COLUMN ONE : A Crash Course for Haitians : Many refugees arriving for resettlement are bewildered by modern urban life. They feel isolated but hopeful of political asylum.

Amid the lilting sound of Haitian Creole echoing lightly in the makeshift classroom in South-Central Los Angeles, five young men stare transfixed at a diagram of a device they had never seen in their hometowns.

On the blackboard is a drawing of three large circles with the words red, yellow and green written in descending order.

It is a traffic light, but it is 1 1/2 hours before instructor Gerhard Desir drives home the lesson of the day: Never, never walk on red.

“This is crucial,” Desir said after the class adjourns. “I’m teaching them survival skills. Basically, it’s like they’re coming from a different planet. It’s not an easy transition.”

Only weeks earlier, the men were scratching out a living in the countryside of Haiti, one of the poorest and least developed nations in the Western Hemisphere. They were among more than 16,000 Haitians who fled the country late last year after a military coup overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who is scheduled to visit Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Although the Haitians--having survived the violence of the coup d’etat and days of flight at sea--count themselves among the fortunate, they feel a numbing sense of isolation and a continuing uncertainty over their fate in this country.

“Even though I am here, I am not completely at ease,” said Carlos Theophile, who arrived in Los Angeles a month ago. “But little by little, I will get into my new life until it is my own.”

Although 8,100 refugees have been sent back to Haiti by the U. S. government, 5,767 have been granted temporary permission to enter the country while they press their bids for political asylum.

Quietly and with little fanfare, they have been resettled throughout the country, where they face the challenge of adapting to a world where the language, culture and the basic facets of life, such as 911 and modern plumbing, are bewildering.

Most come from country villages steeped in grinding poverty. Few have marketable skills in the United States and many cannot read or write even in their native Creole.

Most of those allowed into the United States have been resettled in and around Miami and New York City, which have Haitian communities. But hundreds have been sent to cities where there are relatively few Haitians and no counterparts to the Little Haitis of the East Coast.

So far, 67 have come to the Los Angeles area and been settled in a cluster of apartment buildings in northwest Inglewood by Catholic Charities, which also has provided food and clothing. Another 200 are expected to arrive in the coming weeks.

For Theophile and the other refugees, the journey to build a new life has moved forward in tiny steps.

Most had never heard of Los Angeles before. Would they be here alone? Did it snow in California? Would they be accepted?

Ilemet Vereus, who fled Haiti with his seven children, remembers other refugees warning that he would feel imprisoned in Los Angeles because he spoke no English and could not move about as he could in Miami. After arriving, he was afraid to walk on the streets and would only go out in groups of five or six to buy food.

“Well, I’m here,” he recalls thinking to himself. “I have no choice. I have to accept life as it is.”

But as the weeks passed, the newcomers have begun to adapt and carve out their small niche in the city.

A group of the Inglewood refugees, many of them practicing Catholics in Haiti, worship at the New Testament Church of God, a Pentecostal congregation in South-Central Los Angeles.

The tiny storefront is on 4th Avenue near 54th Street, between a liquor store and an alley. It is the only church in the city where Haitians can hear their language spoken and drink from the well of their culture.

The Rev. Reneaud Guillaume, a pastor at the church and a native of Haiti, said the newcomers have doubled the congregation of Haitians, Jamaicans and Belizeans to about 60.

“They say they have no place to go on Sundays,” said Guillaume, who has been hired by Catholic Charities to work with the refugees. “This is the only place they have to hear their own language, to sing and have a moment of pleasure.”

On a recent morning, a noisy melange of Creole, French and English spills from inside the painted blue edifice onto the street.

The day’s sermon is delivered in English and simultaneously translated into Creole. The congregation and Guillaume engage in call and response, a tradition typical of black worship throughout the world.

“Alelouya! Mennen ou vini de Guantanamo!” Guillaume sings out in Creole. “Alelouya! Mennen ou vini Ozetazini!”

Hallelujah for delivering you from Guantanamo. Hallelujah for bringing you to America.

“Praise the Lord!” the congregation answers. “Beniswa Leternel! Beniswa Leternel!”

In a corner, a trio of middle-aged women in white dresses and broad-brimmed white hats tap their tambourines to the sound of a hymn, accompanied by a man playing a mournful harmonica. A mother fans herself serenely as an infant nurses at her breast.

“To pray here with other Haitians in our own language is a blessing,” said Theophile in Creole as he sat in the straight-backed chairs that serve as pews.

Theophile, a wiry 27-year-old, came from Cite Soleil, one of the poorest slums in Port-au-Prince.

He was an open supporter of Aristide and a member of a political organization called the Mau Mau, after the Kenyan guerrillas who fought for their country’s independence from Great Britain.

Cite Soleil was attacked by the military and he remembered the sight of his neighbors “falling like it was raining,” Theophile said recently as he recounted the story of his journey to America.

He went into hiding for two months before deciding to flee with 47 others aboard a small sailboat.

Eight days later they were picked up in international waters by a U. S. Coast Guard cutter, which took them to Guantanamo Bay, the United States-controlled military base on Cuba.

Theophile spoke of his days at sea with the bravado of a young warrior, at one point bursting into an anti-government song.

But for others, the journey evokes nothing but frightening memories.

Michele Jackson, who was a carpenter in the town of Les Cayes south of Port-au-Prince and lives in an apartment in Inglewood, talked about his life in Haiti and his escape. His wife sold vegetables and clothing on the street. Both were open supporters of Aristide.

After a cousin was killed by soldiers several days after the coup, Jackson assembled his family and fled into the bush.

For more than a month, they and dozens of others hid while preparing for their flight. By pooling their money, the group, which had grown to more than 60, managed to buy a small sailboat for $500, Jackson said.

“Our goal was we would rather be eaten by the sharks than be caught by the army,” he said. “We felt we should take our chances.”

They packed into a boat and left in the midst of torrential rains. With no idea of how to reach the United States, they followed cruise ships through the Caribbean, hoping to reach Miami.

“We were packed like sardines,” said Silotte Pierre, who was on the boat with Jackson. “Sometimes, I still feel the pain. So many people on board. There was nowhere to move.”

They carefully rationed their small supply of rice, beans, flour and sugar. No one spoke of returning.

For three days, they followed one ship as it slowly moved north until they saw a sliver of land on the horizon. Their hopes were dashed when they beached and realized that they had reached Cuba.

They set out to sea again, this time with no ship to follow. No one slept at night and they spent their time watching the horizon and singing to themselves. After nearly two weeks at sea, they had virtually exhausted their food supply.

“We could only feed the children,” Pierre said. “There was only seawater and sugar and flour for them.”

Early in the morning several days later, they saw a row of lights in the distance. No one was sure if they had reached the United States, but they headed for the lights, desperate to touch land again.

They had reached the southern coast of Florida. After being detained for several days by the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, they were sent to Los Angeles.

“Yes, I am lucky,” Pierre said. “God is with me.”

In Los Angeles, the newcomers were provided food, clothing and housing by Catholic Charities, which has taken the responsibility for teaching them English and finding them jobs. The U. S. government has provided the agency with $600 for each Haitian to cover the initial cost of their resettlement.

Catholic Charities has found jobs for seven of the Haitians: two women as housekeepers, three men as truck loaders and two others as laborers at a university. But it hopes to persuade the several thousand established Haitian immigrants in the area to hire more.

Although the Haitian community here is small, many have volunteered to help drive the newcomers to the market, teach them English or just sit and talk for a few hours.

“They need somebody to really care for them,” said Clelie Theard, who volunteers as an English teacher and driver a few days each week. “They need education more than anything. (Adapting is) not easy for anybody, but as long as we stick together it can be done.”

How much they have to learn is apparent in Desir’s three-hour English class at St. Catherine’s Center on 70th Street.

Only one of five students knows the alphabet. A lesson on using a gas stove takes more than an hour of repeating the message: Turn off the gas at night.

Desir, who came to the United States as a toddler with his parents, said he has had to start at the very beginning with his students.

He started by teaching them the alphabet and then how to spell their names so they could apply for federal assistance, identification cards and political asylum. In the past few weeks, he has covered stop signs, crosswalks and earthquakes--a phenomenon his students have never experienced.

“They know about earthquakes now, but there are some who still don’t quite grasp the significance of it all,” Desir said.

Except for English class four days a week and church for some on Sundays, life has settled into monotony.

For Jean Laurent, a 27-year-old fisherman from Les Cayes who was resettled in Los Angeles Feb. 24, the world has collapsed into a tiny circuit that encompasses school, his apartment, church and a market two blocks away.

He has gone to the market twice accompanied by Haitians, but is wary of venturing out alone until he can speak more English. Riding a bus is unthinkable for fear of getting lost.

Laurent spends much of his day in his sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment talking with other Haitians who drop by or watching English-language television shows, which he does not understand, but watches nonetheless.

“I feel I am free,” Laurent said. “But right now it is very frustrating for me.”

His niece, Louisia Noel, 16, said she has never left the apartment alone. Although she speaks Spanish, she has yet to talk to any of her Latino neighbors.

She observes the world from their apartment’s living-room window, peering out on a tiny slice of Hyde Park Boulevard and occasionally catching a glance of other teen-agers walking by. “I would like to go to school and do what they do,” Louisia said.

Laurent, like others, is confident that with time he will overcome the hurdles of adapting to a new country. Compared to violence he fled in Haiti, learning a new language and culture is a minor problem, he said.

More difficult to overcome are the haunting memories of their homeland and lingering questions about their fate.

Jerry Gaspard, Haitian unit supervisor for Catholic Charities in Los Angeles, said some Haitians suffer psychological problems as a result of their ordeals fleeing Haiti.

“They wake up at night with nightmares and memories of having been in the boats in pitch dark during storms,” Gaspard said.

Their most consuming fear is the possibility that after going through so much to escape, they may be sent back to Haiti.

Although their temporary status is an acknowledgment that they have a plausible case for political asylum, the process carries no guarantee that they will be allowed to stay permanently.

Having overcome such hardships to get here, most are optimistic that they will win asylum. But they continue to worry about their future, given the legal battles and political maneuvers over whether they can stay or must go.

“I didn’t want to come here. I made $300 a week in Haiti. Now, I don’t have a dollar in my hand,” said Milien Buteau, who was resettled in Los Angeles last month. “But I would rather hang myself than go back.”