Personalities 34 P o r t l a n d monthly magazine meaghan maurice teachers, the principal. She wouldn’t stop until they got a translator and listened to what she had to say. She came here for a bet- ter life for her children. She wasn’t going to let us sit and watch TV all day.” By the end of sixth grade, Khadija was finally getting support. “Once I started to learn, I started to enjoy it.” She began tak- ing after-school homework groups and staying in the library to catch up. By soph- omore year she was in mainstream class- es. But her ESL classes at Lewiston Middle School showed her the challenges kids like her faced in the system. “One teacher gave us a ten-page book and made us read the same sentences over and over for the whole year. We were teenagers. We weren’t learn- ing anything! The parents complained. The She recalls a class vacation in high school, when she and a friend walked into a grocery store. They both wore hijabs. The store fell silent as the girls entered. ter our arrival, my mom attended a meeting at Lewiston City Hall,” where applications to a farming program were circulated. Hawa was one of the only refugees not to throw the application away immediately. “Everyone else was too scared to sign up,” Khadija says. “They thought it was danger- ous. That we’d be taken out into the fields and killed or something.” Meanwhile, Khadijah and her siblings, who are now scattered across the country from Ohio to Texas, went to the local ele- mentary and then to middle school. “I had a teacher in Texas for a couple of months who helped me learn some English, but no one knew what to do with us at my new school. I spent two years coloring and watching TV.” She was eleven. “One day, I turned to my mom and told her I hated waking up to do nothing every day. I slept all the time; I had no purpose. My mom was furious. She drove to the school and screamed at the K hadija Hussein, 22, sits in the long grass beside rows of colorful chard and heads of lettuce, neatly planted over this slice of the Packard-Littlefield Farm in Lisbon. The sun is bright, and the morn- ing is already hot, though the yellowing corn warns of the season’s end. This farm- land is owned by Cultivating Community and farmed by members of the New Ameri- can Sustainable Agriculture Project. Khad- ija’s mother, Hawa Ibrahim, 56, was one of the first to join the program in 2006, af- ter leaving Kenya with Khadija and her six other children for a new life in America. The family arrived in Dallas, Texas, at the end of 2005, where they stayed for a short time with the support of the Internation- al Rescue Committee. “After four months, we were on our own,” Khadijah says. “We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have a car or even a driving license, so how could my mom get a job? A relative told us to come and join them in Maine.” She shakes her head, then laughs. “We traveled for three days to get here. Dallas was hot, so we arrived in flip-flops. It was early March. The snow was so high. I cried and cried to my mum: ‘You made me take the bus for three days to torture me like this?’ I’d never seen snow like this before.” Hawa had farmed the family’s land in Africa until war and persecution of Somalis drove them out. “We had a farm there. An- imals, land, a cool lake to jump in when it got too hot. We left all that behind. Soon af-