For the students at Schenley High School who spent a decade as refugees in Kenya, exiled from their native Somalia, this week's immersion in Pittsburgh's past was another step toward finding their place in the history of their adopted hometown.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Schenley High School ESL student and Somalian Bantu refugee Bahati Muya, right, aims while Amina Muya waits her turn at throwing a football during a tour of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum at the History Center. Click photo for larger image.

The Somali Bantu students arrived with their families in Pittsburgh last summer as part of a federal resettlement program that aims to bring to the United States nearly all of the 14,000 people who fled civil war and ethnic persecution by a lighter-skinned majority in Somalia.

Now, they and their parents, like the African and African-American immigrants and slaves who began arriving in Pittsburgh during the Revolutionary War, are working to educate themselves and create a life for themselves.

The first black person in Pittsburgh is believed to have arrived in 1780, and many black travelers of that time ate and slept at Black Richard's Inn, according to Gilbert Anderson, an educator who led the students' tour of the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center on Tuesday. Later, he said, black workers played a central role in the region's industrial growth.

"In the steel mills, you see brown faces, white faces, black faces," Anderson said, gesturing to an old photo in which grime covered all the faces equally. "All kinds of people worked in the steel mills."

The Somali high school students, who now number eight after one new arrival in January and another last week, mostly listened intently to Anderson, touching the rough materials of wood and coal with which the region's agricultural and industrial economy was created, examining old photos and maps, and occasionally commenting on the exhibits.

Since arriving, the students have concentrated not only on learning English but also on learning about concepts -- from pie charts to the existence of dinosaurs to the fact of World War II -- they had never heard of in the refugee camps, where the girls in particular were expected to fetch firewood, lug water and tend young children rather than spend time in school. Even those who attended several years of school in the camps found classes of 100 or more students, and arrived here with only rudimentary skills in math and reading and writing in English.

But yesterday, even students who struggled a few months ago to understand and to speak basic English showed real progress, as they retraced the region's development from a rough frontier community where life somewhat resembled conditions in the Kenyan refugee camps, to the modern, technology-driven society to which they and their families are trying to adapt.

At the first exhibit, a replica of the log cabin used at a Washington County homestead in the late 1700s, Anderson pointed out a pair of crudely made shoes -- "no left, no right, just shoe" -- and a little bag with a long strap.

"Is this a woman's purse? No, this is a man's purse," said Anderson. "The men kept all the money."

"What do you think about that?" said Kathy Ramos, the students' teacher of English as a Second Language. "Today, it's different."

"Today it's different!" repeated Halima Abdalla, a quiet, often somber 19-year-old girl in a blue head scarf who rarely spoke during her first months at Schenley, as she laughed out loud in agreement.

In traditional Somali culture, men are the heads of their households, controlling money and making most of the important decisions, but the Somali girls and women in Pittsburgh have begun considering how to incorporate the American ideal of equal rights for women into their own lives, according to Khadra Mohammed, who runs the Pittsburgh Refugee Center and is an advocate for the Somalis.

During the region's frontier era, Anderson said, people raised cows, chickens, sheep, wheat, corn and vegetables to feed their families and spun their own clothing from wool and flax.

"They had everything themselves -- they were farmers and everything was in the family," he said. "Now people have to buy everything because they don't know how to make anything."

Sowdo Darbane, a 16-year-old who arrived in Pittsburgh last spring, shook her head in disbelief.

Anderson led them through exhibits about the slave trade, the Civil War and the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape to the North, to other exhibits, such as a reconstructed boarding house from the early 1900s that once was home to bachelor steel workers who slept in its beds in shifts. Nearby stood a water pump and a wooden privy like the one that once stood outside the boarding house and served more than 100 people from the neighborhood.

What would happen if the water pump from which people got their drinking water stood right next to the privy? Anderson said. What would the water be like?

"I think the water will be dirty and smell yucky," said Amina Muya, 16.

That's right, Anderson said, and between 1900 and 1910 -- before modern sewage lines were installed to separate wastewater from drinking water -- as many people died in Pittsburgh of typhoid fever as died doing dangerous work in the steel mills. In fact, he said, more people died of typhoid in Pittsburgh than in any other American city.

Anderson pointed to the yellow and blue lights that faintly illuminated the gloomy darkness around the boarding house. This was the amount of light that would have been available at noon because of the smoke from the steel mills, he said.

"You work 12 hours a day and get very dirty and you come home and the water is dirty and there's very little light," Anderson said. "Is this a good place to live?"

"No!" the students shouted, shaking their heads.

But by the 1950s, the city had cleaned up much of the pollution, and most working people had acquired modern improvements such as TVs, electrical lighting and indoor plumbing -- conveniences the Somali students experienced for the first time after they moved to Pittsburgh last year. At the same time, their families assumed the burdens of paying rent, covering bills and finding steady jobs.

"Now we have frozen foods and clothing and all these conveniences," Anderson said. "It's a much easier life in some respects and it's more complicated in other respects."