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Discord in their homeland divides Ivory Coast immigrants living here.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

When Alassane Dramane Ouattara’s opponents wanted to discredit him in his bid for president of Ivory Coast in 1995, they looked to Philadelphia for material.

Their operatives dug up the Wharton School graduate’s marriage certificate, issued by Pennsylvania in 1966. Detractors said it proved that Ouattara, a former prime minister, was ineligible because he was not born in Ivory Coast. Supporters swore the certificate had been doctored, and Ivorian newspapers printed a copy to prove the point.

The intrigue over the certificate is not the only way the crisis in the former French colony, also called Cote d’Ivoire, has played out in Philadelphia.

Civil war fractured the West African nation in 2002, and 5,000 miles away, on Baltimore Avenue – a hub for African immigrants – the same religious and tribal fault lines cracked open. Hair-braiders, cabbies and restaurants lost customers wary of the owners’ sympathies.

The conflict in Ivory Coast has divided immigrants in the region and across the United States in a way that risks fueling further discord at home.

Three years after troops from the mostly Muslim north mutinied, the battle lines still are drawn. Muslims rose up in 2002 because, they contended, they had been denied political power for decades by the Christian elite in the resource-rich south. French peacekeepers now mind a line of control that separates Muslim from Christian, north from south, rebel from loyalist.

This region’s contingent of Ivorians – 3,000 to 5,000, according to the country’s embassy in Washington – is not the largest in the United States but, by many accounts, it is the most passionate and most partisan.

La Calebasse, a restaurant on Baltimore Avenue, used to be a hangout and listening post for all of the region’s Ivorian immigrants. Within its warm, yellow walls, expats used to argue and exchange gossip about what was going on back home over steaming plates of peanut stew.

Now, from behind the counter, Ma Cisse holds a finger to her lips and warns in a whisper: “Don’t talk politics in here.” She has good reason to censor the chatter. Customers came to blows after the war, and had to be thrown out. Others boycotted the restaurant. It now has 20 fewer customers a day.

“They said: ‘Coming here is like giving money to the enemy,’ ” owner Daou Cisse said. “It’s not good to see people from your country, people you used to talk and laugh with, avoid you.”

The war siphoned off 30 percent of the Christian clients of International Boutique, a West Philadelphia beauty salon run by Muslims. “They don’t trust us,” owner Adja Sangare said, “and we don’t trust them either.”

The troubles began in 1993. Ivory Coast had been politically stable and, as one of the world’s largest cocoa and coffee producers, an economic powerhouse on the continent. Then Felix Houphouet-Boigny, president for three decades, died, sparking a succession battle.

In the next decade, the country that was once the envy of West Africa careened along a road of political turbulence that finally exploded into civil war. Its politicians fought bitterly over the question of Ivoirite – or who, in a country that had attracted generations of immigrants, had a rightful claim to Ivorian identity. The fight took on a religious and ethnic cast, with Muslims belonging to the northern Dioula tribe of traders portrayed as outsiders and, after the 9/11 attacks, even as terrorists.

Ouattara, the former Philadelphian and would-be president who now lives in exile in Paris, became the flag bearer for this group.
The mere mention of his name among Ivorians in Philadelphia quickens the collective pulse in a room: Supporters rush to retrievetheir copy of his marriage certificate, and detractors produce a directory of African students in the United States that, damningly, lists him as a scholar from Burkina Faso – a neighboring country that, to the ire of Ivorians, has flooded their country with workers.

Each of Ivory Coast’s major political parties, including Ouattara’s Rally of the Republicans (RDR), has a chapter in the Philadelphia area with an elected leader and a fund-raising arm.

“As far as people trying to do things for their political parties, Philadelphia is the busiest place,” said Franck Bamba, spokesman for the Ivorian Embassy in Washington.

The parties periodically picket the United Nations and the French and Ivorian Embassies. And they have raised thousands of dollars for medical supplies, food, shoes and – allegedly – even arms for their factions.

Coffie Sosthene, a South Philadelphia High School teacher with ramrod posture and a disciplinarian’s mien, keeps the eyes of his “party militants” on the prize: getting out the overseas vote for the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast-African Democratic Rally during elections that the U.N. hopes to facilitate by October.
But Sosthene avoids canvassing on Baltimore Avenue. Political opponents have argued with him there, and it has gotten physical.

“Because I happen to be an Akan [a southern tribe], I become an enemy to the people,” he said. “I’m a symbol of what they went through in the Ivory Coast.”

Through remittances and by flexing political muscles, the immigrants feed the conflict at home, even as it saps their strength here. The interplay shows up a rough edge to the connectedness that globalization allows.

“The community here is both a victim of and an actor in the war,” says Eric Edi, head of the Cote d’Ivoire Association of the Delaware Valley, a mutual-aid group that, postwar, has lost members.

The split has made it harder for the community – which includes refugees and illegals, people with no medical insurance, and people juggling jobs – to meet its needs.

The Ivorians have even held rival independence day festivals, and their women belong to rival “kitty clubs,” which pool money for births and deaths using the African tontine system.

“This is how we got divided a little bit, stopped a little bit, because of issues back home,” said Alassane Ouattara, an RDR member who is not related to the exiled politician. He used to lead the association but, like most Muslim and northern Ivorians, no longer even belongs.

Edi and Ouattara have retreated to separate corners of the Ivorian community: a storefront church in Logan where Edi leads the choir in French, and a converted mosque on Girard Avenue where Ouattara translates sermons from Dioula. Both flocks pray for peace, but the imam and the pastor do not even know each other.

Abu Bakr Fofana, spokesman in exile for all imams in Ivory Coast, explains: “We can have some friends [from the other side]… but not too close.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

As the bus approached Philadelphia’s Northeast, where houses are arrayed with attractive gardens and even more attractive price tags, passenger Wen Chen pitched a friend in New York City.

“Philadelphia houses are so cheap,” she chatted into her cell phone in Chinese. “It’s easy to buy.”

The 38-year-old waitress, who moved here a year ago, was on her way home from a visit to relatives via a newborn bus line that runs from the Roosevelt Mall on Cottman Avenue to Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Launched a month ago, with a fleet of two and an owner who doubles as driver, Universe Bus Line is one sign of a slow, quiet resuscitation of a neighborhood by an intravenous flow of immigrants, many of them relocating from New York City.

Immigration advocates have long argued that Philadelphia, a former hub for factories and foreigners, could stem its population loss by recruiting immigrants. Other cities, such as Boston, have used immigration as a strategy for urban renewal.

It appears immigrants are arriving even without a plan to lure them. According to a U.S. Census Bureau report released last week, the foreign-born last year were 11 percent of the city population, a jump from 9 percent in 2000.

In Oxford Circle and other areas of the Northeast, cheaper housing appears to be the draw.

At least four realty agencies have opened near Cottman Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard in the last two years. The Chinese characters on their storefronts hint at marked ethnic change in the neighborhood. In 2000, only about 190 people born in China lived in or around Oxford Circle, of 10,000 citywide. Two of the realty agencies alone have sold three times that number of houses to Chinese-born clients.

Target Realty has sold more than 400 properties in three Northeast zip codes since opening an office on Bustleton Avenue in March 2004. Its brokers say rowhouses that would have fetched $80,000 in early 2004 now go for double that, and real estate that idled on the market for months gets snapped up in days. Almost all the buyers are Chinese-born New Yorkers.

“They can’t even buy a bathroom in New York for the [same] price,” Yvonne Hu, the company’s owner, said. “There are multiple offers because there’s so much demand.”

Word-of-mouth, long part of the creation lore for ethnic enclaves, has driven the move. House hunters approach Jack Kong – whose Cottman First Realty has closed on 250 houses since opening in 2004 – with a specific request.

“They’ll say, ‘I want 19149,’ ” he said. “They’re looking for that zip code… because their friend says so.”

That zip code puts transplants within walking distance of the Roosevelt Mall, the Universe Bus Line, and the fledgling Wing Hing grocery, where smoky circles of elderly Chinese men play backgammon at a folding table every day.

The influx has been so dramatic that nearby Solis-Cohen Elementary School converted book closets into classrooms and added two trailers in a parking lot for 250 more students – half of them new residents.

“The people who’ve resided here for a long time are passing away or moving to retirement communities,” said Joseph Baum, the school’s principal. “And they are being replaced by families with children.”

The Chinese student population alone doubled to about 200 – 20 percent of the school – in the last year. Most came from New York, said Yiquan Xuan, a Chinese-speaking counselor’s assistant at the school.

A dozen families who relocated said they left cramped, rented quarters in New York to become homeowners here.

Wen Chen, the Philadelphia booster on the bus, has been longing for a home more like the one she had on the banks of the Ming River in Fujian, the province once home to many of the Northeast newcomers.

After 15 years in the United States, the mother of two preadolescent boys was ready for her own house in a quiet neighborhood. As she and her husband hunt for it, they are living with relatives and working at China Ruby, a Cottman Avenue restaurant.

For the $1,000 a month they paid to share a house in Brooklyn with two other families, “in Philadelphia, you can own the whole house,” she said. “Everything is yours already, so it’s much better.”

Jin Xiu Wang, 32, and her husband, Jin Hui Zhu, 32 – a cashier and a cook at Chez Elena Wu in Voorhees – bought a $100,000 rowhouse a few blocks from Solis-Cohen in March 2004. The family of four had been paying $1,500 for an apartment.

“In New York, the place is too small. [Here,] it’s very nice,” Wang said, pointing to the front yard, with tomatoes ripening in a tidy vegetable garden. “Enough for the kids to play.”

The newcomers, like the bus that picks them up in front of the McDonald’s at Cottman and the Boulevard, are bypassing a stop in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. It costs too much for them to buy within the borders of that gentrifying, overcrowded enclave, the historic gateway for Asian migrants.

“There’s not enough [affordable] housing,” said John Chin, head of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp.

Sept. 11 sparked the migration south. The terrorist attacks hit New York’s Chinatown, close to ground zero, hard. Garment factories shut down. Restaurants lost half their customers and let workers go. Several businesses – and their owners and workers – relocated here.

It may be too early to tell how the newcomers will affect Oxford Circle. But there are traces of new vitality and new stresses in the graying neighborhood, which has lost old-timers to suburbs, retirement homes and mortuaries.

“There are more kids,” said Roger Harvath of Huntingdon Valley, a mortgage loan officer in the Northeast.

He grew up a few blocks away from Solis-Cohen, and his grandparents, now dead, spent their lives there. He has witnessed flight by older residents.

“They look around, and they see this is not the neighborhood they grew up in,” he said. “It used to be some African American and mostly white. Now, the Asian and the Hispanic community is increasing.”

Xuan sees a demand for more resources – for English classes, after-school programs, Chinese culture clubs, and medical care in Chinese.

“The parents have no English. They work long hours,” she said. “They need help.”

Xuan needs help, too. On her two days a week at Solis-Cohen, she arrives to meet a swarm of parents. They ask her to read the school calendar and for favors such as taking a child to the doctor on her day off.

But benefits counter the costs: For one, the influx has been good for business.

Universe Bus owner Kwai Louang Chuek saw an untapped market, so he started a company. Other cut-rate buses, these ferrying between the two Chinatowns, support a culture of commuters who live in New York and work here – or the reverse.
Another start-up shuttles the hundreds of Chinese women who package clothes at a Marshalls factory at Red Lion. Still others have seeded cell phones, construction companies and buffets throughout the region. Five Fujianese business associations have been created in Philadelphia in the last five years.

Kong, of Cottman First Realty, said New York investors want to develop Asian strip malls in the Northeast mimicking the ones that line Washington Avenue. Most of the enterprise, however, is more modest.

Chinese wedding planner Meirong Song, who just moved to Northeast Philadelphia, stood in front of her storefront under the Manhattan Bridge recently. Indicating the businesses of Little Fujian bustling around her, she shouted: “Too many people. Too much headache. Too much competition.”

She is thinking of moving her business to Philadelphia, too.

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

Iraq veteran runs for Congress
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Like John Kerry, Democrat Patrick Murphy, an Iraq veteran running for Congress in Bucks County, Pa., is straight out of central casting: earnest, clean-cut, a lawyer, an officer in war.

But while Kerry was the poster boy for veterans who came home to denounce the war they fought, Murphy is reluctant to criticize: “I’m not anti-war. I’m not pro-war,” he says. “I’m pro-troops.”

Eight Iraq war veterans have run or announced runs for political office across the country, according to the two major parties. Although all but one are Democrats, none has spoken out against the war or stated support for a troop withdrawal.

They have set themselves apart from many Vietnam veterans with their measured tone about the conflict that forged them _ and their early interest in electoral politics. The Vietnam generation, political analysts say, was often more interested in protest than political bids, and those who ran did so angrily.

“More veterans are thinking of running for office, for starters, and they’re taking a different attitude toward the job on top of that,” says Donald Kettl, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’re more engaged. They’re more interested in trying to transform policy.”

So far, no Iraq veteran has been elected to Congress, despite two high-profile runs last election cycle, in Virginia and North Jersey. Though the Iraq veterans lost to incumbents, they were welcomed by the public in a way that soldiers returning from Vietnam were not.

Kerry theatrically cast away his war medals, but Murphy, 31, and his peers have been able to highlight their military experience. One, Democrat David Ashe of Virginia, encouraged voters to “send a Marine to Congress.”

Murphy, who won a Bronze Star as an 82d Airborne Division captain in Iraq, works it as well. He led veterans’ outreach for the Kerry campaign in Philadelphia and, during his own fledgling campaign, has often appeared at public events with soldiers and veterans. A picture of him with a 6-year-old Iraqi orphan wearing his helmet and a grin appears on his Web site.

Although he hasn’t served in the military, U.S. Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick _ the incumbent whom Murphy would challenge in 2006 if he wins the Democratic primary _ traveled to Iraq with a congressional delegation over Memorial Day weekend.

His chief of staff, Michael Conallen, said that Fitzpatrick works hard to address the concerns of veterans, a key constituency numbering 60,000 in the district. He said Murphy’s military service, while commendable, does not give him an edge.

Murphy said that crowds had received him by standing, clapping and pledging support.

“There’s been a conscious effort to separate the war from the people who are fighting it” this time, Kettl said.

Just as there has been a shift in attitudes to soldiers since Vietnam, there has been a shift in the tone of veterans who would be politicians.

“A lot of Vietnam veterans came back sad and bitter, highly disillusioned and not wanting to engage,” Kettl said. “Many had a hard time with people … calling them baby killers. It took some time, half a generation, for them as a group to make their stamp on the process.”

The rage of that earlier generation has been sandpapered.

Murphy, for one, criticizes the Bush administration for the way it has conducted the war. There aren’t enough troops on the ground, and many of their vehicles lack armor and technology to defuse roadside bombs, he says.

But he will not denounce the actions of U.S. troops _ or the war itself. Anti-war groups have approached him to speak at their events. He declined.

Little children have asked him, since his return, whether he killed anyone. He deflects the question: “I tell them being in the military isn’t about killing people. It’s about bringing peace to people who don’t have it and bringing them a better life.”

Murphy says he believes his troops helped more than they hurt in Iraq.

During seven months in Baghdad, he saw many damaged lives. He spent most of his time as an Army lawyer, weighing whether those lives had been damaged by the United States in a manner meriting payment.

One Iraqi after another came before him to be compensated for destroyed property or dead relatives. One man bared the chest of his 10-year-old daughter, burned during a U.S. bombing campaign, to make his case.

Murphy heard more than 1,600 cases under the Foreign Claims Act, a World War II-era law that allows the United States to pay if its forces are negligent, except in combat scenarios.

“We make amends,” he said.

In one out of five cases, he did. Murphy paid out $200,000 total.

And he helped arrest and prosecute a revered Shiite cleric, a lieutenant of rebel leader Muqtada al-Sadr, for hoarding weapons in a mosque. The local council had warned that there could be an uprising if U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested him.

Despite the objection, they did arrest him in October 2003. Eight people were injured during the ensuing clash. But zero shots were fired into the crowd, Murphy said.

“That was a testament to the discipline of our troops over there,” he said.

Murphy’s stint preceded some of the moments that, for some, have come to define the war negatively. He left Iraq before the mutilated corpses of four Blackwater guards were hung from a bridge near Fallujah; before businessman Nick Berg was beheaded; and before the pictures of naked, abused prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison were publicized.

Stu Rothenberg, a nonpartisan analyst based in Washington, said veterans who ran last year were constrained.

“You had to be very delicate in the last cycle,” he said. “You didn’t want to be seen as disloyal and not supportive of the troops. … People who served in Iraq or Afghanistan don’t want to go out on a limb too far until they see how it ends.”

A poll of soldiers and their families conducted before the last election, by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that 55 percent of those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan thought the war had been worth it.

Murphy is still one of them _ despite the procession of ruined lives, and despite the moments when U.S. troops did fire into crowds of Iraqis.

“It’s never the intent. It’s part of what happens. … It’s war,” he said. “Those are things you deal with for the rest of your life and are not easy to talk about at a dinner party or on the campaign trail …

“I feel I’ve done everything I could to change the world for the better in my time in Iraq.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

A tradition of assimilation makes immigrants and their children less likely recruits for terrorism, experts say.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Adam Bdeir jigged his shoulders like rapper Jay-Z. Then the 7-year-old spat out the Arabic alphabet, to the beat of a Middle Eastern drum: Alif, Baa, Taa.

The so-called Alif Baa rap, concocted at a summer camp among suburban estates, is a twist on an old story: Immigrants and their children become part of American society by fusion. But it also captures – in the weeks after suicide bombings in London carried out by Britons by birth – why experts say second-generation Muslims here are less likely recruits for terrorist organizations.

Though the camp in Whitemarsh, al-Bustan, is not exclusively Muslim or even Arab American, it is devoted to promoting Arab culture. It is part of a multicultural mechanism that allows Muslims here to strike a compromise between two worlds, even in the midst of a post-9/11 backlash that has made that compromise harder. And its campers mirror the Muslim population in the United States: They come from middle-class, suburban families who do not live sealed off in ethnic enclaves.

The descendants of Muslim immigrants in Europe – largely guest workers from Northern Africa who rebuilt cities after World War II – continue to live in ghettos isolated by poverty, language, religion or national origin. One nationality tends to overwhelm: Pakistanis in England, Moroccans in the Netherlands, Algerians in France.

“It’s much easier to recruit in enclaves,” said Robert S. Leiken, an expert on immigration and national security at the Nixon Center in Washington. “It’s much easier to make contacts within a community like that.”

It’s also much easier for residents of an enclave to feel they or their communities don’t have a stake – or have been denied a stake – in their adopted country. That kind of alienation exists to a lesser degree among second-generation Muslims in the U.S., Leiken and other analysts say.

American Muslims are better educated and wealthier than Americans as a whole, and a third are professionals, according to a 2002 Cornell University survey.

They come from a wide variety of countries. Only seven percent of mosques draw worshippers from only one ethnic group, according to a 2001 Hartford Seminary study. And mosques are growing faster in suburbs than in cities.

The parents of many U.S.-born Muslims came here in a wave of students and high-skilled workers after 1965. They have lived the American Dream, and it has scattered them across the country, mostly in towns and suburbs.

Adam, the 7-year-old mock rapper, is the son of a Palestinian, a medical researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who settled his family in Jenkintown when he immigrated nine years ago.

“It had a good school system,” explained Mukhtar Bdeir, 13, Adam’s brother and a camp counselor at al-Bustan. “And, it was a nice, small town.”

It’s also a town with few other Muslims or Arab Americans – the kind of suburban patch that can both fast-track assimilation and make the children of immigrants feel more like misfits.

But a web of civic organizations keeps the Bdeir boys from falling as they try to straddle two cultures. There is al-Bustan, and there is the Foundation for Islamic Education, the Villanova Islamic center where Mukhtar learned Arabic and the Koran.

Such civic organizations allow “the kids to be American and to be Muslim at the same time,” said University of Illinois sociologist Louise Cainkar, another expert on American Muslims. “That is a path other groups have taken in this country. You can be both.”

Just as U.S. Muslims differ from their European cousins, the United States is a different place for foreigners from most European countries. Over more than 150 years as an immigrant magnet, it has developed a model for accepting and integrating immigrants that sets it apart.

While pressures on immigrants to fit in have always existed in the United States, pluralism is a reigning social value.

The children of fairly secular immigrants have, in fact, become more Muslim than their parents, Cainkar said. The revival has taken the form of an explosion in Muslim student associations on campuses, in more U.S.-born women donning the veil, and in more mosque-going.

In France, Muslim girls can’t wear a hijab, or traditional head scarf, at public schools. In the Netherlands, Moroccans are barred from nightclubs. In Germany, Christian and Jewish organizations are allowed to offer instruction in public schools, but Muslim organizations can’t.

“In Europe, the children [of Muslim immigrants] have not been accepted, by and large,” said Leiken, who argues that rejection makes them ripe for jihadists. “There’s a lot of discrimination.”

Policies and attitudes following 9/11, however, have changed the way many Muslims feel about their place in America. As Murad Mustafa, a graduate of Northeast High School born in the United States, put it: “America’s not for us.”

The beheading of businessman Nick Berg by insurgents in Iraq prompted Mustafa’s classmates to lob slurs at Arab Americans. When Mustafa’s twin brother fought back with his own insults, it set off a chain of events that ended with federal agents’ scouring the family’s ceiling for weapons and his brother’s being transferred to a disciplinary school.

Mustafa lives in a diverse neighborhood in the Northeast, next to an elderly white woman he affectionately calls mashghuula(in Arabic, “the guardian” of the block). He goes to al-Aqsa, the mainstream Philadelphia mosque that draws worshippers from 40 countries and from both the suburbs and the city. And he salutes the mostly African American customers at his family’s convenience store with the inflections of Philadelphia: “Yo, man, what’s up?”

Still, however assimilated, he feels targeted. Some say that even that sense of siege has shoved Muslims into the mainstream, as they organize against hate crimes and profiling.

“You see Muslims as participants in coalitions,” Cainkar said. “You see Muslims on the public stage.”

And you also see young Muslims continue to sort through the tensions between their two identities.

Nadia Elokdah, an al-Bustan counselor, regrets that her father – an Egyptian immigrant – never taught her Arabic, in order to ease her acceptance in the Bucks County suburbs. But she has already made concessions of her own. She does not wear the hijab.

“If I lived somewhere else, I would do it,” the 18-year-old said. “We’re told by the Koran not to stand out. We’re told to fit into society.”

Related: Summer Fun, Islamic Lessons

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

Immigrant communities join to help repatriate their dead.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

As Claire Outou Bakayoko lay in a casket in West Philadelphia, a choir of fellow immigrants from the Ivory Coast sang:

Je suis un étranger.
(I am a foreigner.)
Je me suis un passant. Je me dirige vers mon Père.
(I am just a passerby. I am going home to my Father.)

On June 26, the day after that refrain, Bakayoko did go home. Air France flew her body to the West African country where she was born and where, on Saturday, she was buried.

It is a final journey many immigrants replicate. Just as they straddle two countries in life, they frequently do so in death.
Bodies travel from the Philadelphia region to a range of countries, including Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Vietnam, Ghana and the Philippines, according to local mortuaries. One serving the Latino community ships a body at least once a week. The practice is most common among Mexicans, who often crisscross the border to work here but leave wives and children behind.

Mexico’s government has set aside $12 million to assist poor migrants with burial back home. Its consulate in Philadelphia has helped repatriate the bodies of 171 U.S. residents since 2003. They included four soldiers who died in Iraq fighting for their adopted country but wanted to be laid to rest in their native country.

Even for migrants from more far-flung places, culture and divided lives lasso them back to their homelands in death.

Bakayoko struck out alone to the United States a decade ago, at 26. She always meant to return to Boujbo, her village 50 miles from Abidjan, the country’s major city – but with a degree from a U.S. university.

“She used to say they need her more in Africa than here,” her husband said.

Political turmoil at home and the hard scrap of life here as an immigrant got in the way.

To make a living, she started braiding hair at her apartment. She opened Diva, an African hair-braiding salon, in the Logan section of Philadelphia. She had two sons here and brought her eldest, born in the Ivory Coast, to join them. And she married Moustapha Bakayoko, a worker at the Hope Full Gospel Church, in October.

Still, even with a life in Philadelphia, she held onto hopes of a return to the Ivory Coast.

“She didn’t want to stay here, get old here, mmn-mmn,” said Philomen Maye Outou, her sister-in-law. “We work hard. To braid hair is not easy. You do it to have something over there . . . to go back home to.”

Families who can’t bring their dead home may invite shame, because some African traditions say the soul stays with the body, said Robert Djiriga, an Ivoirian pastor in Philadelphia.

“It is about honor,” he said.

That feeling runs so deep that the Cote D’Ivoire Association of the Delaware Valley even has a funeral committee that raises money for expensive burial rites both here and there.

In Africa, “it’s unheard of to have someone buried outside the country and outside the continent,” said Eric Edi, the association’s president. “Your ancestral tie is very important.”

It costs about $5,000 to fly a body to the Ivory Coast.

Once Bakayoko’s casket was carried from the viewing room at the Terry Funeral Home, the mood – and the mission – of the 200 grievers changed.

Bakayoko, who died of lung cancer, had been mourned. Now it was time to collect contributions to send her home.

The hard-charging rhythms of gbegbe, dance music from the
Ivory Coast, issued from two stereos. Two men from the funeral committee took to the mike, a cardboard box between them open for cash, checks and money orders. Women who had been wailing retreated to a church nearby, where a buffet of cassava, plantain and African stews was laid out to sustain them through eight hours of telethon-style fund-raising.

“We’ve cried,” Edi said. “It’s about money now.”

A civil war in the Ivory Coast has divided Ivoirian immigrants here along ethnic and religious lines, but politics did not enter Bakayoko’s hair-braiding salon. And Bamba Ibrahim, head of the funeral committee, was asking the crowd to transcend the conflict, too.

“Claire saw all the world as her brother or sister,” he told them. “Please follow Claire’s footsteps without regard to background.”

The owner of La Calebasse Restaurant stepped forward with $425.

The Christian Church of Love and Good Works – Djiriga’s largely Ivoirian congregation – offered $1,050.

The local affiliate of the FPI, one of the political factions in the Ivory Coast, gave $1,000.

Cisse Ibrahim, the local leader for the rival RDR party and a member of an Ivoirian mosque in the city, contributed $200.
In the last four years, Gregory Burrell, owner of Terry Funeral Home, has watched at least 10 such scenes unfold before sending bodies back to West Africa.
“It’s amazing how they come together for a cause,” he said. “They listen to music. A lot of times, they talk, and they start laughing, and the money just starts rolling in.”

Ivoirians from Atlanta, Washington, New York and New Jersey trekked to Claire Bakayoko’s funeral. In the end, they raised nearly $25,000 to send her home.

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.