Nap Time and Playtime And Time to Learn Farsi

Beatriz Otero, president of CentroNia, a District-based family support group that offers early childhood education, said running a day-care business is an excellent steppingstone for immigrant women. "It gives you a certification in a way that few other entry-level jobs do," she said. In the past five years, she added, the group has helped train 800 women, most of them foreign-born, to meet national voluntary accreditation standards, involving hundreds of hours of study and apprenticeship, for early childhood instruction.

Many providers said they have a natural penchant for the job.

"In my country, we know how to take care of children," said Riffat Jabeen, a Falls Church provider from Pakistan. Her English is choppy, so parents such as Geisinger have encouraged her to speak Urdu with their children.

Added Farah Ibrahim, a provider in Leesburg with a pre-med college degree from Pakistan: "You have to have a passion for it, a warmth," which can often come from the experience of living with an extended family. Ibrahim, who emigrated in 1992 to find better prospects for her three children in the United States, worked as a bus driver and a cafeteria hostess before opening a day-care operation to maintain her children's roots and look after other youngsters.

Seema Tabatabaei fled Iran with her husband two decades ago, passing through Bangladesh, Pakistan and Canada before settling in Sterling in 1999. Unable to secure a teaching job despite having Canadian kindergarten qualifications, Tabatabaei worked intermittently as a babysitter until she learned three years ago about acquiring a day-care license.

"Day care was the only way to express my feeling for kids," she said. "And a way of survival. We needed that extra income," and never more so than for the past seven months since her husband, Massood, lost his engineering job. He said he is unlikely to find another until he gets U.S. citizenship.

Now, she teaches Farsi to eight children. She is so successful that Olivier Boissy said he turned down a job in the District so his daughter Lanah could stay with Tabatabaei until she reaches kindergarten.

But it's not always clear how much the kids listen. One recent morning, Miss Seema, as they call her, pulled a book from the shelf and started reading aloud in Farsi about Mimini the monkey. Mali, 3, flung a box of crayons across a puzzle board. Lanah bounced up and down on a miniature sofa. Yasi, 4, airplaned around the room and tore the back off another book.

"They're too excited," Tabatabaei said.

So her husband offered to lull them with the stringed sounds of his ancient Persian tar -- for a brief respite, a different sort of foreign language lesson.