(NECN: Lauren Collins, Concord, N.H.) – Batulo Mahamed knows her way around the garden — there is no place more familiar to her than this small plot she tends to on a church lawn in Concord, New Hampshire.

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She is safe here, thousands of miles and nearly a decade away from home. Batulo and her husband Salad Salad are Bantu Somalis, refugees forced to flee a village where even their garden, the source of the family’s daily meals, could cost them their lives.

Refugees are immigrants without choice — members of an ethnic or religious minority under the threat of persecution who seek protection in another country. Many spend years in a refugee camp until the U.N. decides whether and where to offer them a safe haven. This family was moved from a camp in Kenya to New Hampshire in 2004.

New Hampshire is home to thousands of refugees. Between 1997 and 2008, the state has welcomed more than 4,800 of them from more than thirty countries around the world — from Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Though many refugees are strongly rooted in farming cultures, they are relocated to cities — mainly Laconia, Concord, and Manchester.

Cathy Chesley is the director of Immigration and Refugee Services for New Hampshire Catholic Charities — one of the many groups in the state that help newly resettled families. Nearly every refugee who comes to New Hampshire is placed initially by Lutheran Social Services.

Batulo had never slept in a bed nor lived in a bricks and mortar home until she arrived here.

Batulo and Salad, like many refugees, are most frustrated by an enormous language barrier. They are all introduced to basic English upon arrival in the U.S. — just enough to go to the store and maybe sign a lease.

Linda Garrish Thomas volunteers teaching English as a second language. Awur Jok is one of her students, nine years resettled in Manchester.

That struggle with language translates to a struggle through everyday tasks.

A recent University of New Hampshire survey found that 99-percent of refugees wants to find a good job, support themselves and blend into American culture. English competency is key to realizing those goals.

Batulo attends a daily ESL class in Concord before she goes to her garden. Salad works construction and studies at home.

The couple’s children — enrolled in local schools — are flawless in their English.

The couple has seven children — three born in the United States, one left behind in Kenya.

The nine year old boy is still in the refugee camp with his grandmother, his application denied because of a lapse in paperwork.

Families are often split up in the resettlement process — many required documents, like birth certificates, simply do not exist.

Batulo, Salad, and a translator meet often with an immigration attorney from Catholic Charities who is helping in their fight to grant the boy refugee status.

Batulo and Salad hope someday to earn citizenship, which would help their attempts to get their son. They also want to vote, and call themselves Americans. For all their struggles, they say there is no comparison between the life they have now and the one they fled.

And like those tales of generations ago, the stories of today’s refugees are about men and women coming here not for a hand out, but a hand up.

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