Immigrants Dream of a Better Life in Italy : Europe: Two months with Somali family demonstrates the difficulties, including fruitless job hunts, hungry children and hopelessness. They’ve sold virtually all their possessions--including the umbrella.

The plates are arranged on the floor and the children try to wait for sunset when they can eat.

The boy wipes his palm over a steam-clouded window and presses his nose to chilly glass. Sleet slaps against the pane. The storm smells of the sea, a few blocks away.

Baharudin, 9, studies the darkening ropes of clouds.

“Now?” he asks.

His mother, Sada Abdullahi Muhmed, shakes her head and goes back to breast feeding her daughter, born at the beginning of the winter.

The older girls bring out covers for the food, a mix of their new country and homeland they left four years ago. One bowl is filled with pasta. Smaller plates hold triangle-shaped Somali meat pies.

“Now?” the boy asks again. Sada Muhmed nods.

Usually her husband decides the moment to end the daytime fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. But he is still 18 miles away in Rome, where he goes almost every day to talk with other Somali men about the only subject that really matters: where and how to find a job.

Sada Muhmed holds the baby while her other five children--ages 4 to 18--sit on a thin brown carpet and eat. The television news flashes its top stories. One is an attack on a Tunisian man in a nearby beach town. Everyone is too hungry this February evening to notice.

“Leave some for your father,” Sada Muhmed says.

He gets home an hour later, shivering and soaked. The heat in the two-room apartment barely works. He runs his hands under warm water in the kitchen.

After a few bites, Mohamed Ahmed Farah turns to his wife.

“Nothing today,” he tells her in Somali. “No jobs.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” she says.

“Maybe. Inshallah, “ he says. “God willing.”

*

Mohamed Farah once had a job driving trucks, a home in Mogadishu and a plot of farmland outside the Somali capital. “We had yams, beans,” he says. “We had enough to eat, some money. Now I know how happy we were.”

Then came civil war. His family--like tens of thousands of others--were snared in the middle. Gangs backing one faction picked out Mohamed Farah’s family as supporters of a rival group.

Mohamed Farah’s wife--who was several months pregnant--was raped by 20 men, he says.

“She was bleeding and crying,” he says. “If we stayed she would die. I would die. My whole family would be killed.”

They went by bus to Ethiopia in late January, 1991, and arrived in Addis Ababa with the equivalent of about $4,000. Their home was a hotel room, he says.

The fetus survived the rape and one night Sada Muhmed cried out. She was in labor. Mohamed Farah and his daughters helped deliver a healthy baby girl, Iftin. But Sada Muhmed grew weaker. The placenta remained in her and her fever climbed. Mohamed Farah says he went to a doctor 13 days after the birth.

“We tried to save money and it almost killed her,” he says.

They boarded an Alitalia flight to Rome on June 6, 1991, claiming they were en route to Libya. Mohamed Farah had a plan: Tear up all their passports and identification and appeal for refugee status in Italy, Somalia’s former colonial ruler.

They spent 15 days in an airport detention center before a three-month residency permit was granted.

“They told us, ‘This is Rome. Good luck,’ ” he says.

They knew no Italian and had no contacts. After their money ran out at a hotel, a relief group found them a small room in a town south of Rome. A few months later, they were moved to Ladispoli, a drab seaside town of concrete apartment towers and scrawny palm trees.

*

A cheap wristwatch and a pair of earrings are all that’s left.

They’ve sold the rest of their jewelry. Bracelets, rings, a gold necklace brought them 650,000 lire (about $390), just enough for rent. But the money went quickly elsewhere: clothes for the infant, shoes for the children.

Nothing is left for the landlord, whom they last paid in January.

“She comes almost every day and tells us to pay or get out,” says Mohamed Farah, 39. “I lie to her. I say, ‘I have a job at the Somali Embassy as a driver and I’m waiting to be paid.’ ”

“I told her we can’t leave. We have nowhere to go,” says 13-year-old Nasra.

“What does she say to you?” her father asks.

“The same thing: Pay the rent or leave,” Nasra says.

Mohamed Farah sits for a long time without saying a word. He sketches out his debts with a pencil stub. Rent and utility bills amount to about $600 a month. They eat as cheaply as possible: mostly pasta and bread. Milk for the children is a treat.

The oldest daughter, Fatha, 15, returns with some pasta and sauce from the corner market, which has given them credit. They owe close to $800.

“They wanted to know when we would pay something,” she says.

“What did you say?” asks Sada Muhmed, 35.

“Soon.”

“Inshallah, “ her mother says.

*

Three Romanians are already waiting under the street lamp when Mohamed Farah arrives. They nod greetings. It is too early for much else on a cold March morning.

Dawn is still an hour away. By then, they hope to be working as farmhands. For many Africans and Eastern Europeans around Rome, this is their best chance for work.

The car they are waiting for pulls up to the curb.

“I need one person. That’s it,” says the driver, an agent for an artichoke farm that uses day labor.

The driver recognizes one of the Romanians. “You. Let’s go.”

Last year, Mohamed Farah worked a few days in the fields dotting the flatlands toward Rome. A day’s pay: the equivalent of $30. This year, however, he’s been muscled out by the growing number of Eastern Europeans in the area.

“We keep hearing the same thing: no jobs, no jobs, no jobs,” he says. “Sometimes I want to laugh . . . but I don’t.”

Mohamed Farah is part of a frustrating equation in Italy: more foreigners but few new jobs. Even the most menial work is normally done by Italians, protected by strong unions. About the only niche occupied by immigrants is off-the-books domestic work. And it goes almost exclusively to Philippine women.

Mohamed Farah says he has sought immigrant visas for Britain, Canada and the United States, but he feels his chances are slim without a sponsor.

Meanwhile, his eldest son, Khadar, 18, has enrolled in community-financed classes on home construction.

“He’s our best hope,” says Mohamed Farah. “But how long can we wait?”

*

Mist turns to rain. Mohamed Farah steps under a building ledge with his package from a Rome immigrant aid center: five packages of spaghetti, two jars of sauce, some canned fruit, sugar, cooking oil and second-hand overalls for 3-year-old Iftin.

He used to have an umbrella. He sold it to a friend.

He ties the plastic bag tight and waits for the March shower to ease.

“I pay 10,000 lire to come to Rome and they give me 10,000 lire worth of food,” he says. “At least it’s something to do.”

He also finds comfort at the mosque. Mohamed Farah dodges puddles on a street near the main train station, where many African immigrants hawk carved figures or sell tissues and other pocket items.

“Never,” he mutters. “I would never do that. It is not real work.”

The mosque is on the third floor of a building blackened by decades of grime. The elevator is broken. The old windows can’t keep out the traffic noise.

After prayers, Mohamed Farah takes a glass of sweet, milky tea. He sips it very slowly even after it turns cold. He has nowhere else to go except home, where the landlord may be waiting.

*

Every time he moves, the chair creaks. Mohamed Farah can’t sit still. The landlord has given him another ultimatum.

He plans a family meeting when the rest of his children return. All but one are outside enjoying one of the first warm days of April.

One option could be moving to the hills outside Rome and building a little shack as some other immigrants have done. Or maybe someone could rent them space in a trailer.

“Or we could sell one of the children,” he says.

“Papa, what?” pleads Iftin.

“My treasure, I’m just kidding. It’s just a joke.”

They hug. She goes back to playing with some cards.

“I can’t believe I said that,” he says. “I didn’t mean it, but when you are scared you do crazy things.”