A Season of Study In a Strange Land

Here, in the four weeks since his father came on a fellowship at George Washington University, the sixth-grader has not yet made friends, and he has to work hard to understand people. Yesterday, he listened carefully to the announcements and the Pledge of Allegiance. After homeroom, he watched his classmates pour into the halls.

"I don't know what is my next class," he said, looking around uncertainly as students ducked into various doorways. The hall emptied. He finally chose a classroom and slid into an empty seat.

But something was wrong. "My teacher is Mrs. Scott," he said. This wasn't Mrs. Scott. He hurried back to the locker area, where another teacher gave him directions, and he ran the rest of the way.

At Annandale High School in Fairfax, ninth-grader Raazia Batool strolled the halls with a confidence she lacked when she started school here in March after moving from Pakistan. Raazia wore her usual tunic and headscarf, but yesterday she dressed it up with new black pants with sparkly embroidery.

Raazia, 15, remembers being puzzled the first time a bell rang and it was time to head to a new class. In Pakistan, students stayed in one room, and teachers moved around.

When a teacher arrived in Pakistan, "we stood up . . . and said hello to her," Raazia said. "They don't do that here."

In Dumfries, Patricia Arevalo walked into her first class at Potomac Senior High School wearing typical teen apparel -- jeans and a white Daddy Yankee T-shirt. But she was no typical ninth-grader. A 20-year-old married mother of three who came from El Salvador in 2001, Arevalo has spent the past five years tending to her children.

She recently decided she wanted a future beyond the fast-food path her mother and sister had taken, so yesterday she stepped into a U.S. high school for the first time.

"I was scared to go to school," Arevalo said. "When my sister was going to school in Pennsylvania, someone said in a crowd, 'Hey! She doesn't speak English!' She dropped out after a month."

Does Arevalo worry she'll do the same? She smiled and said: " Yo soy mas fuerte ." (I am stronger.)

For her first day, Nadin had pulled her curly hair into a high ponytail and selected a pair of jeans she'd brought from Iraq. Sitting in their apartment before the bus came, she and her father talked about how different life is here.

"In Iraq you cannot walk at night; here you can walk until morning," said Habib, a man with a thick, brown mustache and a worried look in his blue eyes. Since coming here, he said, his daughters no longer start at loud noises; in fact, they love U.S. amusement parks.

Gesturing toward Talin, who was gazing out the rain-streaked window at the Pentagon, he added, "In my country, I never, ever, ever let her stand beside the glass, because daily we had 25 bombs. But now I feel comfortable."

Thinking about Baghdad, Nadin said, "The hard part was there was no electricity, so it was hard to curl my hair." Then her thoughts drifted thousands of miles away, and tears pricked her brown eyes.

"I feel very bad because I lost my friend Basma," she said of a friend she'd left behind. "I miss her." Her father handed her a tissue and promised they would try to call Basma.

A couple of hours later, at Oakridge Elementary, Catie McDonald, a new student from New Mexico, had taken her under her wing. When a teacher took roll, calling out "Nadia?" Catie's hand shot up.

"It's Nad in, " she said. "She's from Iraq."

Looking at her new friend, Nadin broke into a smile.

Staff writers Michael Alison Chandler, Maria Glod and Ian Shapira contributed to this report.