Standing in front of a green wall in a sparsely furnished studio, El Cajon’s marketing manager Chris Berg looked into a camera and on cue began describing the city’s upcoming Nov. 30 tree-lighting ceremony to kick off the Christmas season.
“This year’s event is going to be much bigger than we’ve ever done before and include many of our local businesses,” he said. “We’re going to have to have an awesome passport scavenger hunt where families can go from business to business and win different prizes.”
He went on to talk about live music, Santa photos, outdoor ice skating and an art walk with 28 vendors, nailing the public service announcement in a single take.
The PSA was much like what any city might use for a promotion, but there was more to come. The studio was In Arabic TV, and Berg’s comments would be posted just as delivered, but also translated into Arabic for the thousands of followers to Newcomers Support & Development’s Facebook page.
The nonprofit was launched in 2015 by its director, Mohammed Tuama, a former U.S. Army adviser in Iraq who moved to the United States from Jordan in 2009.
“The goal was connecting the community,” he said.
A large population of Chaldeans, Christians from Iraq, had settled in El Cajon many years earlier, but Tuama said a second wave of immigrants from Iraq arrived around 2006 because of war in their country.
That wave of immigrants tended to be liberal and educated, and Tuama said the El Cajon community didn’t understand that they were not refugees in need of blankets and food, but rather needed help with things like obtaining business licenses or learning new skills.
Newcomers Support & Development was launched in part to tell the established decision-makers about the real needs of the immigrants, but Tuama soon saw an opportunity to do more.
“Besides looking for a job and starting a business, we’ve found that many people need to be engaged,” he said. “They come here, and now they’re U.S. citizens. What is next?”
Tuama, who already had been working with the county as a job developer for refugees, partnered with the county’s Community Health Enhancement Program to create a Leadership Academy.
“We started telling them about the system in America,” he said. “And we brought the City Council and they introduced themselves. They said, ‘This is what we do, this is how we help, this is how we reach out to us.’”
Tuama launched In Arabic TV in 2019 as a social media channel to further expand his mission.
“I was hoping to provide civic engagement information to the community in Arabic so they could learn about what’s going on in America,” he said.
Viewers received civic lessons and practical information about dealing with city officials, police and school districts. During COVID, Tuama said people who still got their news from their home country were becoming frightened by the overblown reports they were hearing about the United States.
“People are locked down, and they don’t even know what’s going on outside,” he said about foreign news reporting things like “Death is coming to San Diego.”
Tuama found more accurate, unbiased news to provide to his followers, and viewership began to grow beyond El Cajon. People tuned in from San Diego, then other parts of California, then from other states and even internationally. His Facebook page now has 96,000 followers.
The El Cajon City Council recently awarded Newcomers Support & Development a $150,000 grant that will be used to buy a van, cameras, lenses and other equipment to establish what Tuama calls an “In-Arabic Media Outreach” program.
The van and equipment will allow Tuama to create higher-quality videos on locations beyond his studio, providing an extension to the town halls and other outreach work he has done over the past decade.
The group also will provide monthly updates to the City Council and introduce council and staff members to members of the community. He also plans to create quarterly videos of city services and will use the equipment to help the city communicate with local Arabic speakers during disasters and emergencies.
Tuama’s work in the United States is rooted from a time when he was a cultural adviser for the U.S. Army in Iraq.
“When the U.S. Army came to Iraq, they didn’t know how to deal with the culture and the population there,” he said.
Ironically, part of the problem was from acculturation classes soldiers have received in the United States about the Iraqi culture.
“The people who provided these classes are not from the regions that the Army is going to,” he said. “They were Iraqi people who lived in America for many years. They lost the culture.”
The soldiers were misguided and did things Tuama said were culturally unacceptable, hindering their ability to work with the local population.
“They were not able to communicate better with the community,” he said. “They didn’t want to work with them because they thought they were disrespectful.”
Tuama said he and some friends who spoke English approached the troops and said they were doing a lot of things wrong. After they saw the lessons the soldiers had been taught, they understood why the Americans had a misunderstanding of Iraqi culture, and he and his friends helped smooth out relations.
“They showed us the videos of the acculturation classes,” he said. “I was like, ‘No, no.’ So we worked with them and we solved a lot of issues.”
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