It took almost two days for Khadijo Abdulkadir and her family to reach John F. Kennedy International Airport from Kenya.

At the airport, an immigration officer asked Abdulkadir’s father to step aside and directed him into a separate room.

The whole family panicked.

“We were sitting outside fearing, crying. Are they kidnapping our dad?” she said. “We didn’t speak any English, so we didn’t know what to do.”

Since then, she has been learning English at North Side Learning Center. There have been moments she’s been stumped by English, but never frightened like that first day, she said.

NSLC started its fall session in September, offering English classes and homework help to kids. Abdulkadir and her family were among the first to join the center, when it opened in 2009, the same year they came to the United States as refugees. Abdulkadir received a full scholarship and is an undeclared sophomore in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. She is the first-generation college student in her family, and had help getting to SU through the NSLC.

NSLC has served almost 1,500 refugee and immigrant families since it first opened. Mark Cass, who is one of the board members of NSLC, said it has eight full-time teachers and 75 volunteers this fall. Approximately 178 people have registered for the classes. The volunteers belong to different organizations like the Syracuse University Program for Refugee Assistance (SUPRA), SU Literacy Corps and SU International Young Scholars. According to the American Immigration Council, approximately 70,000 refugees were admitted to the United States.

Abdulkadir was born in Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya in 1994, where her family moved in 1992 after the civil war broke out in Somalia. She spent the first 15 years of her life in the camp.

She said life in the camp was like a jail. They didn’t have any papers, so they were not allowed to go anywhere except a few surrounding villages. They were deprived of basic necessities like food, drinking water and education.

“I came here without knowing a single word of English; I couldn’t even spell my own name,” she said.

Abdulkadir reached Syracuse in July and started going to Catholic Charities Northside CYO, where she learned the English alphabet and basic words like saying “hello” or asking where the bathroom is. Her translator at CYO advised her to buy an English-to-Somali dictionary.

Abdulkadir was placed in grade nine and she started school in the fall that followed. She said she was lost when they enrolled her in courses like science and geography. She was skipping classes and hiding in the bathroom because she didn’t know how to read the class schedule and find her classroom.

“I would go back home and tell my mom, ‘Mommy I can’t do this,’” she said.

Abdulkadir said that her mom, who herself never went to school, encouraged her to learn English.

Abdulkadir said she went up to her teacher at school and told her, “I only want English.” However, she was allowed to take only two English courses and she enrolled in classes like art, gym and dance. She also started going to NSLC, along with school.

She said that at one point in time, she was taking English classes at three different places, leaving home at 6 a.m. and coming back at 8 p.m.

“When we came to Syracuse, I never had fried chicken; I never had an apple in my life,” Abdulkadir said. “At the camp, for breakfast we will just have bread and tea and for dinner, my mom would usually mash the corn or cooked beans.”

Abdulkadir attended a public school at the camp where the teachers had only finished middle school and could not teach her much beyond first or second grade. She said they just filled the board with everything they knew.

Younis Mosleh is teaching an adult “English as a second language” class for the first time this fall at NSLC. On Sept. 30, the class met in the evening. It’s a group of 17 men and women of different ages, most of them clad in traditional clothing and talking to each other in a multitude of foreign languages. There are people from Vietnam, Somalia, Kenya and Eritrea in the group.

Mosleh said NSLC caters to a wide audience, offering classes to people ranging from age 8 to age 84.

“I probably only knew A-B-C or a few basic words,” said Mosleh, who came from Yemen to the United States.

Mosleh said he immediately started taking English classes because he felt isolated not being able to communicate with people. In five months, he was able to find a job and later start his own cleaning business.

Teachers at NSLC said Mosleh and Abdulkadir were some of the best students at NSLC and that the program has helped them grow immensely both professionally and academically.

“I sent my paper from school to my first teacher in NSLC for proofreading. She said, she can’t believe how much I have improved,” she said. “If I hadn’t listened to mom, I won’t be in SU.”

Published on October 19, 2015 at 10:41 pm

Contact Srosh: sranwar@syr.edu