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“I don’t think most of them know where they are right now,” she said early this month, while sitting on a small couch in the family’s living room. The apartment was otherwise bare, except for a small wooden table with no chairs and several sets of bunk beds. “But they look like they’re coping,” she continued. “They’re getting acquainted.”
AS the summer unfolded, students settled quickly into their routines and the academy’s classroom scenes came to resemble those at a more typical school. Children formed friendships and alliances, sometimes brokered along language and cultural lines. French-speaking Guineans found comfort in the company of French-speaking Cameroonians and Ivorians. Refugees of Tibetan and Bhutanese descent spoke to each other in Nepali.
But teachers also sought to shake up those cultural cliques.
“New class rule: You must sit with someone from a different country,” said a sign posted in one classroom. The sign was later amended to discourage students who spoke the same language from sitting together.
The Diallos adjusted slowly but steadily; their teachers celebrated each breakthrough.
Ramatoulaye, the youngest Diallo, remained mostly quiet for the next few days. But at the end of the first week, she stood up during lunch in the cafeteria and spontaneously started to dance in front of her classmates, said Xuefei Han, an assistant teacher in the lower school.
By the fifth week, she and Aissata, her sister and classmate, had learned their colors and shapes, were talkative and active, and were putting their hands up in class in response to questions — even if they did not know the answer.
Ramatoulaye also started to bicker with another classmate, a Pakistani girl. But Ms. Han said she did not view that development as entirely negative. “Where before they might conceal their emotions,” Ms. Han said, “they now feel more comfortable showing them.”
An older sister, Fatoumata, 10, was also seized by shyness during the first couple of weeks of the academy. But a pivotal moment came during the third week, when she mustered the courage to raise her hand and ask the teacher, in English, if she could use the bathroom.
“It almost made me cry,” recalled Barbara Cvenic, the assistant teacher of Fatoumata’s junior high school class. “This was a victory, having that confidence to ask for something you really need instead of being uncomfortable all day.”
Mamadou remained among the most withdrawn of the academy’s students. But in a soccer match during a field trip to Central Park at the end of the first week, he briefly came alive, aggressively playing both ends of the field and demonstrating deft ball-handling skills. He played without uttering a sound, however — until about 15 minutes into the game, when he burst through a scrum of defenders and blasted a shot past a bewildered goalie.
Mamadou yelled in celebration and sprinted in a victorious semicircle across the field, smiling for the first time all day as his teammates swarmed him in congratulations. “He’s from my country!” another Guinean student, Djely Bacar Kouyate, exclaimed.
Just as suddenly, however, Mamadou’s smile disappeared and he sank into himself, crossing his arms tightly around his body, as if embarrassed by his outburst.
Ms. Cvenic, his assistant teacher, said a particularly significant moment for Mamadou came during the fifth week.
(The New York Times, August 25, 2012)