"Their eyes have seen the horror of war; their bodies have endured torment. During the 15-day, 100-mile trek from war-torn southern Somalia to a refugee camp in western Kenya, Bilal Abanur said the Somali Bantu who died from starvation and dehydration during the walk were left on the side of the road without a burial.

"To stay around would have been dangerous," the Charlottesville High School junior said. "Sometimes you would get captured by the Somali bandits."

Walking near her home in Kabul, Afghanistan, Latifa Yousafi was stopped by Taliban men in a car who wondered why they could see her eyes through her burka.

"I did not cover my eyes so I could see where I was walking," the University of Virginia custodial worker said. "They beat me."

Abanur and Yousafi are two of more than 800 refugees who have been resettled in Charlottesville and Albemarle County since 1998 by the International Rescue Committee, a global relief group that provides a haven for the unwillingly displaced.

Refugee children make up 48 percent of the English as a Second Language program in the Charlottesville schools and 8 percent in Albemarle schools. They add diversity to the local student body, but their varying levels of English proficiency and school experience present challenges.

Many of the younger refugees were in and out of school, as wars in their countries closed schools and forced their families to move often to find safety.

Both Abanur and Yousafi see education in the United States as a way to stabilize their unsettled lives.

Abanur seeks a college degree. Yousafi hopes her daughter, enrolled at Buford Middle School in Charlottesville, can earn one.

Enduring the Taliban’s rule

The Taliban did not allow Samira Khair Khawa, whose mother is a good friend of Yousafi, or any other woman to attend school in Kabul.

"My dad didn’t let my older brother go either because there was a lot of stuff going on outside," said Samira, a 13-year-old Buford student.

Samira, her father, who worked for a bank, her mother and two brothers escaped the Taliban in 1996 by moving to Pakistan, where they opened a shoe store.

"You didn’t have to wear the long scarves," she said. "You didn’t have to worry about going outside."

Samira does not understand the Taliban’s oppressive rules.

"You shouldn’t have to show your religion," she said. "Whatever you are can be in your heart because right now, my mom does not wear her scarf and that does not mean she’s not a Muslim, that she doesn’t love her religion."

When Samira’s father died of cancer in 2001 in Pakistan, her mother, Lailuma, filled out an IRC application to come to the United States.

Lailuma and Yousafi were both 20-year biology teachers in Afghanistan, and now they work as custodians at UVa.

"Here I work as housekeeper because my problem is with English," Lailuma said.

Yousafi, who regularly helps Lailuma run errands, was at the Khair Khawa house unloading groceries.

She recalled when members of the Taliban raided her house in 2001.

"We crawled in the basement with the children," Yousafi said.

Her husband died during this period of elevated violence.

He went out in front of the house for some water, which had to be retrieved from a well because Taliban rockets had destroyed the plumbing system. A Taliban rocket landed not too far from where he was standing and the debris that kicked up killed him.

"The people who did 9/11, I think they are not human," Yousafi said. "They don’t have a good heart. If they have their own children and their own families, they don’t know what’s going on. They are like animals, like cannibals. All people in Afghanistan, they hate them."

It is from this instability that Yousafi and Lailuma came to America, with their children and without their husbands.

"My mom is working really hard for us to have an education and a good life," Samira said. "All my family is in Afghanistan. My mom thinks it’s really hard to have a good life because she works really hard and tries to understand everything."

Bantus shunned

As his high school-age sisters sat on the couch and read their homework from a three-ring binder and his 9-year-old brother crawled on the floor wearing a red "Coke" T-shirt, Abanur, 19, spoke of new opportunities that were beyond his dreams in Somalia.

"We were the lowest part of the government," he said. "We were not counted. We were not counted at all. The refugee camps were the first time we got the idea of education."

Abanur’s Somali Bantu ancestors were sold into slavery and shipped to Somalia from Tanzania and Mozambique in the early 1800s, a period when increased industrialization created a need for cheap labor and money-hungry African leaders cared little for their people.

After slavery was abolished in the region in the early 1900s, the Bantu settled in southern Somalia and worked as farmers. Because their roots were embedded elsewhere, they were never truly accepted by the other Somali clans.

Civil war broke out in 1991 after Somalia’s president, Siyaad Barre, was removed from power after 22 years. The country’s many clans then lusted for control, which spurred infighting. Because the Bantu had no seat in Barre’s government and no allies among the clans, they were easy targets and were exploited for their stocks of food when stores elsewhere became scarce.

Constant fear - that’s what Abanur said he felt throughout his early childhood.

"If you wake up this morning, you don’t know if your life is gonna last by tomorrow," he said. "You’re like, ‘If I go out, I’m going to get attacked by a bullet,’ because you don’t know which side the bullet will come, you don’t know who shoots you."

The Somali bandits were members of other clans that stole food, raped Bantu women and killed their husbands.

Why?

"Because they are powerful," Abanur said. "Discrimination. That is the only thing."

The culture of opportunity

When Abanur first arrived in the United States, he put his dirty clothes in the sink, applied soap and hung them out to dry. "Washing machine" was not part of his vocabulary.

He was also amazed at his new bathtub.

"I said, ‘I can swim in this water and it’s good-looking,’" Abanur said.

Abanur played on the CHS varsity soccer team last year, scoring a few goals despite having never played on an organized team before.

Coach Kevin Madigan used to drive him home from practice because Abanur’s family had no car.

Madigan remembered Abanur, not for a play he made on the pitch, but for a conversation they had on a ride home from it.

"He told me he was getting pressure from his family to drop out of school and work to pay the bills for the family," he said. "It moved me quite a bit."

Unfortunately, his age makes him ineligible to play high school soccer now. Abanur recently started working weekdays after school as a bellhop at the Omni Charlottesville Hotel.

He noted how fairly all employees are treated there, a far cry from labor in Somalia.

"If you work for someone, there is nothing called hourly, there is nothing called wage," Abanur said. "Most of the time if you argue, you are in trouble."

He admires the ideals of the U.S., where your origin does not dictate your rights.

"With your government, everybody has a right," Abanur said. "There is no difference between age or gender. You’re white, I’m black, but we have the same rights. My government wasn’t like that. We were like thrown paper on the ground."

Home?

Samira said that because her mother’s brothers are still in Afghanistan, she does not feel like Charlottesville is home. Some of her uncles who regularly phone the family want Lailuma to stay in the United States with her children so they can attend school and university; others want her to return to her homeland.

"Some of my uncles want my mom to come back," Samira said. "They’re like, ‘What are you doing there? You should come here and live your life in your country.’"

Lailuma and Yousafi watch the news often to see how much of a hold the Taliban still has on the region.

For now, Samira said she and her brothers are here to finish college.

Yousafi wants for her children what she could not have growing up.

"Every day we were scared," she said. "We were watching over our shoulers to see if something would happen. We would like our children to grow in freedom and peace," she said. "They can’t get a good education if they are thinking about the bad situation. They would think they are not safe and can’t study."

Studying is what Abanur plans to do for many more years in college, after he applies for U.S. citizenship.

"This is becoming more than a home to me," he said." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, December 17, 2006)