The Changing Face of Burnsville

The Star Tribune profiles the changing face of my home:

Cornelius Dipo Ajayi smiled at his wife, Marriam, and tried to look reassuring as the Metro Transit bus carried them farther and farther south.

There are nice houses in south Minneapolis, he told her. We'll ride the bus from downtown and you'll see.

Coming to America was a good thing. Nigeria was home, familiar and dear in so many ways, but the West African country was in political and economic disarray. Ajayi's life had been threatened. Schools were in turmoil, and the future looked bleak for the children: daughter Dele, 15 when the family emigrated; son Damilola, 10, and daughter Oluwafunmi, 3.

Once in America, coming to Minnesota made sense. Friends from Nigeria had settled here and offered their home as a temporary stop.

But coming to Burnsville?

They had boarded the wrong bus, and it was carrying the Ajayis through Richfield and Bloomington and into Burnsville. There, debating whether to try a return trip, Ajayi saw a sign on an apartment complex: "Now renting."

That was seven years ago.

"We came to Burnsville by chance," Marriam said, smiling, as the Ajayis gathered recently in their townhouse to watch "American Idol" and talk about their place in the suburban melting pot.

"But since we came here, we have liked it."

Rapid change

Nothing tells the story of the changing suburbs like numbers from the Burnsville schools, where nearly one student in eight -- 1,229 of 10,339 -- has a limited proficiency in English.

Seven years ago, just one student in 33 needed help with the language.

"The community itself only has a history of 40 or 45 years," said Ben Kanninen, the district superintendent. "In the past 10 years, they've seen demographic change far more rapid than anything they saw in the first 30 years."

Half of the limited-English students in Burnsville give Spanish as their first language. A quarter list Somali. Significant numbers of students speak Cambodian, Laotian, Russian, Chinese, Amharic, Arabic and Hmong.

Change has not come without problems, but difference is increasingly seen as the norm, said Kay Joyce, principal at Burnsville High School.

"It's not unusual at all now to see a student of color voted in as homecoming king or queen or as captain of an athletic team," she said. "In the elementary grades, especially, it's what they all know."

Kanninen agrees. "There are people who resist change -- any change -- and there are individuals for whom this is a bad thing," he said. "Some of the newer people say they feel they're kept at arm's length, a little outside. But I don't get a sense there's strong resistance."

The evolution of the larger community can be shown through numbers, as well. In 1980, Burnsville was home to 1,163 immigrants; the largest group was Germans. By 2000, the number was nearly 4,500, and more than half were newcomers who arrived in the 1990s from Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

Hints of the changes abound in the coffee shops, on both sides of retail counters and in that most traditional of community institutions, the service club. Ajayi joined the Burnsville Breakfast Rotary Club a few years ago. Before him, an immigrant from Uganda led the club in organizing a project to build wells in his homeland.

Breakfast members Michael Follese and Jay Van Arnam said that Dipo -- the name that Ajayi asks friends to use -- is hardly their only local contact with the larger world.

"My kids in high school have Russian friends," Follese said. "I'm on a treadmill at the health club next to a guy with a scarf around his head."

At the market, at the clinic, at theaters, "you see everything from Russians to Ethiopians to Hispanics," Van Arnam said, and that has altered the popular notion of what it means to be from Burnsville.

"I don't look at anybody as an immigrant anymore."

For security and schools

Ajayi, 47, grew up in Lagos, a sprawling city of more than 10 million people on Nigeria's Atlantic coast.

It was a fairly comfortable life for Ajayi, who earned degrees in business and worked in advertising, rising to manage a major agency. His perks included a car and driver.

But Nigeria was governed by military dictators, and the political instability caused the crime rate to soar and the educational system to deteriorate.

Men who mistakenly identified him as a political enemy once surrounded him on his way to work and appeared poised to kill him. Desperate, he showed them his identity card as a church deacon. "Finally, one of them said, 'It's not him. Let's go.' I was shivering the whole day."

Still, the decision to leave wasn't easy.

"Leaving parents, that is hard," Ajayi said, and as he spoke, Marriam began to cry.

"We lived with both of our mothers," he said, reaching to comfort his wife. "We have cousins who are getting married this year. We would have been the key people for them to have at their weddings.

"The family is important in our culture. Even today, seven years later, I feel a continuing sense of something missing."

Damilola, 16, who goes by Peter ("My friends have enough trouble with my last name"), and Oluwafunmi, 9 -- Funmi, or Debra to her friends -- turned from the TV to watch their parents and listen.

"In the time before we left for America, my mother would come to my room," Marriam said. "Sometimes she would comment: 'I'm not sure I will ever see you again.' "

She died in 2002.

Has Dipo considered bringing his mother to America, to Burnsville? He laughed, and Marriam laughed, too.

"Life is too secluded here," Dipo said. "There is not enough interaction going on. My mother would not like it. She is the kind of person who walks miles and says hello to everyone."

Marriam wiped at her tears and smiled, thinking about Dipo's mother charging through the cul-de-sacs of Burnsville, engaging young and old. "People here are more reserved," she said.

"But they haven't been unfriendly," she added. "They don't turn away when they see you out. They will smile and wave and say, 'How are you?' "

Their townhouse, which they bought in 2002, is in a cluster of homes on a private drive. They have mingled some with neighbors, Marriam said, often through the children, and she has a plaque recognizing her involvement in the local Head Start. But it's a far cry from the communal society they all remember -- all but Funmi, a toddler when the family left Nigeria.

"I can't remember anything," she said with a blissful grin.

Africa remains in her brother's memory. He remembers the fragrant bean cakes called akara that his grandmother made especially for him. He misses her, and he misses her bean cakes.

"I miss my grandfathers," he said, softly but with weight, as if he were talking about the sun and the moon. "They were there, and I loved them."

He misses friends, too. "One of my cousins, Mayowa, was my best friend. We played video games together. Primitive video games."

The memory causes him to brighten. "One good thing about coming to America: better video games."

A sophomore at Burnsville High last school year, trim and fit, Peter says he may try out for the soccer team next year. He's good at math and wants to be a computer programmer.

He expects to follow his older sister to college. Dele is at the University of Minnesota, studying fashion and psychiatry. "She wants to work in New York," her bemused father says.

Naive expectations

Dipo is a gentle, courtly man, proud of his degrees and the professional reputation he established in Africa.

He arrived in Minneapolis with his family on a Sunday afternoon in September 2000. The Twin Cities looked clean, intelligently designed, welcoming.

"I was naive," he said, with "too many expectations that I would just glide into my new life here. I sharpened up my résumé, dressed up and went out on interviews. But this was a time when the economy was not good. The people interviewing me were not even sure they would keep their own jobs." Others seemed put off by his accented English.

When he couldn't get anywhere with advertising or public relations companies, he took entry-level sales jobs.

"My accent was very, very raw, and the customers were not patient with me," he said. "As soon as I opened my mouth and started to speak, they would ask, 'Is there someone else?' I was very worried. Is this how it's going to be? Have I made a terrible mistake?

"The first thing is to survive, to see that my family survives," he said, so he swallowed his pride and took cleaning jobs at the Mall of America and the Metrodome. But he lost the mall job one night when, exhausted, he fell asleep in a restroom.

"They marched me out and told me never to come back," he said. "I cried. I shed tears."American Idol" was over, and Peter and Funmi sat on the floor reading. They stopped reading and looked up at their father, perhaps trying to imagine him in a janitor's uniform and sitting on a bench, crying.

Dipo went home and told Marriam what had happened. "I asked her, 'You want to go back?' I talked to myself, too. 'Do you want to go back, or stay here, or just drop dead?' "

The debate raged in his head, but not for long.

"I decided, 'OK, I will stay,' " Dipo said. "Coming to America is a leveler. I had some remorse for coming out of my comfort zone, for losing part of my identity. But it will work out."

He is a man of strong faith -- he is pastor of a small nondenominational church in St. Paul -- and that faith extends to his new life in this new land.

He went to the Internet, which told him that the best opportunities available for recent immigrants were in health care and insurance.

After three months of study, he obtained the necessary credentials and landed a job with Met Life in Bloomington. He now works in insurance and investments at New England Financial, a Met Life company in Minnetonka.

"Dipo has a work ethic and attitude that surpasses that of most people," said Carol Schulstad, his supervisor. He is a model for achieving "good balance to his life," she said, and his story connects him with a growing segment of the Twin Cities population.

Maintain the family

Dipo's mind often returns to Africa. But he said Minnesota has a strengthening hold.

"You get a car loan, you get a mortgage, your kid goes to college," he said. "You can't look back. At church now, after seven years, I am looking at doing missionary work -- from an American base.

"The most important thing for the immigrant is to keep the unity of the family. Maintain the cultural unity of the family and stick together in challenging times, and you can attain much."

Marriam adds, "If I passed today, would I want my body to be transported back to Nigeria? No. This is home. We have made this place our home."