Add Somalis to Polyglot Scene : East San Diego: Muslim refugees from civil war try to find foothold in a strange environment, poor job market.

Less than two months out of barren refugee camps, the Somali adults wait apprehensively for English class to begin, their eyes darting back and forth across the Spartan room at the San Diego Community College Mid-City adult school, eager for a smile or some other symbol to put them at ease.

Up the street at Mann Middle School, sixth-graders Ali Mohamed and Abebe Ferede quickly delve into computer math games in their Newcomers Class, despite having missed school for nearly two years. They are luckier than some classmates, who have never before put pencil to paper or held a pair of scissors.

All are determined to make the most of school, now that they find themselves safe in a new country, away from their war-ravaged and starving homeland.

The Somalis bring new challenges to San Diego’s schools and social service agencies, now scrambling to assist the city’s latest immigrants.

Walking along University Avenue to and from classes--mothers and daughters often clad head to foot in brightly colored shawls--the Somalis have become another face in the polyglot immigrant community centered around the 54th Street intersection in East San Diego.

The low-rent apartments where they cluster have come to serve as debarkation centers for successive waves of ethnic groups into San Diego--from Mexican to Indochinese to Russian Jews to Ethiopians, and now Somalis.

Within the past six months, the number of Somalis here has mushroomed from fewer than 200 to more than 1,000, most of them arriving under U. S. refugee policies for family reunification. Another thousand or more could arrive within the next year.

This growing community--most younger than 40 and members of large families--represents the largest concentration of Somali refugees in the United States.

Relative to U. S. standards of living, they are poor. Their new environment often seems alien; they are surprised and frustrated to find that jobs are so scarce. Yet they consider themselves the lucky few.

“Peace--that’s what they value most about their new situation,” said Abdi Duh, a teacher at the adult center and a 10-year resident of San Diego. “They have a chance for food, for health, for school, at a time when so many Somalians are still dying.”

Mann eighth-grader Sahar Mohmud grins as she announces her favorite American TV show: “Cosby.”

Seventh-grader Abdikarim Hussein wolfs down a hamburger and fries for lunch and talks about his favorite subjects, English and math, and the computer-driven machine lathe in his woodworking class.

Those typical concerns contrast with his still-painful memories of his father, a businessman in the capital city of Mogadishu, who was killed in Somalia’s continuing civil war.

But at least today Abdikarim and his five brothers have a home, with their uncle Ali Abdi Mohamed. He was a biology teacher who was forced to flee into a Kenyan refugee camp for almost 16 months before arriving in San Diego in mid-July.

Mohamed now works as an aide at Mann, helping not only students and parents navigate the shoals of school rules, but also teachers eager to know as much as possible of the basics of Somali culture as quickly as possible.

“The biggest difference between the Somalis and previous groups that we’ve seen (such as the Indochinese) is their religion,” said Cynthia Jensen, director of the International Rescue Committee office in San Diego. The New York-based committee has sponsored the majority of Somalis coming to the United States so far.

The Somalis are almost exclusively Muslim, and their Islamic faith helps cement the community as the refugees struggle with their new environment. Almost all the children attend weekend classes to learn the Koran, the religion’s sacred book, and a neighborhood mosque on Winona Street serves as a community center as well.

But the most religious--who adhere to the admonition to pray five times a day--run into problems at secular American institutions.

The times of some language classes at the adult education center overlap prayer intervals, and students have been assembling in empty classrooms to pray, causing concern among administrators who fear a dilution of the constitutional separation of church and state.

“We want to work out a solution because we know that your religion is important to you,” Gretchen Bitterlin, English-as-a-second-language chairwoman for adult education at the San Diego Community Colleges, told Somali adults at an orientation meeting last week.

For the moment, the students are praying outside at sunset, and Abdi Duh has arranged for the adult center’s police patrol to make a check of the building’s perimeter at the same time, putting everyone at ease, particularly the women, to concentrate on their prayers.

For younger students, prayer time hasn’t proved a problem, since community leaders have said there is enough flexibility in the required times to allow children to pray before or after school.

But some teen-age Somali girls at both Mann and nearby Crawford High School have balked at wearing regulation gym shorts and T-shirts during physical education class because the outfit exposes arms and legs, which Islam dictates should be covered at all times.

At Mann, gym teachers have allowed the girls to wear long-sleeved shirts and sweat pants, as well as to keep their head shawls, or khamar, on while mastering the swing of a baseball bat or smack of a tetherball.

“We’ve got so many different ethnicities and languages here that no one really notices,” Mann Principal Julie Elliott said, noting that almost half of her 1,500 students are enrolled in ESL classes. “In a way, it’s the all-American kid who stands out like a sore thumb.”

Crawford High is allowing girls who are uncomfortable with undressing in front of others to skip the class for the meantime.

With the student influx only in its second month, teachers are still feeling their way in planning ESL for the Somalis and in figuring out how to make students as comfortable as possible. Although about 80% of students are literate in their own language, there are some who fled from rural areas without ever having had formal schooling.

At Marshall Elementary, with more than 75 Somali children now spread throughout classes, teachers are thinking of creating their own newcomers class because their existing ESL classes are pitched at intermediate or advanced levels.

Although almost none of the children know enough English to talk about their refugee experiences, teachers nevertheless can sense the lingering effects.

“I think that because so many were (fixated) on survival, they haven’t learned yet how to be fair,” teacher Kenneth Albrecht said. “On the playground, if they want a ball, they just grab it, maybe because” in the camps it was everyone for himself as a matter of survival.

Karen Robinson, the newcomer class teacher at Crawford, said that, although Somali boys are “extremely friendly and gregarious,” some of the girls appear “unhappy and resentful” and complain often of stomachaches.

Both she and other teachers believe that the teen-age girls may be confused by the vast cultural chasm between the treatment of women in their homeland and in the United States.

“I don’t think they understand yet the role of women in America,” Robinson said.

Yet at all levels, teachers find parents more than willing to go the extra mile to support their efforts. Marshall Principal Richard Cansdale even hopes to get a tutoring-study room set up at one of the large apartment complexes the Somalis have taken over.

The parents have quickly learned about drug and gang problems in their tattered neighborhoods.

“They worry about losing the discipline over their children,” Mann’s Mohamed said, explaining why many want to stick to strict religious precepts.

Mohamed said parents almost daily ask their children what food was served for lunch at school, since the Islamic religion forbids pork products in their diet.

“The students just say, ‘Well, we don’t know, we just took the food we were given,’ ” Mohamed said, shaking his head over the inevitable first sign that children will assimilate much faster than their parents.

Mohamed and a few of his fellow refugees with some English fluency are among the few adults fortunate enough to have found steady work. Less than half have jobs, Jensen of IRC said.

The wave of migration dovetails with the nation’s--and San Diego’s--worst postwar economic downturn, drying up the supply of entry-level jobs that previous groups could exploit, such as tourism and electronics assembly work.

“I think that there’s some disillusionment among the Somalis,” Jensen of IRC said. Some half a dozen Somalis have left within the past month to pursue meatpacking jobs in South Dakota, she said.

Abdi Hussein, a Somali caseworker at IRC, said the lack of work has caused some family tensions. “There’s a lot of pressure to go to work,” he said.

Hussein said a few more daring Somalis are looking to set up ethnic businesses such as restaurants or markets, similar to what has taken place in Toronto, where more than 20,000 Somalis now live.

Because the majority hope that better English skills will accelerate the job hunt, they have for the meantime crowded into ESL classes at the Mid-City adult school.

“My gut feeling is that these people are going to succeed,” Mid-City’s Bitterlin said, “that just to have gotten out of Somalia when so many are starving and dying means they can make the transition.”