The office of the Somali Relief and Rehabilitation Assn. is no larger than a walk-in closet. It has no desk, chair or filing cabinet. Its furnishings amount to a telephone, an answering machine and wall-to-wall carpeting.

By most measures, the windowless alcove would seem nothing to celebrate about. But for a tiny refugee community from a country torn by famine and war, the freshly painted office on West 6th Street in Los Angeles represents hope--for Somalis here and those in their East African homeland.

"Everyone is calling, but we don't even have furniture yet," said Director Ahmed A. Dahir recently, awaiting a donation of furnishings from a soon-to-be closed branch of Security Pacific Bank. "We are right now shipping $15,000 worth of medicine to Somalia."

Since its founding two years ago, the relief group has been bounced around from donated desks in a downtown office building to the kitchen tables of its volunteers. Until recently, the official phone number rang at the Mid-Wilshire home of co-founder Saeed Megag Samater; board members would meet in his consulting office or at the workplaces of other volunteers. Only last August was the group incorporated, and it has not yet filed its list of officers with the California secretary of state.

Still, the nonprofit group, which is affiliated with a relief effort by the same name in the disputed northern Somalia region of Somaliland, is hoping to become a unifying force for the fragmented and scattered Somali immigrant population in Los Angeles. Known as SORRA, it is funded through private donations and is one of several organizations providing resettlement assistance for refugees here and displaced Somalis in Africa.

Other groups, such as the African Community Refugee Center on Fairfax Avenue, have helped find housing, clothing and job training for new immigrants. But SORRA claims to be the only relief organization in Los Angeles run by and for Somalis, and it hopes to build on that distinction.

Fewer than 300 Somalis live in Los Angeles, according to local Somalis, but their numbers have been slowly growing with successive waves of immigration. A decade ago, Dahir said, just nine Somalis called Los Angeles home, most of them students at UCLA.

Today the population is a diverse mix of poor refugees, some of whom arrived last month and speak no English, and successful professionals who have gradually worked their way to Los Angeles after fleeing Somalia, some nearly two decades ago when it was aligned with the Soviet Union.