Fatuma Ali among her devotees. Photo by Mary Wiltenburg, 2011.

“Witch doctor” is clearly not a Swahili term. But that is what the woman yells, over and over, stomping in place and drinking from a plastic pouch labeled “Premium Vodka.”

Fatuma Ali wears a red-and-blue-checked cloth, belted toga-style around her body. Between slurps of vodka, she cracks open a bottle of lager with her teeth and gulps that too. From the back corner of the room, her husband, Richard Lawile, a soft-spoken former truck driver, explains that five male jinni, or spirit-personalities, take turns inhabiting his wife’s body and speaking to her clients. These jinni include a German soldier, an Arab trader, and the one we’re seeing now, a Masai warrior. Fatuma spends so much time in this state, her followers call her simply “Masai.”

In the gathering dark, five of her devotees are packed into a room the size of two portable toilets. Two slip outside when Fatuma invites my translator and me to enter. Among those who remain, her eyes glassy and unfamiliar, is Neema John, the woman I have come to Tanzania to find.

Two years ago, I visited Dar es Salaam and wrote about this young refugee’s struggle to be reunited with her family in the U.S . This January, she and her son got permission to go. But they haven’t. February and March deadlines have come and gone. Officials say there’s a chance they can extend these if she gets busy completing her medical checkup and visa interview, but she’s shown no sign of eagerness.

Instead, say officials at the agencies trying facilitate her move–the U.S. Embassy, UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN refugee agency), and International Organization for Migration (IOM)–she has repeatedly broken promises to show up, and goes weeks between contacts. Her parents say they don’t know why, and agency officials are dumbfounded. A refugee passing on a chance for a new life in America is so rare, says UNHCR legal advisor Ron Mponda, “it’s like a falling star.”

Yet Neema seems likely to do so. I have come to Dar es Salaam to learn why. On this first day, my search has led here, to a tin-roofed cinderblock house in a muddy bottom in the slum of Keko.

Tanzanians know Keko as the city’s busy furniture district. But past the velour sofas and carved cabinets along the main road, footpaths wind back into an area remarkable for its squalor. Keko makes Neema’s low-income neighborhood of Kigogo–a hilly collection of homes built on a city dump, but at least with clean latrines, a fruit and vegetable stand, a convenience shop, several tailors and a water pump–look middle-class.

It’s not just that trash is everywhere in Keko—the trees and grass seem to be growing out of it, the stream-bottom made of it, and a fetid stench rises from everything. To get to Fatuma’s house, you walk along this stream, cross a precarious log bridge, duck between the sties of several enormous sows and emerge into a yard of sucking mud.

Tony Joseph, Neema’s 6-year-old son, leads us there. In the yard, we meet his mother. Neema hugs me, but shows no emotion at my unannounced visit. She is followed out of the house by Fatuma, who welcomes me and ushers me in.

There, her Masai personality gives way to the German one, who speaks in a jumble of syllables that Richard tells us are German and English words. They are not, but they sound close enough to satisfy the Swahili-speakers on the floor, who light candles and pay small sums as Fatuma cracks open another beer.

This is not a story I’m eager to tell. In 2009, a spate of killings and maimings of Tanzanian albinos (whose body parts are prescribed by some traditional healers to bring clients financial success) focused western media attention on the country’s witch doctor problem. In response, the government banned all “traditional healers,” making no distinction between professional herbalists, those few involved in the killings, and small-time con artists like Fatuma. The ban was recently lifted, but inevitably much of the coverage fed stereotypes about African backwardness and exoticism.

Africans especially are disappointed by this portrayal, says Dr. Simeon Mesaki, a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam who has studied the issue of witchcraft in Tanzania for more than 30 years. Over lunch, later in the week, I describe to him the scene at Fatuma’s house.

“She’s a quack,” he says; true traditional healers are professionals who would never drink on the job. He estimates 80 percent or more of the country’s practitioners of witchcraft fall into Fatuma’s category.

Sitting in Fatuma’s house the first night, though, I’m struck not by her strangeness, but by her familiarity. I’ve met her kind before: in prisons, in small-town America, anyplace a person with confidence can cobble together a repertoire of pretense and manipulation to prey on worse-educated or more desperate people.

But amid her quackery, Fatuma also has a certain insight. Later in the week, when relations between us sour, she would accuse me of coming to Tanzania “just to help myself” by writing a story–not to help Neema. As proof of my good intentions, Fatuma demands a $500 payment–for Neema, of course. Though I do make a $10 “contribution,” she’s right that I have no intention of paying her a larger sum.

But she’s wrong that I don’t want to help. We just could not have more different conceptions of what that means.

Read the post as it originally appeared, on the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting blog Untold Stories >>

Bill Clinton Hadam (l.) has been selected for an elite Olympic training soccer team. It's part of the comfort zone his whole refugee family is easing into. (Joanne Ciccarello / CSM)

Clarkston, Ga.

“You can’t hit a girl,” was Bill Clinton Hadam’s advice.

This summer, when 10-year-old Emmanuel Sango arrived in Atlanta, friends Bill Clinton and Igey Muzeleya were anxious to help him adjust to American life.

The boys’ families had become best friends as refugees in Tanzania’s Mkugwa refugee camp. Four years ago, Bill, his brother Igey, and their parents had resettled in Georgia; their first years here were lonely, hungry, and baffling. Today, they have hard-won insights to share with the old friends who recently joined them.

Bill’s warning to Emmanuel was practical. But Igey, a devotee of Nickelodeon and an astute observer of third-grade social mores, thought it didn’t go far enough.

A few days earlier, his friend had been using a pit toilet and playing with a homemade slingshot. Igey knew from experience that Emmanuel’s new classmates at Indian Creek Elementary – where he and his brother had spent a miserable year, before escaping to a charter school – would be ruthless.
“He didn’t know McDonalds,” Igey explains. “He didn’t even know Burger King.”

In 2008, the Monitor began a year-long series that followed Bill (now 11), Igey (now 9), and their parents, as the newly arrived refugee family adjusted to life in the United States. When the project ended in September 2009, their future was uncertain. Today, challenges remain, particularly for Bill’s missing sister and nephew – and changes to the family have added new ones. But one thing seems clear: Although the boys won’t become citizens for another couple of years, they’re Americans now.

Take Bill. In 2006, the 7-year-old left Mkugwa camp for his new home in Atlanta. In Mkugwa, soccer had been his passion, played with balls he made himself, out of plastic bags and twine. In Georgia, even before he spoke enough English to participate in class, he joined a soccer team at school. Shell Ramirez, the mom who directed the program, spotted Bill’s talent and persuaded the local Y to give him a scholarship to play on its team. American parents and coaches quickly “adopted” the shy African, buying him balls, cleats, and other gear, and shuttling him to practices and tournaments. Bill’s joy on the field was magnetic, says Jeff Newbury, director of coaching for the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA soccer club, who has coached the boy for nearly three years.

And he was good. Very good. Bill and his best friend, Lagos Kunga – a refugee from Angola and Bill’s partner in mischief since he arrived at the roach-infested apartment complex that was both boys’ first American home – are such strong players that Mr. Newbury says it’s as though lightning struck his tiny soccer program twice.

“Lagos is a once-in-a-lifetime phenom kid,” he says, “one of the best players in the country – if not the best, he’s in the top three or four.”

In 18 years of coaching soccer, and playing professionally himself, Newbury has never seen a better player. Bill is nearly, but not quite, a match for his friend. He’s a year younger than the boys on his team, so Bill, “if he played in his own age group, would be the best … every single time he steps on the field,” says Newbury. “He’s an amazing, amazing player.”

This fall, both boys had a big break when they tried out against hundreds of top Georgia players for the state’s Olympic Development Team, the ground floor of the Olympic soccer program, from which future US Olympic and World Cup teams will largely be drawn. Bill was one of only 40 players his age to make the team.
“I was really proud of myself,” he admits shyly.

Lagos, a year older, made the team for his age group as well. The practices and games will bring both boys into contact with top coaches – and later, with college recruiters. Players must try out for the program every year, and if Bill continues to make the team, and make progress academically through high school, “it’s not a question of is he going to get a college scholarship – the question is where’s he going to go,” says Newbury, who spends 10 hours a week with the young player and thinks a lot about his future beyond the field.

“I could care less if he makes it as a professional soccer player,” he says. “I want Bill to go to college. I want him to have a job, and have his own family, and I want him to live a life that doesn’t exist in the world he came from.”

•       •       •

On the Soccer field, Bill is not just a world away from Mkugwa camp – he’s competing against kids from an America that looks very little like the multiethnic refugee enclave of Clarkston, Ga., where he now lives, or the nurturing and hyper-diverse International Community School (ICS), where he attends fifth grade. On his own Olympic trainee team, Bill is one of a handful of nonwhite kids, and the only African. Other players arrive in SUVs with sparkling gear and parents to cheer them on. Bill’s dad works the night shift at a poultry plant; his mom works overnight, too, on Georgia State University’s housekeeping staff. So Bill rides with Newbury, who buys him chicken fingers and a milkshake before dropping him home, sometimes at an empty apartment.

Academically, Bill and his brother are still catching up. But ICS teachers say they’re hungry to learn. Halfway through third grade, Igey is reading “Frog and Toad”-ish books with ease, and his teacher says he seems “ready to make a leap.” Bill has a strong interest in science: poisonous spiders, venomous snakes, and questions like this recent ornithological gem: “How come birds can learn English, but we can’t learn Bird?”

When the Monitor first reported on Bill, as he was finishing second grade at ICS, teachers were worried about the sensitive boy who cried almost daily. They’re still concerned – because, in the throes of early puberty, Bill spends so much class time giggling with friends. But teachers say his sensitivity is evolving into a robust sense of social justice. Last spring, during a unit on civil rights, he asked who had been responsible for starting racial segregation in America.

“I think I hate that person,” he said quietly. [Hear a previous interview with Bill.]

•       •       •

But the biggest change in both boys’ lives this year has been welcoming two new family members: not older sister Neema and nephew Toni, who remain in Tanzania, but a younger sister and brother.

Dawami (with 7-month-old Daniel) works nights and has to leave her children with friends. (Joanne Cicarello / CSM)

Bill’s mom, Dawami Lenguyanga, was almost 42 when she got pregnant last fall, for the fifth time. Her first two children, Fidelis and Neema, were 10 and 8 in 1996 when their Hutu father was shot in their Kigali living room in reprisal killings after the Rwandan genocide. As a massacre consumed their neighborhood, Dawami and the children ran out the back door. In the crush of screaming, fleeing people, Dawami lost sight of Fidelis. If he is alive today, he is 24 years old.

Dawami and Neema ran on, all the way to Tanzania. There, on the way to register at the United Nations office, they met Hassan Mwanasumpikwa, a fellow refugee fleeing torture and bloodshed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hassan remembers seeing Dawami waiting in line and thinking, “Eh, she’s beautiful!” The two were married the following year in Mkugwa refugee camp, where sons Bill and Igey were born, joining their parents and sister in stateless limbo.

This time around, between Dawami’s age, the twins, and other health problems, her pregnancy was considered high-risk. At 26 weeks, her water broke and she was rushed to the hospital. For a nightmarish week, she lay watching two heart monitors flicker on and off beside her bed. ICS staff and parents, and Bill’s soccer network, came together to care for the boys while Hassan shuttled back and forth between work and hospital. On May 24, twins Abigael Naomi Hassan and Daniel Benjamen Hassan were born, each weighing less than two pounds.

The babies, named for Dawami’s favorite Bible stories, spent two months side by side in pink and blue incubators in the neonatal intensive care unit before coming home to the family’s new apartment. Medicaid covered Dawami’s prenatal care, her hospital stay, and the twins’ touch-and-go first months of life – and it continues to pay for their checkups. Today, despite the challenges that face micropreemies, the bright-eyed babies are learning to sit up, and their pediatrician, Dr. Ronald Homer, says they are doing “just wonderfully: healthy, developmentally doing very, very well.” Igey is a natural with them, toting the tiny 7-month-olds around by their armpits.

Their new home is a far cry from the roach-infested apartment where the family spent their first three years in America. A few familiar photos remain, but faux-leather couches, towers of artificial roses, and a 50-inch flat-screen TV now dominate the living room. In the fridge, next to the plate of whole fried fish, there’s a jar of Goober Grape.

For their first few years in Georgia, the family seemed to have one hapless encounter after another with US laws and customs. Once, Bill’s mom was sent to court over a demagnetized subway card. Another time, a driver T-boned her car; she was found at fault, and when she tried to pay the ticket on what she thought was the appointed date, she discovered a warrant out for her arrest for failing to pay it or to appear in court earlier that month.

The Sango family’s arrival in July showed how far Bill’s family has come. When Dawami heard her friends would be moving to Atlanta, she visited all the complexes near hers that had three-bedroom apartments for rent. When she’d found a safe, affordable one, she sent a message to Seth Earl, the Sangos’ case manager at Lutheran Services of Georgia, requesting that he place them there. She hoped their kids could go to school together.

Eva Sango fixes her daughter’s hair. Her family resettled in Clarkston, Ga. this year from the refugee camp in Tanzania where they knew Bill’s family. The mutual support has helped them all. (Joanne Cicarello / CSM)

Instead, Mr. Earl placed the Sangos in a complex near Dawami and Hassan’s former home. Unfamiliar with ICS, he says, he was daunted by its application process and waiting list. So he enrolled Emmanuel and his sister at Indian Creek Elementary, the school where Bill and Igey spent a disastrous first year before finding ICS. The young charter school for refugee, immigrant, and US-born kids works particularly intensively with newcomers to the country. In 3-1/2 years there, Bill and Igey have each worked with dozens of teachers, assistants, mentors, tutors, and reading and English as a Second Language specialists. No other elementary school in Georgia takes such a comprehensive approach to educating young refugees.

Still, Hassan persevered on behalf of the Sangos, helping father Kapokela Sango get a job at the poultry plant where he works. Three months passed before the family of seven received the food stamps they should have gotten upon arrival in the US; Dawami and Hassan filled the gap.

But the Sangos saved Hassan and Dawami, too. In September, after a month of maternity leave, Dawami had to return to work or lose her job. Mom Eva Sango offered to care for the twins every night in her cramped apartment, along with her own five kids.

Igey often goes along, too, and sleeps over. He and Emmanuel have become best friends. Two years ago, Igey was so lonely and anxious to fit in that he claimed to be from Georgia, and insisted that everyone call him “John.” One day, he started to cry, explaining in English that he could feel himself forgetting Swahili, and he knew that, when he did, he would have to find a new family that could understand him. Today, that scared little boy is comfortable in his skin, and dryly hilarious in both languages.

•       •       •

Every November, Igey and Bill’s school holds a parade on United Nations Day. It’s a bright, noisy, tear-jerker of a celebration, where students dress in traditional costumes and walk behind the flags of the countries where they were born – or countries of their choice. In first grade, when Igey was learning about his past, he walked with the group with the Tanzanian flag; in second, in honor of his dad, he represented Congo. This year, he was nowhere to be seen; it looked as if he might have missed school. Then, as the end of the parade was winding its way toward the crowd of shivering parents, Igey appeared, in his little gray hoodie, and strutted across the parking lot, holding up one side of a big American flag. 

Bill (l.) – with his mom, dad, 7-month-old twin sister and brother, and brother Igey (r.) – in November in Clarkston, Ga. (Joanne Ciccarello / CSM)

“What’s happening with Bill’s sister?” More than a year after the Little Bill Clinton series officially ended, I still hear that question all the time from readers. Today, we finally have some answers – as well as a new story in this week’s Monitor magazine about an exciting development in Bill’s life, and big changes in his family.

You may remember Bill’s long-lost sister, Neema John, and his nephew, Toni Joseph, whom I visited in Tanzania in 2009. Neema was separated from her family when they resettled in Atlanta, and since 2007, her parents have been fighting to reunite with her in a legal saga plagued by uncertainty and delays. But over time, as deadlines have come and gone, their reunification case has made creeping progress. In August 2009, US Immigration finally approved now-22-year-old Neema to join her family.

But now-6-year-old Toni was another matter. On the advice of Chau Ly, the family reunification specialist at their resettlement agency, his grandparents applied for humanitarian parole for Toni – the same legal status that was granted to Haitian orphans who came to the US after the earthquake. The application documented the boy’s unstable living situation, and his grandparents’ ability to support him.

In April 2010, US Immigration sent a letter demanding that Toni and Neema take DNA tests to prove their relationship. The family was ecstatic, assuming the process was nearly complete and that they would soon be reunited. The grandparents paid for a DNA test to be sent to the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Tony and Neema went there to take it.But they never got past the gate.

According to Cedra Eaton, consul at the embassy, the procedure requires that Toni have a Tanzanian passport before he can be tested. He can’t legally obtain one, though, because his Rwandan refugee mother has no legal status in Tanzania, and his father is an unknown rapist. This September, US Immigration sent a letter saying that if it didn’t receive the DNA results within 30 days, Neema’s case would be denied.Mr. Ly wrote back, begging for an exception to the passport rule. The UN refugee agency can issue travel documents that count as a passport. One may be in the works now for Neema and Toni, who recently dropped off a photo there, and have been asked to return on Jan. 5.

If they are able to take the DNA test, and US Immigration approves Tony’s humanitarian parole application, only visa applications and fees, medical clearances, and a visa interview at the embassy will stand between Tony and Neema and a family reunion.

Meantime, the test waits on one side of the embassy gate, and Bill Clinton Hadam’s sister and nephew wait on the other.

As the sky opened up over the International Community School's end-of-year field day, Bill and I shared a grin. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill/TCSM

Click here to hear me and The Christian Science Monitor‘s Pat Murphy discuss a year spent following the life and education of 3rd-grader Bill Clinton Hadam, for the series “Little Bill Clinton: A School Year in the Life of a New American.”

Bill (l.), Igey (r.), and friends rescue a family of robin chicks who've fallen out of their nest. Photo © Mary Wiltenburg

Dear Bill and Igey,

When we first met, I wondered if you would grow up to read these stories.  Your teachers were worried about you learning to read, and neither of you had really seen the Internet, so it seemed like it would be a long time before that happened.

But this year, you surprised everyone. Suddenly, your parents weren’t the only ones who realized how smart and funny you are. Your teachers could see it. Your friends could see it. People following these stories saw it and cared about you from across the world. And you boys not only started reading – you started going online, then on friends’ Facebook pages. I know now that you will see all of this much sooner than I imagined.

So as this project ends today, I want to tell you how lucky I feel to have spent this year with you.  There were tough times along the way, for your family, for your school, and especially for your sister. Bill, I know you didn’t always enjoy all the photos and questions and attention. Thank you for being patient with me anyway.

Lots of moments from the past year still crack me up: When we talked about Michael Jackson, or kissing, or the origin of the world, or life in your old refugee camp. Igey, you are hilarious even when drugged.

In serious moments, I was struck by how caring you both are.  One day this summer, Igey, you called me to say that three chicks had fallen out of their nest. You had rescued them, scooped them onto a paper towel, and hidden them under your bed to keep them safe. But they were chirping, and hungry, and you didn’t know where to find worms.

I didn’t either, so we settled for bread. You guys and Ritha and Lagos all gathered around, and Bill dropped crumbs into the robins’ little yellow mouths, while Igey tried to figure out how to get them back to their mother. When they were full, you climbed the tree they had fallen out of and put them back in a new nest made of a cardboard box.

It seemed unlikely to work, and I tried to prepare you. But when we checked later that day, there was the mother bird, bustling around her boxful of babies. You were beside yourselves with joy, dancing around the parking lot shouting: “She’s back! The mama! The mama is back!”

The other night, Igey, you called again, worried about the future. We talked about years from now, when you go to high school, and you asked:  “Will we still know each other then?”

I said of course we will.

And you said:  “But will you still come to my house?”

I hope so.  I’m proud to know both of you, and always will be.

Love,  Mary

P.S.  For folks listening in: Our series concludes today with a final video, and a look back at the spiritual life of the International Community School in the past year.

We don’t know yet whether Neema will be able to join her brothers in the US, but we’ll have updates on this site as things unfold in the months ahead. I’ll keep writing about the boys too, in the “Reporter’s Notebook” section of my own website, on Twitter, and hopefully in a forthcoming book. For now, though, thank you all for your encouragement, wisdom, and great questions over a remarkable year.

Read this blog post and comments as they originally appeared, as part of The Christian Science Monitor series “Little Bill Clinton: A School Year in the Life of a New American”>>

Bill Clinton Hadam, with the team of ICS teachers who worked with him this year. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill/TCSM

Based in a public charter school for refugees and American-born students, a reporter looks back on year of progress

Decatur, Georgia – On a sunny afternoon last October, Hibo Hassan, an assistant teacher at the International Community School, did a dangerous thing. She painted a little girl’s hand.

It was Eid ul-Fitr, the Muslim celebration that marks the end of the month-long Ramadan fast. Hibo came to school with gorgeous henna designs on her hands. Henna, a burgundy dye, has been used for skin and hair dying across multiple continents since the late Bronze Age. Henna painting isn’t particularly associated with Islam, but it’s a celebratory art in many cultures. Like Hibo herself as a girl growing up in Somalia, her students were enchanted by the intricate patterns and vines. They begged her to make designs on their hands too.

Looking back over the past year at the charter school outside Atlanta, this moment says a lot about the kind of community ICS is and aspires to be. As a new school year starts this week and our series draws to a close, the Obama administration is prodding America into a new era of charter schooling. This a story of what moral and cultural education can look like in a charter school community that’s not afraid to talk about faith.

HIBO DEFIES LABELS. The young Ethiopian-Somali woman’s sense of style is audacious. Her shock of often-vertical, sometimes-orange curls is astonishing. She’s sensitive, hilarious, and unafraid to speak her mind: her front-office rants are masterpieces of storytelling, outrage, and vocal projection. And Hibo’s practice of Islam is one that would feel familiar to young people of many faiths.

“Why is he going to assume that just because I’m Muslim I don’t drink beer?” she fumed one day. A server carding her in a restaurant the night before had expressed shock, since officially, Islam forbids drinking. “That makes me mad. I said, ‘Don’t put that on me without even asking me. What, all Muslims are alike?’ ”

Like many ICS teachers and staff, Hibo is engaged with her students in a way that goes way beyond the classroom. She visits them at home, takes them out for ice cream, and goes to their soccer games. She babysits for many students. After school, little girls line up for her to braid their hair in cornrows.  Their henna request seemed of a piece with all this. Hibo didn’t think anything of it. One day, she brought in supplies, and during the school’s extended-day program, painted temporary henna designs on five or six first- and second-graders’ hands.

During an interview later  that evening ICS principal Laurent Ditmann’s phone rang. The caller was speaking loudly enough to be heard  across the desk. The father of one of the little girls who had come home with “some kind of markers and stuff” on her hands, he was struggling to contain his fury. He wasn’t shouting, but he was close.

“Right now, I am hot,” he said, with a Southern inflection. “Nobody should ever mark somebody’s child. That stuff is people’s religion and stuff.”

A YEAR AGO, this Georgia public school was unmistakably Christian. ICS staff had a comfort level uncommon in a US public school with talking about education in religious language.

Not illegally so; nobody was proselytizing. As its name suggests, ICS is an inclusive global cross-section of students, staff, and families – and that hyperdiversity extends to faith. Some 30 to 40 percent of students and 15 percent of staff are Muslim, and that and other traditions are celebrated in, rather than shut out of, the charter school’s culture.

In its seven-year history, ICS has become one of relatively few public schools in the nation where staff members can be open with students about their faiths. It’s a hard balance to strike, teaching about a range of traditions, amid a huge variety of them, in a public school, renting its space from two churches. Most ICS teachers manage this extremely deftly.

Still, until last fall, the school was Christian in an important way. Back then, the words school leaders used most to talk about their school included: miracle, theologian, family, spiritual growth, power of attraction, transformation, humbly, faith tradition, “Beloved Community.” Some parents felt this was a vital part of what made ICS so welcoming to newcomers. Others tolerated it for the sake of a school they loved. Still others were put off by it and sent their kids elsewhere.   Today, the words more commonly used in ICS meetings include: strategic plan, academic excellence, diversity, model, feasibility study, pragmatic, intentional, balance, environment, community. What happened in between forms the backdrop to the year when third grader Bill Clinton Hadam stopped weeping in class, and his little brother Igey learned to read.

ICS’S FOUNDERS WERE LARGELY CHRISTIANS, in the best sense of that word: the “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave [me] drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me” sense. The dozen or so members of the “discernment group” who first envisioned the school for affluent suburban kids, poor Georgia-born kids, and refugee kids from conflict zones across the globe, were almost all religious. Of the two who remained most active at the school this past year, Patty Caraher is a Dominican nun, and Bill Moon is a former seminarian.

These people live their faiths. They spent four years talking about ICS before it opened. Making sure everyone felt heard in the process was as important to them as whether a school emerged. Their sources of inspiration were often theological: the sermons of 13th-century mystic Meister Eckhart; the scholarship of Emory University professor emeritus M. Thomas Thangaraj; and above all, the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his dream of the creation of a “Beloved Community.”

A year and a half ago, almost no sentence passed school leaders’ lips that did not include this phrase. It was hard to define; one founder confessed she had never known what it meant. Dr. King had written that the aim of his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Montgomery bus boycott was “to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality.” But how this vision should apply to an elementary school was not always clear.

Still, the phrase had the power of an incantation. People said it reverently, or ironically, but they always said it. It was a spiritual yardstick held up to tough interactions. People who signed on with the school were understood to be trying to build it.

The phrase “Beloved Community” owes its pervasiveness at ICS particularly to one founder, beloved in her own right: Patty Caraher. The spry, septuagenarian nun, known to all as Sister Patty, is one of those radically loving and forgiving individuals who stand as examples of humanity at its best. Four decades ago, when she taught in all-black schools in Mobile, Ala., Patty protested and went to jail with her students. Many of them still remember her vividly. Patty “was God’s example of a white person that cared for and loved me,” one former student commented earlier this year. “It was my first example.”

At ICS, Patty led family outreach efforts and organized the school’s teaching assistants, mostly refugees and young volunteers. She also helped write the school’s vision statement: “We seek to build and nurture the Beloved Community espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Old enough to have heard King’s speeches on the radio, she talked about him as a friend, and discussed his Beloved Community with the authority of someone who had fought with him.

This year, when she felt that vision was under attack, she fought for it too.

ENTER THE AGNOSTIC JEW. Actually, ICS principal Laurent Ditmann, who this week begins his second year as head of the school, entered the scene three years ago as an assistant to then-principal Bill Moon. Laurent was on his fourth career, having been a French professor, watch salesman, and business consultant before landing at the elementary school.

Laurent is one of those prodigiously smart folks whose social wisdom is catching up to his intellect. He loves ICS, and feels fiercely loyal to its students – in part because his story resembles some of theirs. His parents survived the Nazi Holocaust and started life after the war as refugees in Paris. Like many people touched by atrocities, Laurent wanted nothing to do with any god that would allow such things to happen. He was impatient on his students’ behalf, particularly with Bill’s and other staff members’ talk about spirituality, which he felt was standing in the way of practical changes needed to insure the school’s survival.

“I don’t look at [community] as something spiritual, I look at it as the result of what’s been done,” Laurent said as he began his new job. “To me, community is activity.”

So he got busy. He buzzed into his new office with timeframes, consultants, and an annual fundraising goal $150,000 more ambitious than any previous year’s. Longtime school supporters worried he would kill the spirit of the place. Laurent countered that, under new state guidelines, ICS could not afford to rely on goodwill or “miracles” – nor could it camp out in scattered church buildings indefinitely. For its spirit to survive long-term, he said, the school needed a facility of its own, a better-defined development plan, and policies and procedures that would make it less vulnerable in uncertain political and economic times.

In his haste to get ICS these things, Laurent ran afoul of a symbolic school tradition: the reflection. This was a solemn moment at the start of every meeting, when a participant offered something like a prayer. Often it was a poem, an anecdote about a student, or a quote from Mohandas Gandhi or Pete Seeger or the Dalai Lama. One extended reading from “Chicken Soup for the Teacher’s Soul” left several staff members in tears.

Laurent could not get reflections right. At times he made light of the tradition, which lost him points with those who found it moving. At others, he made sincere attempts, drawing readings from his own sources of inspiration. But this was not foolproof either.

Besides collecting fountain pens and pocket watches – and his and his wife’s newest hobby, couples tap-dancing – Laurent’s chief extracurricular obsession is with military history. His language is laced with battle metaphors. When he read reflections in meetings, they were often the thoughts of great military men. While such quotes lent a heroic air to the cork board in his office, they tended to fall flat in staff meetings – especially among English-learners who did not grasp what a long account of the D-Day invasion might have to do with the school’s need for a building.

Still, Laurent soldiered on. He hired a consultant to interview staff, parents, and school supporters, and draw up a five-year strategic plan for ICS. In February, when a draft debuted before staff and parents, the school’s old vision statement was subtly changed. It now read: “We have historically sought to build and nurture the Beloved Community akin to that promoted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

The battle for the school’s soul was on.

THERE WAS ALWAYS A TENSION in a public school like ICS having religious underpinnings. Founders tried to gloss over it by talking about a spiritual approach to education that treated every child as unique. That was, and is, true at ICS: children are loved, celebrated, and treated as whole individuals in a way that American parents clamor for and refugee parents trust. This year, the school, which admits by lottery, received more than 350 applications for fewer than 100 slots.

But it wasn’t that simple. This past fall, when the school’s charter came up for county review, readers were struck by the sweetheart deal the school had with the two Christian churches from which it rents space. They worried this might signal a subtle quid pro quo. As principal, Bill had led several services at the school’s main church home as a kind of thank you. The charter committee had no tolerance for such apparent cosiness. Laurent and the school’s lawyer had to insist in ICS’s new charter that the churches’ assistance would “not foster excessive government entanglement with religion; has not coerced students to accept or participate in a religious activity in any way; and may not have the purpose or effect of endorsing religion.”

Historically, to address concerns about such “entanglement,” school founders pointed to the large numbers of Muslim students and staff at ICS. This was by no means a given in the school’s first years, despite large numbers of Somali and Bosnian refugees arriving in metro Atlanta. Some parents wrote the place off on the basis of the church buildings it rented. Only a great outreach effort by Muslim staff persuaded many refugee parents that ICS was not a place that would try to convert their children.

It isn’t. If anything, the school is a place where many refugee students and parents first encounter non-missionary Christians, and many American kids and adults see mainstream Islam in action for the first time. Several parents raised in Western Christian traditions talk approvingly about their children fasting for Ramadan with Muslim friends and teachers (they never manage to hold out the whole month, but neither do most of ICS’s Muslim kids). In fact, independent of one another, two of the school’s US-born staff members recently converted to Islam.

Not that that’s the school’s goal either. But it speaks to a place where it has long been understood that people can come to the same core values from different theological perspectives. It helps to foster a community in which nobody thinks twice about a third of the school’s cheerleaders wearing long skirts and the hijab.

And it aligns ICS with the quietly radical mission statement of the International Baccalaureate program it follows: “to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people … who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.”

WHEN ICS FOUNDERS TALKED about the “Beloved Community,” they were borrowing from Dr. King an originally Christian concept – one introduced by American metaphysicist Josiah Royce, who saw the church’s primary role as modeling this ideal. Laurent felt this was problematic in a multifaith environment, and some parents and staff agreed. He was behind the “akin to” change in the vision statement, and in the weeks of strategic plan revisions that followed, he argued that leaning too heavily on a single faith tradition was inappropriate in a pluralistic school like ICS. Surely, he said, there must be other words – unity, diversity, respect – that would better convey what the school was after.

This did not sit well with founders, and some longtime community members, who felt the soul of the school – the spirit that made it unique, that feeling new visitors got when they visited the campus for the first time, which was hard to put into words, but kept them coming back in droves to volunteer – was in jeopardy.   Sister Patty made the most heartfelt case. In an e-mail to parents and staff, she argued: “MLK’s dream of the Beloved Community is not a soft feeling, a fuzzy dream. It’s a strong counter-cultural value of respect, care, dignity for all no matter the religion, culture, traditions. In a real sense it’s a subversive dream because it flies in the face of competition and individualism of the dominant society…. It’s a spiritual goal of oneness. It’s a lifelong pursuit.”

“We could put in our vision statement something about unity in diversity, respect for all,” she continued. “These are all acceptable words right now. They are part of creating the Beloved Community but they don’t convey the radical vision that MLK lived and died for. The kind of educational excellence that we are working toward with our dear ICS children will only be reached if we also embrace the Beloved Community. They go hand in hand.”

When the strategic planning committee had weighed community input, the plan went to the board. The tortured language of the school’s vision statement, approved in March, reflects the terms of the peace: “We have historically sought and will continue to seek building and nurturing community akin to the Beloved Community promoted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the most diverse and open-minded way.”

At the end of the year, with fond farewells and not a little exhaustion, the remaining founders retired from ICS. Bill and his wife Mary, who had been ICS receptionist, left their school family and struck off across the country to visit their six children and an army of grandchildren.

Patty, though, couldn’t bear to retire completely. Though she’s cut back her hours, Wednesday mornings still find her sorting food for the hungry families and meeting with teaching assistants from around the world: working to realize that subversive dream.

LAST FALL, AS LAURENT SAT ON THE PHONE with the father angry about the henna on his daughter’s hand, there were rough months ahead for the rookie principal. His criticisms and changes would soon alienate the school’s old guard. His firing of ICS’s development director would lose him funders.

He would overhaul report cards to make them easier for parents with limited English to understand – but send them out months late. He would struggle with insomnia and panic attacks, and fall short of his fundraising goal. He would lose his cool. As he finished the year, Laurent would quote the Korean War movie “Hearbreak Ridge”: “[I]f this hill doesn’t kill us it’ll surely break our hearts.”

“That’s how I feel about this place,” he would say in May. “ ’Cause it’s been as much as I could take.”

But there were many triumphs ahead, too. The school’s charter would be approved for the next five years. With a restructured leadership team and the help of two excellent assistant principals, Laurent would begin to run the school, as he put it, less like a church and more like a business. Teachers would get raises, more uniform contracts, a salary scale, a chain of command, and regular professional development.

After a big push in math instruction, ICS would overcome its previous year’s failure and meet its test score requirements under No Child Left Behind. With a new development team in place, and its board focused on good governance and responsible budgeting, the school would end the year on a surer footing procedurally and financially. By the coming fall, ICS would have a feasibility study done on a prospective new school site and a parent-teacher organization up and running for the first time in the school’s seven-year history.

That October day, as he sat on the phone, the new principal was still learning what kind of leader he would be.

“My wife is not happy either,” the father was saying. “Right now I’m very calm compared to what I used to be.”

In a glimpse of what his best moments as principal would look like, Laurent said, respectfully: “I understand what you’re saying, and I will address it.”

But the father was not done being angry. He said his wife had calmed him down considerably before he called, “because I love this school, and they’re learning so much about other cultures and stuff.” He and his wife valued that for their daughter, the father said, “but you don’t put your culture on my daughter’s body.”

“You’re right,” said Laurent.

The father seemed a little startled. “Well,” he said, “maybe I …”

“No,” Laurent insisted, “you’re right. It’s that simple. Nobody should mark on your child without your permission. I will make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

The father was speaking gently now. Across a desk, a phone line, a cultural and religious divide, his voice cracked with love for his daughter. It was the voice of someone who wants a different educational future for his child than the one he had himself. His protectiveness, and some raw discomfort with Islam, were bound up together in a larger fear of a world that would continue to mark his daughter, as it marks us all, in ways not even a loving father can control.

Maybe, he told Laurent, there was no need to punish the staff member who’d painted his daughter’s hand. Maybe there was a way to just chat quietly with her and explain the need to ask permission before doing something like that. Laurent agreed that this would be best. Sounding almost apologetic, the father said the person probably hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. Laurent said he suspected not, and he would handle it in a sensitive way.

He did. Even when a second family threatened to pull their daughters out of the school because of the henna, Laurent didn’t punish Hibo. He met with the parents, and she met with them, and everyone talked about the potential for allergic reactions, the history of henna art and its prevalence throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and the need to ask parental permission in such cases. Her boss supported Hibo, while warning her always to err on the side of caution when a child’s body was concerned.

”He handled it like a pro, actually,” Hibo says.

WHEN HIBO FIRST LEARNED that the father had called about the henna, she felt terrible. The man’s daughter had been her student the year before, and Hibo loved her and her parents. It had seemed like such an innocent gift she’d tried to give the little girls. There were no religious overtones for her, but she could see how it might have looked that way to someone unfamiliar with the tradition.

Hibo sought the family out to apologize. They told her they felt bad too, and they had never meant anything against Islam – they just wanted to be asked about things like that. Hibo told them she took full responsibility, and apologized again. But they had already forgiven her. They still call her to babysit.

On the phone, Laurent thanked the father for calling. “We will make mistakes,” he said, “We’re not perfect, and we will screw up.” The school relied on parents to tell them when they did, Laurent said, and the dad had done just the right thing by calling him.

Then they chatted about the man’s daughter. Laurent knew her. “She’s a wonderful kid,” he said.

Her father now sounded as close to tears as he had been to shouting. “I appreciate it,” he told the principal. Nobody is perfect, he said, and “I love you and the school and what you’re doing there. It’s a wonderful school.”

As its founders would say: Amen.

Read this story and comments as they originally appeared, as part of The Christian Science Monitor series “Little Bill Clinton: A School Year in the Life of a New American”>>

As new fourth graders line up for recess on the first day of school, teacher David Bellamy takes questions about the hermit crabs, and Bill starts to get to know them. Photo © Mary Wiltenburg

The boys piled out of the house this morning in fresh white shirts and uniform pants, giant backpacks flapping behind them.  The new school year began today at the International Community School, and as our year-long series ends, Bill and Igey are starting fourth and second grades.

Last night around nine, I got a panicked call from Igey:  “Um, Mary?  Is orange a boy color or a girl color?”  He had gotten a new backpack in his favorite shade, and was taking flak from Bill, who had opted for basic black.

Both boys were anxious to get to school this morning.  When their parents went inside to sign their health forms, the brothers split for their new classrooms without waiting for an escort.

Down in his second-grade room, Igey found his seat and got to work on a Getting-to-know-you questionnaire.  The boy, who’d started his second pass through first grade last fall unable to read, took one look at the first question – “What is your favorite color?” – and broke into a grin.  O-R-N-I-N-G, he wrote.  Then, examining it, he said, “That doesn’t look right.”

In teacher David Bellamy’s fourth-grade room, Bill chose the desk with the best view of the classroom’s hermit crab tank, and began making the acquaintance of Colombia (the greenish one), Jamaica (the shy one), and Barbados (the pretty one).  “Awww,” the girls chorused, as Mr. Bellamy brought out the light-shelled crustacean with the purple claws.  Bill, who a year ago was shy to the point of mute frustration, joined his classmates in peppering their teacher with questions.  How do hermit crabs eat, Bill asked – which led to whether they bite, which led, in a roundabout way, to how they change shells.  Which, it turns out, involves a funny dance, featuring much wiggling of a hermit crab’s “big old rear end,” that Mr. Bellamy does extremely well.  Giggling ensued, and the kids were in high spirits as they lined up for morning recess.

And then Bill was out on the playground, where soccer teams of familiar faces picked up where they’d left off in May, and began tearing up and down the field.  A ball flew way out of bounds, and Bill ran to retrieve it, delivering it back with a spectacular kick over the top of a classroom trailer.  Play resumed, and he sauntered around the building and took possession of the ball wearing an enormous grin, as friends clustered around shouting for passes:  “Bill!  Bill!  Bill!”

Read this blog post and comments as they originally appeared, as part of The Christian Science Monitor series “Little Bill Clinton: A School Year in the Life of a New American”>>

A mini-United Nations of job seekers lines up outside a Georgia farmer's market that has not hired in months. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill/TCSM

Global conflict and recession chip away at America’s ability to protect the huddled masses it has rescued: some go homeless, some even return to war zones to make a living.

Clarkston, Ga. – “Are the kids dead?” Hassan Mwanasumpikwa joked with his wife in the last hour of their trip. As they left the Atlanta airport in the dark, he tried to shake sons Bill Clinton Hadam, age 7, and Igey Muzeleya, 5, awake for a glimpse of the city.

Nine days before, on Oct. 16, 2006, the refugees had learned they were going to America. After a 10-year wait, the Congolese-Rwandan family had hours to pack for the 8,000-mile journey. In the next few days, there were many firsts: English phrases, flush toilets, airplane flights.

After a whirlwind orientation, they flew from Tanzania to Kenya, New York, and Atlanta. There, a fellow passenger guided them through a maze of trains and escalators to the baggage claim, where a resettlement caseworker was waiting for them.

Now, the boys lay on their parents’ laps in matching USA T-shirts, too exhausted to think of the refugee camp, or the sister, they’d left behind – or to take in the headlights snaking past as the car merged onto the highway, heading north toward their new life.

This is a dream most of the world’s refugees will never realize. America takes in more of these vulnerable people than any other country. But this year, as the US resettles an expected 75,000, 13.6 million others worldwide are living under or seeking United Nations protection. Sixty percent have waited a decade or more for permanent homes.

Pick a conflict today – Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan – or reach back to Bosnia or Vietnam: In our globalized world, every war eventually shows up on America’s doorstep as kids like Bill and Igey. Their experience, and those of friends and neighbors on both sides of the Atlantic, is a window on the nation’s refugee program.

A cornerstone of US foreign policy since the Carter administration, the resettlement program draws universal praise for its lifesaving generosity. But since 1980, it has been no politician’s top priority and has gone without major reform. And in today’s economy, the minimally funded program is failing many of those it rescues. Without a basic cultural foundation and language skills, some refugees who arrived in the US eager to build a life are ending up on the streets. Some are even returning to the war zones they fled, in desperate search of livelihoods.

“A crisis [is] unfolding on our own doorstep,” says Bob Carey, vice president of resettlement for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), whose caseworkers will welcome and find housing for more than 10,000 new arrivals this year. “The system is fundamentally broken.”

THE APARTMENT WHERE THEIR CASEWORKER dropped Bill, Igey, and their parents, had the basics: beds, table, couch, apples, tomatoes, and a rotisserie chicken in the fridge. Igey had never seen an apple; he tried to eat one, but fell asleep halfway through. The family would have slept all the next day, but World Relief, the evangelical agency responsible for their reception and placement, picked them up for paperwork and shots. Soon they had Social Security cards, the boys were enrolled in kindergarten and first grade, and their parents were job-hunting.

World Relief and IRC are two of 10 voluntary agencies, mostly religious, under contract with the US State Department. Their job is to meet arriving refugees, who’ve been vetted overseas by the UN and the US Department of Homeland Security, and get them started in places like Atlanta, Phoenix, and Minneapolis.

Funded according to the volume of refugees they resettle, these agencies get $900 per head to cover administrative costs plus a refugee’s first three months in America: food, clothes, furniture, housing deposit, and rent. The agencies raise funds and distribute donated goods, and provide many refugees with help finding jobs, learning English, and accessing medical care, funded by the Department of Health and Human Services – and states sometimes chip in public assistance. But eight months after arrival, refugees are on their own and newcomers are lined up behind them, just as wasted and lost.

BEFORE THEY’D SLEPT OFF THE JET LAG, Hassan and family began venturing out of their apartment, looking for someone who spoke French, Swahili, Lingala, Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, or anything else they could decipher. Igey, the littlest, made friends first: Two Colombian brothers invited him over and gave him a toy truck to play with, not caring that they shared no common language.

Dawami Lenguyanga, the boys’ mother, layered each son in two pairs of pants and three shirts.

“Cold! We’d never seen cold like this,” she remembers of the 50-degree F. averages that month.

The three-day orientation the family had gotten in Tanzania from the International Organization for Migration hadn’t lingered on weather. It had left them with a sense that America was a place of calamity where you couldn’t always count on your neighbors. Dawami and Hassan had practiced shouting into phones: “Hello? I need ambulance! Hello?” and “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Looking back, they say, it was the first clue that their new home might not be everything they’d envisioned. “US is big country in Africa,” says Hassan. “When you say you go to America, it’s like paradise.”

HASSAN AND DAWAMI QUICKLY GOT JOBS:  him gutting chickens at a poultry plant, her at a farmers’ market.

But today, refugees entering the job market are one of the biggest casualties of the economic collapse. In Phoenix, a major resettlement center, 80 percent of refugees were employed and self-supporting within four months of their arrival in 2007. Now, only 10 percent are.
It’s a similar scene here in the Atlanta suburb of Clarkston, an enclave of resettled refugees from more than 50 countries. On a cold February morning, Bhutanese refugee Bhanu Dhakal waited in line with 60 other refugees at the farmers’ market where Dawami got her first job. After two hours, he learned that there was no work, even for an experienced high school English teacher like him. For four months, he’d been hunting, willing to take any job. He and his wife were amazed: “This is not what we expected in America.”

REFUGEES FOUNDED THIS COUNTRY, though they weren’t called that then. For most of its history, the US made no distinction between those coming because of political or religious oppression and those coming for economic reasons. On arrival, it was every man for himself.

After the Nazi Holocaust, the US and UN began to write into law their commitments to help people made stateless by persecution. Over the next decades, the US admitted waves of refugees to whom it felt a responsibility: Cubans, Russian Jews, Vietnamese. With the Refugee Resettlement Act of 1980, President Jimmy Carter formalized America’s refugee program and made it more politically and geographically evenhanded. Since then, the country has resettled 2.7 million refugees – the most diverse cross-section of cultures, languages, educational experiences, and needs, that any nation takes in.

“We’re extremely proud [of that openness]. It follows from a long historical tradition,” says Elizabeth Campbell, director of the Refugee Council USA, a coalition of 25 nonprofits. “But keep in mind, the strength of the US program is also its weakness.”

Embracing an ever-more-diverse influx of refugees – from the Burmese rice farmer to the Iraqi accountant – has overwhelmed the one-size-fits-all system, as well as the funding supporting it, say those across the country involved in resettlement.

“Right now, we know there are huge problems facing refugees who resettle here because of the increase in unemployment and cutbacks in government services,” says Tim Riesser, a foreign-policy aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont. While little hard data has been collected on how many refugees are falling through the cracks, resettlement agencies see a growing number who are unemployed and unable to pay rent.

“They get help,” says Mr. Riesser, “but they’re facing so many obstacles: unfamiliarity with the culture and don’t know the language, many don’t have job skills, [and] in a time of real economic downturn, they’re among those who suffer most.”

A State Department reauthorization bill, passed by the House last month and awaiting Senate approval, would provide job training, English classes, and cultural orientation to refugees before resettlement, and permit some families to bring with them children they have informally adopted. And the State Department gave an emergency $5 million grant in June to help resettlement agencies forestall refugee homelessness.

But critics say such piecemeal changes won’t fix larger flaws: The program is uneven state to state and inflexible in its emphasis on getting all refugees work in entry-level jobs – even when that’s a waste of their professional and educational experience or impractical because of trauma or widowhood, or impossible given the economy.

THERE’S NO SIGN that the Obama administration plans a major revision of resettlement policy in the near term, and the issue isn’t on the Congressional agenda. Key agencies – State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) – are in a holding pattern until administration appointees are in place.

What could change is funding. Over $1 billion is budgeted federally for resettlement (about $14,000 per refugee). But since the program’s founding, funding hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living – the length of assistance to new arrivals has shrunk: from 24 months three decades ago to a maximum of eight today.

Citing the failing economy and the growing number of refugees unable to find jobs, ORR asked Congress for a $40 million increase in 2010.

Refugee resettlement is a tiny program in the grand scheme of Washington. It has no real opponents, but advocates all have higher priorities and the refugees themselves have no political clout.

It’s widely agreed that the program’s funding is due for a radical increase, says a congressional aide who works on refugee issues. The Obama administration is considering the problem, adds the staffer, especially the hardships facing Afghan and Iraqi refugees whose work with the US military forced them to flee their homes. But in this economy, how any politician will weigh the moral and political costs against the financial one is still a question.

Some Iraqi refugees are so frantic now for work that they’re returning to the war as interpreters. “It’s a staggering situation,” says Mr. Carey. “In the 30 years I’ve worked with refugees, I’ve never heard of a situation where refugees are considering going back to a war zone.”

THINGS DIDN’T GO WELL for Dawami and Hassan  after their early months in the US. Long hours working in a fish freezer left Dawami so sick she had to quit her job; it was a year before she found another, on Georgia State University’s custodial staff. Bill and Igey came home from school crying. They struggled to learn English, or anything at all.

The family owed the US more than $4,000 for the plane tickets that had brought them here. Food was scarce. Roaches overtook the apartment. And day and night, their phone rang: friends and relatives calling from Africa, asking for help.

Last year, the US, Canada, and Australia, three countries founded by immigrants, took in 92 percent of the world’s resettled refugees.

A few thousand others went to Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe. Their reception varies according to cultural priorities: The US wants people working quickly, while Denmark favors an easing-in period during which it provides social services and helps facilitate Danish-language instruction.

Refugee families often have a much harder time than immigrants by choice do in living up to the myth of American self-invention.

“There’s an expectation that an immigrant will be able to hit the ground running,” says Bill Frelick, refugee policy director for the international nonprofit Human Rights Watch. “For refugees it’s often the opposite: They’re picked because of their vulnerability.”

Dawami and Hassan had plenty going against them. She was a Rwandan Tutsi, he a Congolese Banyamulenge: both groups targeted by local death squads. Each had dropped out of high school, and seen family tortured or killed. From their “mixed marriage,” Bill and Igey were born into a perfect storm of vulnerability.

And the threats didn’t end at the border. The UN placed the family in Mkugwa, a “protection camp” in northwestern Tanzania. There, at 13, Dawami’s daughter from a previous marriage, Neema John, was raped by older teenagers. Consumed with shame and fear, Neema fled the camp. The day her family received their US visas, they had to make the hurried, painful choice to leave without her. Dawami had been a refugee for 33 of her 38 years.

WHO ARE REFUGEES? The 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and its 1967 Protocol, which the US signed, says: People outside their home countries who can’t return due to “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” (“Asylum seekers” have the same fear of persecution, but are already living in the countries to which they apply for protection.) This wording applies to many desperate people today, from the thousands of Sudanese streaming out of Darfur to the 2 million Iraqis forced from their country by the US war to 3 million Afghans still homeless 29 years after that nation’s previous war.

Over time, though, the definition has become problematic. Each year, millions around the world flee wars that devastate their lands and decimate their people, but don’t count as targeted persecution. Tens of millions more are “economic migrants,” uprooted by lack of livelihood.

Many others, like those now escaping Pakistan’s Swat Valley or lying low in Iraqi villages or Congolese squatter camps, don’t run across borders, which makes them “internally displaced persons,” not refugees. So those UN-documented refugees the international community is already scrambling to help are just the tip of the iceberg.

“The world is doing a fantastic job of producing refugees and internally displaced people,” says Yacoub el Hilo, director of the Tanzania branch of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which handled Hassan and Dawami’s case. The UNHCR was established 59 years ago with a three-year global mandate. Founders imagined it would quickly become unnecessary. Instead, in 2003, it was made permanent.

“So how are we doing as a world?” Mr. el Hilo asks. “[V]ery badly.”

THE GREGARIOUS HASSAN and fearless Dawami left behind many friends in Tanzania. Their camp closed in 2007, part of a government effort to rid the country of refugees. But many acquaintances still languish in nearby camps, nursing American dreams. As they do, their kids are falling behind. This April, in Kanembwa resettlement camp in northwestern Tanzania, many of Hassan’s Congolese friends expressed outrage that schools there have been closed for over a year, and informal teaching is forbidden. (Schools were shuttered to prepare for the camp closing, expected this summer.) It pains former high school math teacher Pierre Lokombe, particularly: “Our kids have nothing to do. And this affects their psychology, don’t you think?”

Dawami’s daughter, Neema, learned that the hard way. Then, in 2006, she returned to the camp with her infant, looking for her family. Neighbors helped her call her parents in Atlanta. Now the family is racing the clock to be reunited with her. When she turns 21 in September, the chances of her and her 4-year-old son joining their family in Georgia will evaporate.

Families rarely emerge intact from war and trauma. Dawami lost a first husband to murder, and a stepson, Fidelis, in a running mob as she and Neema fled Rwanda. He could still be alive; she doesn’t know. Hassan left three kids behind when he escaped a Congolese prison and ran for his life. Now he sends them money, and wonders if he’ll see them again.

Often, inadvertently, resettlement does further damage. Qualifying interviews with UN and US officials can take years. Births and weddings that happen meantime aren’t always factored into who gets visas.

The UNHCR, the International Red Cross, and the US State Department all work to reunify divided families. But the issue is complex. Last October, the State Department shut down one of two avenues to reunification after DNA tests on 3,000 African applicants confirmed fewer then 20 percent of the family relationships they claimed.

Cultural disconnects account for some of the disparity: Informal adoptions are common throughout the developing world, especially in populations ravaged by war. Until the bill legitimizing such families passes the Senate, those approved for resettlement must leave these children behind. Other unmatched DNA cases were the result of rapes or affairs mothers had not disclosed. Criminal gangs may have swelled the numbers, too, by forcing or paying families to sign up nonrelatives.

At the same time, deliberate fraud is common among those applying to immigrate. People will say anything to get to the States – lies that can mask motives as benign as economic self-improvement and as sinister as terrorism. So officials are hypervigilant in scouring stories for inconsistencies.

This degree of scrutiny can be hell on people who – across language and cultural barriers and the imperfections of human memory – are trying to tell the truth.

In dark moments, as Dawami has worked and prayed for reunion with her daughter, she has looked back longingly on those early years in the camp. True, she says, food was scarce, her family sick, the schools marginal, and women and girls in constant danger. But at least they were together.

TODAY, TIRED AS THEY ARE,  Dawami and Hassan are hopeful. US immigration is considering Neema’s case. Hassan is a US taxpayer who has contributed $7,000 to Social Security. Dawami gets rave reviews from supervisors, and her English is improving. In a new school – the International Community School – Bill is reading and Igey is doing math at grade level.

Now, others from Mkugwa camp are resettling in Atlanta. With refugee agencies overwhelmed, Hassan and Dawami are stepping in where they can: driving those without cars to the store, helping the illiterate with paperwork. Often, in their rocky first years, more experienced refugees helped them out. Now, green cards in hand, the new permanent residents have come far enough to start giving back.

No, they say, America is not the paradise they imagined from their mud-brick house in the refugee camp. They live in the same roach-infested apartment where their caseworker dropped them in 2006. They struggle with chronic health problems. Money is tight. Both parents work nights, so the boys put themselves to bed.

But already, they can look back on those early days and laugh: at how lost they got in the airport, and how little they imagined what lay ahead.

Travel in Africa for the project was partially funded by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. 

Read this story and comments as they originally appeared, as part of The Christian Science Monitor series “Little Bill Clinton: A School Year in the Life of a New American”>>

Noe Meh, a Burmese refugee, arrived in Atlanta with her family in June. A former rice farmer and torture victim, she has no English and an 8th-grade education. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill/TCSM

From worlds apart, a Burmese rice farmer and an Iraqi accountant share a dream

Clarkston, Ga. – Refugees now arriving in the US are the most diverse group in history. A 30-year-old, one-size-fits-all entry program doesn’t keep up with their divergent needs. Visits to two newly arrived families here show the challenge.

Until his collaboration with US forces endangered his life, Saadi al Sawadi  was an accountant at Baghdad International Airport. He and his wife, Sihan, a teacher, gave their three sons a comfortable life of books, movies, and camera phones. As refugees in Jordan, they found excellent special needs services for the eldest, Hazim.

Until the Burmese military junta forced them off their land, Htay Reh and his wife, Noe Meh, were rural rice farmers, living in bamboo huts. Each has an eighth-grade education. In a Thai refugee camp since 1996, the torture survivors worked as a social worker and a midwife, respectively, and raised two polite young daughters.

Frustrating, is how American life has been for the Iraqis since they arrived in March. Mr. Sawadi is taking classes to perfect his English. He’s willing to work menial jobs, but interviews – most recently at a window plant – have yielded no offers. His greatest problem is adequate medical care and enrichment for Hazim.

Terrifying, is how America struck the Burmese, four days after their arrival last month. The traffic is incredible. Their African neighbors are a color of human being they’ve never seen. Their fridge and stove are their first electronics. Camped on their living room rug, all four peered out the window at a baffling new world.

The two families share the dream of a good education for their kids, and the fear that, despite their willingness to work, they won’t be able to provide it.

Read this story as it originally appeared, as part of The Christian Science Monitor series “Little Bill Clinton: A School Year in the Life of a New American”>>