A Season of Study In a Strange Land
For Some, First Day Brings Extra Anxiety

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 6, 2006

When she lived in Baghdad, Nadin Habib traveled to school with her father or an uncle, who brought along weapons to defend her from insurgents. One day a bomb hit the house next door to hers, killing her neighbors. Her parents thought she'd been killed, too, until they found her buried under debris.

So it was a little strange for her father to put Nadin, 9, and her sister, Talin, 5, on an Arlington County school bus and wave goodbye as it rolled off in the rain.

"I feel fine. I feel fine," Ali Habib said, walking back toward the apartment the family moved to three months ago when he became a diplomat in the Iraqi Embassy. "They are safe here."

Despite the rain, the first day of school generally went smoothly for more than 300,000 Northern Virginia students returning for the first day of school yesterday, a week after classes started in the District and most Maryland suburbs. Three new schools opened in Prince William County and one in Fairfax County. In fast-growing Loudoun County, it was the first opening day in 10 years without a new school.

For Nadin and hundreds of others from other countries embarking on their first day of school in the region, everything was new. Like new kids anywhere, they felt a little lost, surrounded by strangers and unsure where their classes were. But they had the added challenge of an unfamiliar linguistic and cultural landscape.

Schools in the Washington area these days often look like a miniature United Nations. Nadin's third-grade class at Oakridge Elementary School, for example, includes students from Azerbaijan, Brazil, Ethiopia, Albania, Belize and Mongolia.

Often, the influx reflects cataclysms around the world. In the late 1970s and early '80s, waves of students came from Vietnam and Iran after war and revolution in those countries; the 1980s also brought thousands of Salvadorans fleeing war there. Recently, Arlington has enrolled many students from Mongolia and Arab countries; Fairfax has had an increase this year in new students from Lebanon; and Prince William has noted mini-spikes as students flee volatile situations in Ghana and Nigeria.

School systems face a challenge in finding skilled teachers and interpreters to help the new arrivals. But such diversity also allows U.S.-born students to learn about world events firsthand. Schools host heritage assemblies at which students present native dances, foods and costumes. They also talk about harrowing experiences during times of unrest.

"When we had the war in El Salvador, they talked about how their families were separated," said Margarita Cruz, an assistant principal at Arlington's Washington-Lee High School. Some students went to the Salvadoran countryside to stay with grandparents, she said, while their parents migrated to the United States and later sent for them.

Immigration patterns vary from year to year and place to place. Although the number of students with limited English proficiency has declined in Arlington recently, the school system registers about 600 new students a year who are from abroad or were born here to parents with limited English. In Loudoun, the English as a Second Language program has grown about 20 percent each year for the past three years. In Fairfax, more than 20,900 students are in ESL classes, up from about 14,900 five years ago.

At Seneca Ridge Middle School in Sterling yesterday, Bence Karvalics, 12, wiped rain from his buzzed blond hair and explained the difference between school here and in his native Hungary.

There, "I understand everybody. I've got very lot of friends," he said.

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.