On cable TV in the city of Minneapolis on any night you will hear Somali voices and see the faces of Somalis reporting about their community, performing Somali music, and passing on religious instruction, something vitally important to the deeply religious Somali community. The Minneapolis Television Network (MTN) programs eight hours of Somali language programs a week. Abdulkadir Osman fled Somalia in 1993 to escape the civil war. Now he lives far from Somalia, in Columbia Heights. On many days, he spends the few hours between his two jobs working on the two one hour Somali TV shows that he produces as a volunteer every week. Since 1997, Osman has produced Somali TV on MTN. For the first year, he made the shows working alone. In his second year he started building a crew of local Somali residents. One of those early crew members, Abdi Abdiaar, went on to make another show, Somali Life. Not long after Abdi started producing Somali Life, Osman began producing a second hour of Somali TV every week. Osman works with a strong volunteer crew now, and that makes the work easier, though all members of the crew work hard. Siad Said Salah is a regular at many Somali events recording field video, while Mohamed Shino and Mohamud Mas'ade share the job of anchoring and writing the news casts. The volunteers who produce the shows at MTN are local celebrities in the Somali community. Abdi explains, "I don't know a lot of people myself, but anywhere I go where there are other Somalis, they know me." He says that his eighty-year-old mother knows very few English words, but she does know "MTN," and she knows exactly where to turn her dial to find the Somali programming. The importance of the Somali community programs both for the local Somali community and also Minneapolis was recognized earlier this year when the City Pages  named Somali TV the "Best Public Access Cable TV Program" in its "Best of the Twin Cities" issue. In the article about the honor, the City Pages said, "For some, public access is an early, inspiring lesson in democracy and free media.” Some of the programs are made with the assistance of Somali mutual assistance organizations. Osman produces Somali TV with the assistance of the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota, an organization that provides social services like language classes and employment counseling. The Somali Mai Community of Minnesota is an organization that produces a weekly show in the Somali Mai language. The Somali Bantu people, who speak this language, represent some of the most recent immigration to Minnesota. Both Abdi and Osman say that the single most important reason that they do their work at MTN, and not at another access center, is the MTN staff. They both claim that the MTN staff is particularly understanding of the needs of immigrant producers, and goes out of its way to welcome them. In fact, two members of the MTN staff who originally helped the Somali producers get started are also from Islamic countries. J.C. Bagdadi, Senior Production Manager at MTN, left Libya when he was a young man. Mustafa Tell, who taught Osman's first studio production class, is from Jordan, where he now once again lives and works. MTN Executive Director Pam Colby says, "Sensitivity to the cultural traditions, language and background of new immigrant producers is something that MTN has attempted to build into its staff." Bagdadi calls Saturdays at MTN "Mogadishu Day" after the capital city of Somalia. On Saturday afternoons, MTN's two studios are often both filled with Somali production activity. Producers representing a number of different Somali programs collaborated recently on a special Ramadan call-in show. Bagdadi helped bring the Somali producers together for this two hour live extravaganza, and Osman directed the show. Liban Hussein, on the crew of the Somali Mai Community program, developed the content of the show together with Abdi and Somali TV's Mohamed Shino. "To do these shows would cost us thousands of dollars, but here we make them for no money, for our community," Osman says. This is an abridged version of an article I wrote for the magazine Community Media Review. For the complete text of this article, please visit www.mtn.org. - John Akre