On Muya Muya's first day of school in the United States, the morning's chatter at Schenley High School had turned to din around him. Classmates in his English as a Second Language class, their desks jostled to face one another, laughed about their vacations, took pictures of one another on their cell phones, giggled over a thick photo album, stared into space.

Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette The early morning sunlight hits a teenage Bantu Somali refugee named Amina as she walks up Bigelow Boulevard toward Schenley High School for her first day of school yesterday. In the background are Sowdo Darbane and Amina's brother, Muya. Click photo for larger image.

Muya, however, bent over a math workbook his family had checked out from a library and jotted multiplication and division problems into a spiral notebook already filled with many others. He had learned how to do all these math problems in the refugee camps in Kenya, he said.

But he did have a question: Are there children learning English grammar at Schenley?

"I want to know grammar. I want to learn," said Muya, a 17-year-old Bantu Somali who arrived in Pittsburgh with his family in July. "If your English doesn't have grammar, you're not talking English."

The enrollment of Muya, his 15-year-old sister Amina and their 15-year-old friend Sowdo Darbane at Schenley yesterday was a step toward fulfilling a dream they and their parents, like many refugees, once barely dared to imagine: a good education.

That dream helped inspire the Muyas, the Darbanes and dozens of families like them to abandon the harsh but familiar refugee camps where they had lived for 12 years and to resettle in Pittsburgh -- a city some still struggle to locate on a map.

The Pittsburgh contingent is part of a much larger resettlement project now under way by the U.S. government to place 14,000 Somali Bantus in 52 American cities by March. More than half of them will be children under 17.

Bill Wade, Post-Gazette Claire Galpern, 16, a Schenley High School junior, left, and Eliza Hens-Greco, 14, a freshman at Winchester Thurston School cheer for Amina Sunday night as she learns how to open a combination lock for the first time. The three were attending a dinner at First Unitarian Church in Shadyside where backpacks full of school supplies and clothes were given to about 50 Somali students. Click photo for larger image.

Because of their ethnicity, the Bantus were barred by the ruling Somalis from attending school much beyond second grade, kept from prestigious jobs such as teaching and government work, and prohibited from owning any valuable property, according to Khadra Mohammed, a Somali who directs the Pittsburgh Refugee Center.

As a result, she said, many Bantus are illiterate even in their own language; most speak a dialect of Somali called Maay Maay. All the Somalis are Muslim.

After the Muya family and more than 14,000 other Bantus fled Somalia -- in the Muyas' case, the capital city of Mogadishu -- for Kenya in the early 1990s to escape civil war, Muya and Amina did attend school in the Dadab and Kakuma refugee camps, Mohammed said.

But other children, especially girls, were counted on to do family chores such as collecting firewood, carrying water and tending babies. And even those who attended school dealt with classrooms of more than 100 students. The most advanced read, speak and write in English at about the level of an American second-grader, she said.

Giving their children a chance to educate themselves and to escape discrimination and poverty was the main reason the families came to the United States, Mohammed said. The first Bantu families arrived in Pittsburgh in February.

"There's a difference between when you're illiterate not only because of circumstance but choice, and being illiterate because of discrimination," she said. "The Somalis were denied education because of the color of their skin."

At Schenley yesterday, only the Bantu girls' hijab, or head coverings, and vibrant clothes of fuchsia, orange and pink -- not their skin color -- attracted attention, with a few American girls eyeing them curiously and one commenting, "Dang, look at you all with your long thangs" as they walked by.

Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette Amina listens quietly during an English as a Second Language class. Click photo for larger image.

Two girls in the chaotic lunchroom asked their names, said "hi" and then walked away, still locked arm in arm. Most students, however, didn't look at them at all as the three walked through the halls together, occasionally looking over their shoulders warily when they heard a girl screech an ecstatic, first-day-of-school greeting or a boy shout mock taunts at a friend.

Inside Room 208, the three struggled with an assignment to write three sentences about a children's book they were asked to read, with Sowdo and Muya copying sentences out of the book and Amina writing just one sentence about her book on professions: "I like to be doctor."

Sowdo rewrote her book about families instead of writing about it. But she could explain the concepts of "caring about" and "helping" family members that it described.

"This is easy," said Sowdo, who attended Frick International Studies Academy after arriving in March, as she gestured at the book. "This is for a child."

But both girls, like several other female students in the class, spoke so softly when speaking in English about their summer vacations that they couldn't be heard over the jokes and guffaws of the clamorous boys on the other side of the room.

And they didn't quite understand when one of the teachers, Barbara Golden, asked them to fill in the blanks of questions such as: "The capital of Japan is ..."

Later, Golden helped the girls find Somalia on a globe -- one on which the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics still figured prominently -- the first they had ever seen. Then she asked them to find Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, and then Japan and Tokyo, while their morning teacher, Carolyn Burgh, compiled class schedules for the students.

Nearby, Muya had turned to folding paper airplanes like some of the other boys, although he didn't launch them. Finally he lapsed into staring in front of him.

Three-quarters through his first day at Schenley, however, Muya had set a Monday appointment to play soccer with several classmates. And he had decided he liked the school and its teachers.

"They're not abusing the kids -- they have respect," Muya said of his teachers. "In Kenya, teachers beat the kids. They punish the kids when they don't understand."

Still without schedules, Muya, Sowdo and Amina stayed in Room 208 as one period flowed into the next and fellow students came and left for other classes.

But she didn't mind not being able to follow, Sowdo said.

"We can stay in this room," she said, beaming.