KAKUMA, Kenya — They had learned how to buy bus tokens and clip coupons. Gotten hands-on training for lighting a gas stove and flushing a toilet. Taken a pop quiz on women's rights.
But for a group of U.S.-bound Somalian immigrants taking a three-day crash course on life in America recently, one topic by far stirred the most buzz: snow.
Staring at pictures of snow-covered roofs and hearing stories about waking up to find a frontyard covered in white, the Somalis (who'd rarely felt temperatures below 60 degrees) peppered the instructor with questions.
"How do I save my family from this ... snow?" asked Hassan Mohammed Abrone, 41, a father of two who was already trying to embrace the American lifestyle by wearing a Statue of Liberty baseball cap and a pair of secondhand Nike Airs.
After hearing a description of coats, scarves, gloves and long underwear, another student, Lelya Yussuf, 23, asked: "How can we walk while wearing all that? Isn't it too heavy?" In an effort to explain snow to people who have never seen it, the instructor asked students to imagine how it would feel to live inside a refrigerator. But the analogy fell flat for some, because they'd never heard of such an appliance.
"This job takes a lot of patience," instructor Abdullahinur Sheik Kassim said. "You can't take anything for granted."
For the Somalis in this northern Kenya refugee camp, passing a class in America 101 is the final hurdle to boarding airplanes for new lives. As they fly toward the United States, they will learn for the first time where their new homes will be.
A speed-read through American culture, the U.S.-mandated class tries to prepare them for what they will find when they arrive. It covers everything from mini-malls and microwaves to same-sex marriage.
For most of the students, ranging in age from 4 to 65, it's a steep learning curve. They've spent much of their lives fleeing Somalia's 15-year civil war, scrambling to survive in the bush or toiling in squalid refugee camps. Most come from persecuted ethnic groups and clans, such as the Bantu or Ashraf, that were the first to lose what little property they had after the collapse of Mohamed Siad Barre's regime in 1991. Now those same injustices have made them eligible to escape to the United States.
The cultural orientation class is one of hundreds given each year in Africa by the International Organization for Migration, or IOM, one of the world's largest refugee-assistance groups, which organizes the class with funding from the U.S. State Department.
