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CONCORD, N.H. — Besides his meager income as a landscaper, a Somali man has relied on food stamps to support his seven children and his pregnant wife. But there's little left for things like soap, diapers, utilities - and rent. Next week, against his family's wishes, Mohamed Mohamed plans to move everyone to Maine, where he's heard that life is cheaper and easier for Somali immigrants. They've been in Concord for 10 months. His is not an isolated case, said Nasir Arush, a Somali translator who assists the family and other members of the Bantu communities in Concord and Manchester....

Sometime this spring, in cities around the United States, the first of nearly 12,000 African refugees will step off airplanes and into a modern world as alien and strange as the bottom of the ocean. They will come with hopes of work, education and safety, at last, from a legacy of persecution. They are Somali Bantus, a people devastated by massacre and rape after Somalia crumbled into civil war in 1991. Thousands left rural homes for refugee camps in Kenya. They have languished there for the last dozen years. Now the United States is opening its doors to the Bantus...

The education of a Somali Bantu family began with the flick of a light switch in a modest little apartment in Rainier Beach. Dark rooms suddenly brightened, revealing objects that put the newly arrived refugees in awe: a stove that produced heat without firewood; a toilet with water coursing through it; a refrigerator with more food than they'd seen in an entire African resettlement camp. Haji Shongolo, who arrived March 31 with his wife and four children, lacked any frame of reference to describe it, other than to say through a translator: "It just seems new. I don't know anything...

Members of the Bantu tribe in Somalia find their transition to America more difficult than that of many immigrants because they've never had electricity, running water or TVs. Suleiman Ader's journey began on the farm where he was born when he, as a young man, was struck in the face by men who then forced him to watch the rape of his sister. It was during the civil war in Somalia. To escape, Ader, his wife and child walked for days to reach the Kenyan refugee camps where two more children were born and another conceived. Last month, the family...

25 Nov 2003 12:59:53 GMT FEATURE-From mud huts to Walmart, Bantus make new life in US -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Alan Elsner, National Correspondent UTICA, New York, Nov 25 (Reuters) - In June, Mohammad Hassan was living in a mud hut in a squalid refugee camp in Kenya, slept on the ground, gathered firewood in the bush for cooking and barely subsisted on U.N. food handouts. Now, Hassan, 20, and his family live in a four-room apartment in upstate New York. They buy clothes at Wal-Mart and food in a supermarket. Hassan works in a local cosmetics factory. His brothers and sisters...

Most of the Mugoya family, refugees resettling in Denver after arriving Thursday from Africa, speak no English. Post / Cyrus McCrimmon The Mugoya family rests in the baggage area of Denver International Airport on Thursday while waiting to go to their new home in east Denver. From left, Jele Mugoya, 50; Ishmael, 2; Fatuma, 5; Megenei, 30; and Mohamed, 15. The Mugoyas are among the first of 12,500 Somali Bantus being relocated in the United States. They are descendants of slaves, accustomed to grappling daily for food, fuel and water, blocked by Somali clans from education and job opportunities.Now in...

<p>BUFFALO — They may be the world's closest thing to a truly stateless people: abducted 200 years ago into slavery, relegated in our time to near serfdom, and driven finally into exile by civil war.</p> <p>Until recently, most had never flushed a toilet, flicked a light switch, climbed a flight of stairs or watched a TV. They had never talked on a telephone, cooked on a stove or ridden in a car, never held a pen or used a fork. Many have never crossed a paved road.</p>

<p>AYCE, S. C. -- For the Somali Bantu headed for South Carolina, the promised land is an air-conditioned apartment with a green door, gray shutters, and a clothesline out back.</p> <p>''They'll probably think it's heaven,'' said Viola Hatten, who lives at the Pinewood Apartments, where a two-bedroom unit rents for $395 a month.</p>

12,000 Somalis are to be resettled in the U.S. over the next two years March 10, 2003 Africa's Lost Tribe Discovers American Way By RACHEL L. SWARNS Civil war scattered Somalia's Bantu tribe in the 1990's. Over the next two years, nearly all of the tribe's refugees in Kenya — about 12,000 people — will come to America.Somali Bantu refugees at a camp in Kakuma, Kenya, take classes to prepare for new lives in the United States. KAKUMA, Kenya — The engines rumbled and the red sand swirled as the cargo plane roared onto the dirt airstrip. One by one,...

Sometime this spring, in cities around the United States, the first of nearly 12,000 African refugees will step off airplanes and into a modern world as alien and strange as the bottom of the ocean. They will come with hopes of work, education and safety, at last, from a legacy of persecution.They are Somali Bantus, a people devastated by massacre and rape after Somalia crumbled into civil war in 1991. Thousands left rural homes for refugee camps in Kenya. They have languished there for the last dozen years. Now the United States is opening its doors to the Bantus in...

A Sigh of Relief for the Somali Bantus Due for Settlement A cause of history is being re-written lately with 300 Somali Bantu crossing the Somalia-Kenya border to start new life in a foreign land. They are part of a group of 12,000 Somali Bantu being settled in the United States of America. The move brings to an end suffering encountered by these offsprings of some of the slaves captured in Africa by Arabs at the close of the nineteenth century. The month of July this year (2002) will thus remain in the historical calendar as the time when the...