Sowdo Darbane had never seen so much food.

A 15-year-old Bantu Somali, she sat quietly in Marcia Sturdivant's cramped kitchen yesterday afternoon, watching the Wilkinsburg woman prepare a Thanksgiving feast for her family and four other Somali girls, all refugees who left their homeland in East Africa to escape persecution and hardship.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Marcia Sturdivant, left, serves Somali Bantu refugees Halima Abdulla, center, and Amina Muya their first taste of turkey during her family's Thanksgiving dinner in Wilkinsburg. Click photo for larger image.

"We don't have turkey," Sowdo said of her native Somalia. "We just have chicken. And it is very expensive."

Even with money, added Amina Muya, also 15, a regular meal was hard to find in the war-torn country. Many people had to survive on corn, flour, beans and other goods donated by the United Nations.

"When war comes," Amina said, "you can't buy anything."

Sturdivant, president of the Pittsburgh affiliate of the Black Child Development Institute, has been serving as Sowdo's unofficial mentor since the girl first arrived here, and she invited the five teenage Bantus to her home for the holiday.

"I was just immediately affected by their story," said Sturdivant, whose group is one of several organizations helping the Bantu families settle in Pittsburgh. "These are people who we left behind generations ago, and you can't help but feel a connection."

The girls arrived here over the past few months from refugee camps in Kenya, where they had spent most of their childhood. An ethnic minority barred from education, land ownership and well-paying jobs such as government work in their homeland, they are among more than 14,000 Bantus who fled Somalia amid civil war in the early 1990s.

Many of those refugees are now resettling across the U.S.

Sowdo, Amina, Ehedo Sekondo, Bahati Muya, and Halima Abdulla, are all now students at Schenley High School, and, little by little, they are growing more familiar with their new surroundings.

Last week, their teacher taught them the basics of Thanksgiving, explaining the history of the pilgrims and the staples of turkey and mashed potatoes.

Sturdivant hoped to teach them a little more. She introduced the girls to what she described as a traditional African-American Thanksgiving, preparing fried turkey, macaroni and cheese, lemon chicken, and four kinds of pie -- sweet potato, apple, peach, and coconut cream.

"It's enough sugar to put you in a coma," she said with a hefty laugh.

All the girls are Muslim and can't eat pork, so Sturdivant made two kinds of collard greens, one batch cooked with pork and another with smoked turkey.

A few of the girls insisted on helping with the cooking. Wearing a hijab, or head covering, with a purple flower pattern, Amina stood over the stove and strained the macaroni.

Sturdivant's two young children, Larry and Marshall, scampered across the floor, and the other girls sat at a small table, peeling potatoes and chatting in their native language, Maay Maay.

Sowdo shouted an instruction at Amina, who threw her head back and laughed. "Don't tell me," she said. "I know what to do."

A steady snowfall had started to come down outside, marking yet another first moment for the girls. Amina laughed again, recalling how earlier in the day she had asked her brother if it was raining milk.

As they worked, Sturdivant marveled at how far the girls had come to be in her kitchen.

"These are the children who survived," she said. "But what about all the ones who didn't make it this far?"