They come from Kosovo, from Somalia, Cameroon, South Vietnam and Peru. Their languages, their stories, their circumstances vary widely, but they share a common experience.

Young or old, man or woman, a refugee by nature arrives in a new country breathless from running, if not from gunshots, from psychological terror. All at once there is hope and sorrow. There is gratitude for life, but shock that life's direction has been so dramatically and permanently altered.

There is help, of course. Those who make it to America have been officially granted refugee status based on the danger they faced at home. Churches and nonprofit groups that sponsor them help with resettlement. Currently, Maryland is home to 30,000 refugees. Some 700 now arrive annually; later this summer, 300 more will come through a newly established resettlement center in East Baltimore.

For each, the journey begins with the moment of realization that they must flee. Once begun, it is a journey that never really ends, even for those who have made it into mainstream American life.

What follows are portraits of five refugees, all but one of them students at the Northwood Refugee Center in Silver Spring. Each of their stories is compelling: a mother's narrow escape from death, a teacher's success in translating his skills into new opportunities, a young girl's first feelings of optimism for her future. Taken together, they span the spectrum of the refugee experience, a physical and emotional odyssey of loss, dislocation and rebuilding.

Indrit Bregasi, 27

Pastry chef, Gaithersburg

He is fiery-eyed, dark-haired, intense, a young man descended from a 400-year-old European family. Words cannot explain his metamorphosis from intellectual in the cafe society of Albania to pastry chef at Marvelous Markets in Bethesda, so usually he doesn't try.

"It comes from the first day you understand your position in your country," he says. "From the environment, from the atmosphere, you understand you must leave."

The Bregasi family is replete with heroes fighting for human rights and independence in the part of the world now called Albania. A great-grandfather, an early supporter of freeing women from the veil, was given a national hero's burial in 1911. A grand- father finished law school in 1920, and was killed after the invasion by Italy in 1940. One uncle was killed in 1949 when Communists took over; another was imprisoned for 12 years, then later for 21 more. Indrit's father was jailed for seven years when he was a child.

Bregasi's own contribution was to help topple the Communist regime. In a 1990 protest in Korqa, he and two friends felled a giant statue of the long-time communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Almost immediately, he realized he would pay a price. The names of families like his were on a list. The police knocked on doors and showed his picture. Everybody knew him. He would be beaten, spend a month in jail.

Like the statue, the Communist government eventually fell, but disillusionment with the elected government set in. People had lost their way, Bregasi saw. By 1996, the Communists regained power, and one day at a cafe he was threatened by five men. "We will do to you what we did in Hungary," they told him, referring to the slaughter of protesters in that country. Then one night in December 1997, men with Russian assault rifles shot up his house.

It was time to leave.

"There was no space for families like ours," he says, "families with tradition, families who want to be left to think for themselves and to live in a rule of law."

He said goodbye to his elderly father and walked five hours over the mountains into Greece. A few weeks later he was granted refugee status by the United States and flew there in January 1998. These days he works, studies English and considers his direction. Every few days he visits an uncle who arrived a few months ago, and listens to an oral history of the Bregasi family. He lives suspended, mourning and thinking about how to preserve and carry on the family name, about how different a route he must take if Bregasis are to emerge as leaders in America.

In Albania, his life was about speaking out for the good, the moral. Two or three nights a week, at dinner with a university professor, a bank president, perhaps one of the country's top actors, he would tackle philosophical questions well into the evening. Their discussions set an agenda.

But here, he says, what matters is not whether you speak out for good or just causes but how how much money you have. "In America, you have to have money to be heard."

How to carry on his family's work here is unclear. But he has been amazed to discover how much of the fight has already been won. Back home, he says, the government didn't care about individuals; people with children saw their lives ruined, their families destroyed. He never could have imagined that in America, some animals get better treatment, a shock he experienced when he first encountered a store for grooming pets.

"I can't believe it," he says. "I sometimes feel like I am in heaven."

Princess Frazer, 48

Mother, clerical worker, Silver Spring

Princess Frazer looks at the wall when she confronts the memory of what she used to be, the things she has lost. The house, the garden, the boutique she stocked from her travels as an airline hostess, employees, a maid, the high regard of her community.

It was only material things, she tells herself. "There are babies with no mothers. I have my life. I know God brings me here for a purpose."

But it was more. It was her identity, her way of life, the pride in Sierra Leone, a country she helped build, the first in West Africa to offer university-level education. It makes her ill, she says, even to think about it. She is resigned to the notion that it will take 50 years to restore the education and culture destroyed overnight by rebel soldiers. For her children, the future is here.

Her two children are what she thinks about when she walks 1 1/2 miles to the bus stop each day. She can't afford a taxi -- not if she wants to pay for their food. Some months she makes only $200 copying papers for a Washington law firm.

When she recounts the day she lost everything, she blurts out the details in a detached, staccato voice, as if they belonged to someone else.

It was a Sunday, May 27, 1997. The Frazers were leaving for church when word came that the Dutch brewery in Freetown where her husband was chief engineer had been attacked by rebels entering the capital city. He ran off to help secure it.

By 5 p.m., there had been no word back from him. As a gang of rebels approached her house, she ushered the children upstairs and they hid in a bathroom.

"Mrs. Frazer, if you don't come out, we will burn your house down," the rebels yelled. She decided her children would be safer if she left them behind. But before she got downstairs, she heard glass breaking and gun shots ripping through her parlor.

Outside, she was pushed to the ground and sat on by three women while 10 men pointed guns at her. They demanded her husband's keys to the brewery; when she said she didn't have them, one rebel threatened to break her bones, another to kill her. As the men argued over her fate, Frazer passed out; when she came to, she heard shouts and saw her attackers running away. The brewery had been taken over and the beer was being poured.

She sneaked her children to a secure place, where her husband managed to join her. With roads blocked and the airport closed, the family was cornered. From their hiding place they could see rebels going back and forth from their house, looting it, trashing it. For a week the family stayed hidden, until her husband, who would stay behind, arranged passage for Frazer and the children on a boat to Guinea.

It was an open boat used to transport timber. Along with 1,000 others, she boarded, paying $500 cash. They sat pressed together on the deck, anticipating a day's trip at most. But Guinea refused them entry, and the boat would travel on five more days over the ocean to Gambia.

People who had food gave it to the children. Many grew sick. The women prayed, cried, sang, held onto their kids. Rain came in torrents; waves battered them. The boat, carrying 10 times its limit, dropped to just one engine.

On the fourth day someone aboard reached the Red Cross by cellular phone, and a helicopter dropped food. "Do you know what that's like, after three days of no food or water, to reach up to the sky to grab bread?" asks Frazer.

In Gambia, she relied on American and European churches and relief agencies for food -- refugees were not permitted to work. She became resigned to her status as overnight pauper and began to live for her children, hand to mouth, sometimes hand to heart, praying to God to make the best decisions for them. For her first step, she rejected the refugee camp 300 miles away in favor of a cramped existence in the city so her son and daughter could continue their schooling.

It was in Gambia, where refugees met every week to collect food, that she learned her mother had been killed by the rebels. There she heard how rebels doused the houses of friends and other relatives with gasoline and set them afire, leaving the bodies inside to rot. Her husband escaped to Guinea and then to Ghana, where he lives now, working to earn passage for remaining relatives.

Frazer lived in Gambia from June 17, 1997, to June 9, 1998, when she, her son, 16, her daughter, 8, a cousin and two dozen others who had been on her boat boarded a plane to New York. As they prepared to land, they prayed together for all the people left behind. They arrived in the United States on June 10, 1998.

"These," she says, "are dates you will never forget."

Amelia Siuce, 20

Student, Silver Spring

Amelia Siuce's position in the world was as follows: born into a poor but solid family in rural Peru, where the harshness of life was regularly eclipsed by a good party. Everyone was expected to make something of themselves, but the women did all the cooking and the men did all the talking.

Her father, for instance, proposed plans, solutions and change as a teacher and the mayor of the village where they lived. That's why, when the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla movement moved through the countryside, he was one of the people they wanted dead.

She remembers them bursting into her fifth-grade graduation party and calling out names of men who were leaders. Her father never answered when his name was called; afterward she watched him disguise himself in clothes lent him by the female students.

When her father was admitted to the United States as a refugee in 1991, the rest of the family remained behind, hoping to join him later. She would spend her adolescence in fear and uncertainty over where the family would move next to outwit the guerrillas.

Through those years, she says, she had one goal -- to follow in the footsteps of her three older brothers who studied at a university in Peru with money their father sent. Then, in 1997, she and a younger brother were permitted to join their father here. The terror was over, but to her surprise, her simple goal seemed out of reach. The cost of college in America, she discovered, was prohibitive.

She couldn't enroll anyway without first learning English. She's studied enough in the past eight months so that she's close to being accepted into a program for nursing assistants.

"Maybe I can pay for college by working now," she says.

So for now, she's the cook, serving food to her father and brother, who is in high school. Together they wait for her mother to sell their house in Peru and join the family. On Sundays she plays soccer with other Peruvians in a Rockville park. And, just as before, she and her friends have parties.

She's "a little bit happy," she says.

"I am not reaching exactly what I want. I want to be somebody through work, that's what I want. I want to find a good job, a good position, and naturally I want to make money to give to my family. Then I'll be happy."

But as Siuce ventures out into this new world, some things are changing. In five or 10 years, she says, "maybe I will be in college." And then?

She can picture herself one day, after she gains some experience, speaking out as her father did in the old country, doing the talking.

Hussein Mohamed, 44

Father, disabled, Silver Spring

Hussein Mohamed keeps the documents in a brown leather folder. "Memories," he says,"I can share with my family."

Typewritten papers with official embassy stamps, they certify that Hussein Mohamed, an Ethiopian born in 1955, is a refugee in good standing in one camp, then another. They are proof of his place in history, and also the sum of his wealth. Not wealth measured in money, but in courage and self-esteem. These were all a man who could not walk, whose mangled body was left for dead, could carry with him.

They are what he barters when his children want clothes like their classmates' and he can't buy them. When his children ask when they will get bicycles, or why the family doesn't have a car. When he doesn't have money for a school field trip, and they sigh, demoralized. Then he reminds them of his life as a refugee, and they understand.

He was born in the Ogaden, a part of Ethiopia named for his tribe, once Somalian, into volatile circumstances -- the quest for oil and gems in post World-War II Africa. His Somalian-speaking tribe was barred from school, so Mohamed was never educated. For 30-some years, though, the family prospered as farmers, until a new government began confiscating the harvest to feed the military. This happened repeatedly until 1977, when, Mohamed says, his parents refused. The entire family, save the wives and children, was imprisoned.

Separated from the others, Mohamed was tortured routinely for nearly a year with electric shock. One of his testicles was cut with a scissors. Finally, just before Somalia invaded Ethiopia in 1978, he was shot in the hip and left for dead. The Somalis got him to a hospital and he survived. He would leave months later, walking with a stick, his back bent.

In a Somalian refugee camp he learned the alphabet, then typing and sewing so he could work with his hands. For half the day he typed papers at the national refugee commission; in the afternoons, he sold clothes and sweets and did sewing repairs in a small kiosk.

For 11 years, the camp was his life, and he tried to make a new start. He learned there that his parents and a brother had died at the hands of their torturers. He also married again and fathered six children.

Then one day, at the end of a three-day trip to buy goods for his store, fighting erupted around him in the Somalian capital of Mogadishu. The civil war had begun. He jumped into the nearest car and fled to another city. His camp had been attacked, and he feared his wife and children were lost to him just as his parents had been.

Eventually the United Nations sanctioned his move to a camp in Kenya and the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi accepted his case for resettlement. He tried to return to Somalia to find his family, but authorities told him it was best to search for them later. Sponsored by a church group, he arrived in Rockville in August 1993.

Then came word: The U.S. Embassy had located his family. "The day I received the first call from my wife, I nearly fainted," he says.

Four years had passed since his fateful shopping trip. During that time, U.S. doctors operated on him numerous times, removing four bullets from his hip. His family was shocked to see him standing upright again in photos he mailed them.

The joy of their reunion, though, was short-lived. Shortly after his wife and children arrived, Mohamed was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and doctors had to remove his lung to save his life.

"Even now," he says, "when I remember what I have been though, what my family has been through, I cry."

He uses a cane to walk around the three-bedroom family apartment now, and when he goes out, to a parent-teacher conference, the library, or to a state office to take a test for citizenship, he takes his oxygen tank.

Disabled, and with limited government assistance, he finds it hard not to be able to give his children things they need on the spot. But he buys them notebooks and pens so they can't give excuses about not doing homework. He assigns them pages to read each night from a library book they've selected. And he reassures them that someday it will be different.

And in the story that explains his poverty is another kind of wealth: proof of the goodness of humanity, he says: He was denied an education in his own country, but in America his children have the opportunity to learn. He lost his family, and America helped him find them again. He could not walk, and his new country gave him back that ability.

It's the reason he hopes one day not just to support his family again, but to give back what he has received.

Aleksander Bojaxzi, 56

Teacher, Baltimore

Aleksander Bojaxzi quit his first job in the United States after just six weeks. He was grateful for help from resettlement agencies, but the factory was too noisy to try out his English. More than earning a living, speaking English was his single-minded focus.

The stakes were high; at 50, he would have to prove himself all over again at a time when many men his age are thinking about retirement. But his single-mindedness reflected his confidence in himself and his appreciation for comic unpredictability (it also helped that his wife worked two jobs). Because what happened next was fodder for a Fellini.

In September 1993, this refugee with minimal English was hired as a guide at a landmark of early American history, Baltimore's Charles Carroll Mansion. Only rote memory -- and the fact that people asked few questions -- saved him.

The job was part-time and didn't pay much, and that first year, Bojaxzi applied for welfare three times. He couldn't understand why the government expected him to apply for jobs; couldn't they see his problem was not that he didn't have a job but that he couldn't speak English? Otherwise he might be teaching math and physics, as he'd done for 27 years in Albania.

He decided to pin his hopes on bookkeeping. He took a course, scanned the classifieds and sent off 120 resumes. Oh, and one resume for a teaching job. He was at the corner liquor store, asking for a third time for a job as a stock boy, when a local magnet school called his house offering a chance at a substitute teacher's position. Within days, he was hired.

It was a turning point: His family no longer struggled to pay for food and heat and clothes. But with this job came a new struggle. The high school boasted talented students, but there were also students who didn't want to be there, students who caused trouble.

Was it his limited language or their lack of background in the subject? In Albania, schoolchildren paid attention; their salaries the rest of their lives depended on it. How dare these children waste such a great opportunity! He learned, he says, that kids in America have too many options.

"Freedom," he says with disdain, "is like fat in your body."

But his superiors saw his patience, and his passion for geometry. He practiced every word in the textbook, took courses he could have been teaching just to better his pronunciation. He worked 14-hour days and took classes on evenings and weekends. After several years, his hard work, and a little luck, got him a full-time job teaching gifted children at Roland Park Middle School.

Almost 57 now, Aleksander Bojaxzi has completed a master's degree. His wife has found a job in her field (chemistry), and his two sons, graduates of St. John's College in Annapolis, are headed to graduate school.

He is lucky, he says, that he has wanted to learn his whole life, and that his years as a rock climber gave him "an education in how to be quiet ... to look where is the pathway to get through the situation."

For the first time this summer, he has no real plans except to enjoy the moment, the luxury of time after seven years of feeling pushed up a mountain by an invisible wind.

Always, though, there is his English. In three years of teaching at Roland Park, he has gotten few complaints about it, but still he is not comfortable. He will continue to look for ways to improve it. "There are so many things I want to do," he says.

He has the same high expectations for his students, and this he seems to have no trouble communicating. Their trophies line his classroom shelves.

Pub Date: 06/20/99