With mounds of unique and colorful produce, fresh meat from Amish country and a vast selection of rice and legumes, Family Groceries in Akron’s North Hill neighborhood is the go-to store for the city’s South Asian population.
Most days, Naresh Subba can be found stocking shelves, running the cash register or mopping floors – roles that belie his long-time status as advisor and community leader for Bhutanese refugees who make Akron and Summit County, a nationally recognized “Welcoming Community,” their home.
Co-owned by Subba, his younger brother, Srijang Laoti, and his nephew, Gopal Laoti, Family Groceries opened on North Main Street in 2011, generating annual revenue of $185,000, Subba said.
Now a $4 million enterprise, the busy Akron store has doubled in size, and in 2017, Subba’s family made a million-dollar investment in a much larger Family Groceries in Cincinnati.
“I’m laughing saying this, but Bhutanese community members, they say, ‘Oh, this is our Bhutanese Walmart,’” Subba said of the Cincinnati store.
The Akron store was designed to offer immigrant families the familiarity of home and the practicality of shopping locally, Subba said.
Shopping and socializing
A walk through the store reveals refrigerated shelves stocked with packets of dried fish for soup and broth, while live fish circle a tank. Traditional dinnerware made of softly gleaming brass is imported from Nepal, while patterned natural-fiber textiles from Bangladesh, Vietnam and Pakistan are neatly stacked. One end cap near the checkout features strands of twinkling lights and brilliant decorations from the recent week-long Tihar, the Nepali festival of lights.
On weekends, Family Groceries’ aisles are packed with those who come to shop and to socialize.
Marcus Biswa divides his time between Erie, Pennsylvania and Akron but he makes time to stop in at Family Groceries. Through word-of-mouth, the store is well-known around Ohio and beyond its borders for fair pricing and friendly service, said Biswa, who is a mental health professional with Asian Services in Action Inc.
Subba paved the way for immigrants when he came to the U.S., Biswa said, and his leadership has had a strong influence on the broader South Asian community.
Most recently, Subba’s leadership has entailed spearheading a large project to construct a national Kirat Manghim Temple and community center on property now owned by the national Kirat Community Organization of America. The site is the location of the former Bettes Elementary School in North Akron. Kirat is an ethnicity and the fourth largest religion in Nepal.
he property where the Kirat temple will be built is owned by the national Kirat Community Organization of America.
Subba is a founding member and adviser to the Kirat Community Organization of Akron, Ohio, as well as a founding member of the Kirat Community Organization of America.
In late November, Akron’s Board of Zoning Appeals granted approval for the Akron organization, with support from the national group, to move forward on the more than $3 million project, Subba said.
Subba also is a founding member of the Bhutanese Community Association of Akron, a nonprofit that formed in 2009 to support the refugee population and to help preserve the Bhutanese-Nepali culture through organized celebrations and events.
The universe had different plans
Subba, now 55, said he didn’t set out to be a community leader, or a grocer.
Beginning in the 1970s, thousands of other citizens of southern Bhutan faced political persecution for their ethnicity and religion and were forced to live in refugee camps in Nepal. Subba and his family lived in the camps through the 1990s.
After a decade in the camps, Subba came to Ohio in 2002 on a student visa and earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Kent State University.
“This was something I was always interested in, not, in a sense, clearly defined as nuclear physics, but something along the line of physics where you could explain how the universe happened,” he said. “Nuclear physics actually takes us right into the heart of the creation of the universe.”
While Subba worked toward his degree, many Bhutanese refugees who settled in Akron through the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program gravitated to Subba and his wife, Pavi, a translator and medical assistant, for advice navigating the difficult transition to life in America.
“I mean, everything was a problem,” he said. “So they were asking me whether they could go back to Nepal. They were asking me, ‘Can you please talk to them? I want to leave, I want to go back.’”
The refugees’ struggles were very real, Subba said. Despite housing placement through the International Institute of Akron, without a good grasp of English, the refugees had a hard time finding work. Without work, they couldn’t afford things like cellphones, which they needed to give prospective employers a contact number.
Subba said he gave many of them permission to use his phone number.
Life takes another turn
American culture also presented a unique challenge. Nepal is a monarchal kingdom where most decisions are made for citizens, but in the U.S. the refugees were suddenly on their own, and even choosing which post office to go to could be baffling, Subba said.
“I just tried to connect them to the right person or the right source,” he said. “I spent at least, I guess, 25% of my time time doing that, even now.”
In 2011, while teaching at Hiram College, Subba suddenly was faced with a serious health issue, which temporarily upended his and Pavi’s lives.
“Because I was sick, it was my wife who primarily took them around for shopping, getting the things they needed,” he said. “And because the number was growing, it was becoming more than a full-time job.”
That was when Subba and his family decided to open a grocery store, pooling an initial investment of $60,000 to bring together under one roof the essentials the refugee population needed.
But after working for so many years toward his advanced degree, the transition wasn’t easy.
“Suddenly, I’m in a totally different area, which I had no knowledge of,” he said. “Nothing had turned out the way I imagined in my life.”
But as the business took root, and then flourished, Subba slowly regained his health. And although he didn’t return to teaching, he says he has made peace with the unexpected turns his life has taken.
“If I can continue to have this level of satisfaction, this level of contentment, I should be OK,” he said. “I do not have any more expectations. I just take my life one at a time day. I’m happy with it.”
Editor’s note: The story was updated to clarity the Kirat temple will be built on property owned by the national Kirat Community Organization of America.