’s Integration Lab, devoted to work around the challenge of assimilating newcomers, called the Denver Street Frat promising as a place to help keep refugee teens out of trouble and help them assimilate rapidly.
“Kids left on their own acculturate much faster than their parents and often feel so dissimilar from their family. They lose their natural bond of respect for their parents,” Egmont said. “So it is critical to find a palatable alternative, like this.”
Otherwise, teens can feel compelled to form new street gangs “that become the alternative family,” he said, referring to incidents involving refugees from Southeast Asia.
Immigrants — particularly refugees — “have very low crime rates and high motivation and high education,” Egmont said. “We still have kids who lose their educational footing, who are early dropouts. But most refugees do remarkably well in their upward mobility and achievement.”
In the basement gym, boys lined up last week for workouts led by aspiring lawyer Amadou Bilify, 29, who once was a scared kid amid shelling, seeing shot-out windows and stepping over bodies to escape Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.
Bility helped set up Street Frat with executive director Yoal Ghebremeskel, a refugee from Eritrea who graduated from South High and, as a 2003 Daniels Scholar, graduated from the University of Denver. Bility studied criminal justice at Johnson & Wales University and aims to work, eventually, for the UN-backed International Criminal Court.
His goal is to prosecute war criminals back in West Africa. “They are ruining things for a lot of kids, not just me,” Bility said. “I wasn’t able to experience that mother, father and son time with my parents because of the war.”
On a recent evening, Ghebremeskel dropped into the gym to box a bit with aspiring young fighters. Nearby at computers, Asian kids played games. And a group of Nepali kids, hair dyed blond, flicked chips around a carrom board.
Meals begin after a minute of silence, not religious, though prayers are welcome. The refugees acknowledge water, food, shelter, camaraderie. “It is valuable to look back into your life, see how much you have overcome, where you are going, and be thankful we are here in the present enjoying a hot meal,” Bility said.
“I am looking to be a pro athlete — basketball,” said Mubashir Yusuf, 16, whose mother made it to the U.S. from Somalia via South Africa in 2009. Now 5-10, he plays point guard at Thomas Jefferson High School and also maintains a 3.2 GPA . He’s a junior, thinking about taking college admission tests and finding an exceptional internship.
“I also always have wanted to be an engineer. I’ve got to be good in math and sciences for that.” he said, adding that even though he’s doing pretty well, he sometimes feels as if “they just don’t believe in you” at school.
“I am more comfortable over here,” Yusuf said. “We’re a brotherhood. And here there is peace.”
