It's spring break at Terrace Apartments, and 13-year-old Sabtow Megenow and his buddies kick back at a friend's apartment. They recline on separate hand-me-down couches watching a rap video, while a pair of newly arrived Somali Bantu refugees - 8- and 10-year-old girls - stare wide-eyed at the screen, their backs straight.

The girls have never seen rap before. Less than a week ago, they were in a Kenyan refugee camp where there were no couches, no rap music and no sign of a TV.

Although Sabtow (pronounced "SAB-toe") came from the same camp a year ago May, already the plucky seventh-grader can teach these newbies a thing or two about life in this foreign land.

Lesson No. 1: Lose the shirt. That's the gray, standard-issue sweatshirt they wore on their two-day, four-airplane journey to Roanoke. The shirts bear the initials "USRP," which stands for U.S. Refugee Program.

Sabtow shakes his head at the sight of the clothes, which the girls still are wearing today. He's felt the pain of being labeled an African refugee, of being too different and "too dark."

"As soon as I came here, I took off the shirt and say, 'I will not wear it anymore,'" he says.

"I am no longer a refugee."

abtow Megenow's second lesson is this: The bicycle is your friend. Like the adult refugees at Terrace, Sabtow figured out early on that mobility was key. He uses his bicycle - a second-hand mountain bike, donated through Roanoke's Refugee and Immigration Services - to buy food for his mom, riding home from the nearby Mick-or-Mack store with the grocery bags balanced on his handlebars.

He weaves in and out of the apartment complex constantly, chatting up everyone from fellow refugees to longtime residents to Bantu kids who live on the other side of town.

He is a typical 13-year-old boy one minute - daring his friend to knock on a girl's door, shooting hoops, riding his bike with an umbrella in the rain.

And he is The Man of the House the next - writing the rent check and other bills for his illiterate mother, translating for her at doctor's appointments, tabulating how much money is left on their monthly food-stamp allowance.

Like many Bantu children, Sabtow lost his father when the Somali civil war came to his village in 1992. "Some day a soldier came and said, 'Give me your money,' and he did not have no money. So they killed him." An infant at the time, he arrived at a refugee camp a week later wrapped up on his mother's back.

A slow transformation

While Sabtow has more responsibility than most refugee children, his adjustment mirrors that of many who have resettled before him.

Shortly after the Roanoke refugee office opened in 1978, it began making Terrace the first home for people fleeing war-torn Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe and, most recently, Africa.

Plunked in white Raleigh Court, the complex is, by all accounts, the most diverse 9-acre spread in Roanoke. More than a dozen languages are spoken at the bus stop alone.

First, the new arrivals here associate only with those who look, eat and pray the same way they do. Then, slowly - and sometimes at the expense of their own culture - they change.

The transformation is slowest for the adults. It's been 18 months since the first Somali Bantu moved into Terrace, and refugee caseworkers tick off their accomplishments proudly:

Most of the men are working, and a few of the women, too. A handful drive; they share cars that have been donated to them through the refugee office and take those who can't yet drive on the requisite runs to Wal-Mart.

The Bantu who've already picked up English translate for those who haven't yet - explaining such American intricacies as:

• Why nearby Wachovia Bank charges $4 to cash a check that is written on an account drawn from none-other-than ... Wachovia Bank. No Social Security card means no bank account, and no bank account means a $4 check-cashing charge. ("Rules are rules," the cashier says.)

• Why Pap smears are necessary but excruciating, especially for Muslim women who are not only modest but also suspicious of American medicine. "We say that is why American women only have two children!" jokes Binto Mohammed, 22. "Because of Pap smears."

• Why some traditions are good to maintain, such as wearing the Muslim headdress and praying five times a day;

• While other traditions - carrying items on top of their heads, breast-feeding in public, squatting outside to talk instead of sitting in chairs - are now deemed "too African."

• Teacher workdays, spring break, vacations. The Bantu have never heard of such things. If the parents can't read the notes that teachers send home, they don't know when not to send their kids to school.

"The Bantu will actually walk their children to school if the bus doesn't pick them up when there's no school," says Eli Arocena, an English Language Learners teacher. "They might not understand how the system works, but they know it's important."

Like many immigrants before them, maintaining a connection to their homeland is important. Those who find work first send every extra dollar back to relatives in Africa. They buy international calling cards to phone home and mail pictures of their children playing in the brand-new world of snow.

They hound refugee-office workers - in Mohammed's case, tearfully - to expedite the immigration requests of their relatives still in Africa. In January, her 8-year-old sister contracted an infection and, lacking medical attention, died soon after.

Not like the Bosnians

Ten years ago, when more than 1,000 Bosnians began settling in Roanoke, the transition didn't take as long, but it was harder in some ways. Highly westernized, the Bosnians were more concerned about getting back on the fast track - some of them coming from health and professional jobs. More than half now own their own homes; several families went straight from Terrace to the Southwest Roanoke County suburbs.

"The Bosnians worked hard, and they worried a lot," recalls Shari Conley-Edwards, who has taught nighttime General Educational Development classes to both refugees and immigrants over the years. "They just wanted to go faster, faster, faster so they could get on with their lives."

Some also brought their prejudices, honed by a decade of civil war and strife, with them. Caseworker Dieujuste Pierre recalls how dicey it was when some of the Kosovars and Serbs - mortal enemies in their homeland - were placed in the same buildings at Terrace and the same work stations at Home Shopping Network.

Once, Pierre asked a friendly Serb to help him pick up a Kosovar at the airport and settle him into his new apartment. Everything went smoothly, until later when the Serb confided to Pierre: "Maybe one day I will see that man on the street, and I will murder him. He is my enemy."

Pierre, 45, hammered him with a lecture that began with a lesson on forgiveness and ended with an intimidating stare. A tall, stocky Haitian, Pierre spent his formative immigrant years driving a New York City taxicab and working construction for U.S. Steel.

"I say: 'Look, you're both refugees living in the same place, working in the same job. ...'

"I took him to the Social Security office. I say: 'This number, it will follow you till you die. It will be there wherever you go. If you do wrong, this number will know about it.'"

And so, it went without saying, would Pierre.

By contrast, Bantu refugees are used to living communally, dependent on the United Nations for housing and food. They learned that a single bag of food really could last for 15 days if they pooled it with their neighbors' rations.

"You see the smile on their face when you open the refrigerator," Pierre says. "They're satisfied, grateful for whatever they get."

Not long ago, a new family moved in down the hall from some Bantu. With their lighter skin and straight hair, they were ethnic Somalis, from the country's majority - and a race that has long persecuted the darker-skinned Bantu and called them "slaves."

Sabtow, the 13-year-old Bantu whose father was killed by a Somali, has harsh memories of their presence in the refugee camps - of Somalis stealing Bantu's food and ripping the clothes off their backs; of raping their women and killing their men. "Some of them are OK, but most of them are very, very mean," he says.

But the day the new Somalis arrived, there was Sabtow getting off his bike, helping caseworkers haul in the family's bags.

When the newcomers walked past Binto Mohammed's door, she confided: "They are not like us, you know, not Bantu."

But a half-hour later, there she was, too, welcoming this new family to America and offering them tea.

Co-existing cultures

Another day, another living room full of donated couches, another new family clad in their gray USRP sweatshirts:

This time the newbies are visiting their cousins. And this time the translator is 16 years old. Mumina Mohamed has picked up basic English from her eight months of ELL classes - and from listening to WJJS on borrowed headphones.

A freshman at Patrick Henry High School, Mumina bears a striking resemblance to Condoleezza Rice - though she doesn't recognize the secretary of state's name.

Cultures collide as Mumina's mother blares a Swahili music cassette at one end of the living room while her little brother glues himself to his new "I, Robot" DVD at the other. The cousins sit quietly in the middle, taking it all in.

Into the cacophony waltzes Michelle Gorman, 33, who's lived at Terrace for two years - and knows every refugee in the complex. She's cooked spicy food with the Liberians who live across the hall.

She's read medicine bottles for a Kosovar man who came to her door with cough syrup in one hand and amoxicillin for an ear infection in the other. "Which one of these goes in the ear and which one in the mouth?" he wanted to know.

She asks Mumina to tell this new family, "If they need anything, just let me know and they'll have it." She asks Mumina to teach her some of her Somali dialect, called Mai Mai.

Mumina's mother distributes cans of Orange Fanta - the Bantus' drink of choice - all around. When Mumina says her father has been sick, Gorman goes to her apartment to get some Alka-Seltzer cold medicine.

A minute after drinking it, he tells her, through Mumina: "I feel better already."

Alone and ostracized

At school, Mumina spends most of her time alone. There are no new relatives to show around, no Gorman to help her, no comfortable world stew.

With the exception of ELL classes - where there are two other Somali Bantu girls, the rest hailing from 22 other countries - she spends her day alone, an outcast amid the other 1,800 students. At Patrick Henry, the student body is a perfect microcosm of segregated Roanoke.

The blacks cluster together in one part; the whites somewhere else. But with her awkward English and colorful headdress, Mumina fits in nowhere.

During a recent gym class, the students were sent outside to run or walk three laps around the track. While the Hispanics, American-born blacks and whites each huddled together, Mumina walked alone.

Earlier in the term, two Bantu girls were enrolled with her in the class, but they were removed - and reassigned as office aides - because they weren't getting along with the blacks in that class.

Being alone doesn't bother her, Mumina says; she can ignore the taunts. In the refugee camps, the children were told not to fight when they got to America; that if they did fight, they would be jailed or worse: sent back to Africa.

Patrick Henry art teacher Fletcher Nichols has noticed the tensions between the Africans and the Roanoke-reared blacks. "The African-Americans are unnerved," says Nichols, who also teaches an African-American culture course. "They look at these people who look like them but can't speak English, and they're not sure whether to be bothered by them or vice versa."

The Bantu represent their own historical ties to slavery, he says. "Because of their own issues, some of them may be preferring to look down at the Africans as less intelligent or less something."

African-American churches don't do much to bring the two together, he adds. They're already overwhelmed trying to take care of the needs of the black community.

In Roanoke, some of the Bantu do attend the predominantly black Islamic congregation, Masjid An-nur, which last year at Ramadan gave monetary gifts to each Bantu family in Roanoke.

Nichols does what he can. Just as years earlier he incorporated Laotian food and Bosnian history into art classes, he asked the Bantu students to talk about their experiences. He had them teach basket-making to the others, and the students from Roanoke turned them on to black gospel.

Trying to forget

Marlen Taboor worries about Mumina and Sabtow and all those newly arrived Africans still wearing their USRP clothes.

A 17-year-old junior at Patrick Henry, she emigrated from Sudan in 2000 and has assimilated, for the most part, by associating with all kinds of people - "Haitian, white, African-American, Liberian, even Gothic; I'm cool with everybody," she says.

When she sees American-born blacks giving the Bantu girls a hard time - telling them they stink, asking if they walked around naked in Africa - she tells the girls to ignore them. "I tell them I went through it, too, and that things will get better. I tell them: Don't let 'em see you mad, because if they see you're mad they'll get on your case even worse."

Marlen lived at Terrace when she first came to America and, like Mumina, initially hung out strictly with other refugees. Her first friend was an Afghan girl who lived in an apartment nearby: "Neither one of us spoke English, so we'd point and try to understand each other. We used to practice counting from one to 20 together."

She ditched the sandals that were a constant when she arrived from Sudan via Egypt, changed the way she braided her hair ("to look less African"), and speaks English with just a trace of an accent. She works at Burger King and splits her money between her cellphone and gasoline bills and buying trendy clothes.

One of her best friends is 15-year-old Jamesetta Karnwie, a Liberian refugee who lived at Terrace until recently. Not long ago, Marlen arranged a three-way phone call among herself and Jamesetta's boyfriend, a Nigerian immigrant. Marlen made Jamesetta listen in on the third line - so she could see that he "was trying to be a player" and break up with him.

From opposite sides of the African continent, the two focus on their American commonalities, not the past. They went to prom together in May and talk constantly on the phone. "We talk about everything except the wars back home - that, we're trying to forget."

In some ways, the African refugees are better equipped to deal with bullying situations than American kids, white or black, says refugee office director Barbara Smith. "As long as they can eat and be safe, these kids can accept and adapt to practically anything.

"They're all stronger than steel," she adds. "They wouldn't have gotten here if they weren't."

Being 'too black'

Sabtow, the savvy 13-year-old, was quicker to adapt than most. On his first day at Woodrow Wilson Middle School last fall, he was spotted in the corner of the cafeteria eating spaghetti with his hands. On the second day, having noticed how the other kids ate, he cut his food gingerly with a plastic fork - only now lunch was pizza, which meant the other kids were using their hands.

He arrived speaking passable English - one of the few - and reading at a fourth-grade level. In the Kenyan refugee camp, his mom was among the lucky 6 percent who found outside work. She used the income from her house-painting job to buy him books.

Now, at the beginning of each school term, he helps the other ELL students locate their new classrooms.

Sabtow likes school so much that sometimes he rides his bike back to Woodrow after school just to visit his ELL teacher.

The world outside the ELL classroom isn't always as welcoming, though. In April, two students confronted him in the hallway, shouting in his face. When he asked them to stop, they refused and struck him in the face. Sabtow hit back. The boys who initiated the fight were suspended.

Though Sabtow says he didn't hear what they were yelling at him, one of his teachers did: Lighter-skinned blacks, they were teasing Sabtow for being "too black."

A week later, the mark on his forehead had faded, and so had his resentment of the boys.

Here at Terrace Apartments, Sabtow has learned that having friends - of all types - is key. His neighbor Ben Young, a 27-year-old black concrete worker, fixes his bike when it breaks, which is often.

Sabtow also pals around with a middle-schooler from Kosovo and some of Ben's white friends.

Oh: "And girls," Sabtow adds. "But not just Somali girls."

He still pays all the family bills and translates for his mom, but when he eats pizza, he does it the American way - with his hands.