As pop music spills from a speaker, a group of women from the Rochester Refugee Women’s Network (RRWN) put the final touches on this get-together. The event, co-sponsored by Refugees Helping Refugees, officially started an hour earlier, but is running on what the women affectionately call “refugee time.”
Before the trays of Somali food are passed out and the traditional dances performed,13-year-old Rochester-born Asli Yusuf recalls hearing her mother Sahra Ibrahim’s stories of celebrating International Women’s Day in a refugee camp in Mogadishu.