The shoving started just before lunchtime, during the edgy five minutes when hundreds of hungry students at Schenley High School line up outside the locked doors to the cafeteria. Elbows and backpacks poke and jostle in the shifting, buzzing crowd. The scent of sweat and strawberry lip gloss and perfume mingle as the crowd grows hot. Students push through to walk down the hall, knocking waiting students against one another.

New School, New World One of an occasional series

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Somali refugee Amina Muya, center, is congratulated by junior Michelle Walker, right, and freshman Angela Broge after Muya helped them score during a game of beach volleyball in gym class at Schenley High School. Click photo for larger image. Previous coverage Somali refugees enjoy their first Thanksgiving feast (11/26/04) New students witness school at full throttle (11/1/04) A confusing, but hopeful first day (9/3/04) Somali Bantu refugees adjust to their new lives in Pittsburgh (5/18/04)

During one such wait last month, two American girls approached Sowdo Darbane, a Somali refugee, and said they wanted to fight. One of them pushed Sowdo, who said she didn't push back.

"I said, 'Don't touch me on the body, just talk to me out of your mouth,' " Sowdo, 15, said last week as she waited for the other Somali girls after playing beach volleyball in gym class.

Without Sowdo's participation, the fight went nowhere. But on other occasions, American girls held their noses and pointed and laughed at the Somali girls, teasing that they smelled. Administrators spoke to the girls who had confronted Sowdo and the others, and nothing else has happened in the weeks since, according to Sowdo. But while she doesn't know if that peace will hold, Sowdo said, she doesn't fear the future.

"No, I am not afraid of them," Sowdo said. "They are not Allah."

Now in their fourth month at Schenley, the six Somali students -- Sowdo, Amina Muya, Ehedo Sekondo, Bahati Muya, Halima Abdulla and Amina's brother, Muya Muya -- are struggling with a more intense version of all high school students' wrenching dilemma: fitting in with their peers while remaining true to themselves.

The students, who are discovering a world they barely knew existed while growing up in refugee camps in Kenya, have been flooded by a rush of experiences at Schenley since September -- learning to swim, learning to read, getting their first library cards, seeing dinosaur skeletons for the first time -- that make them beam with delight. While some of the Somali children attended school at the refugee camps in Kenya, the classes were so overcrowded that they arrived in Pittsburgh with almost no English skills or basic knowledge about the world beyond the camps.

But while the Somalis can eagerly soak up that knowledge now, they also must learn to navigate a sometimes-cruel teenage world in which subtle differences in hairstyle, clothing, physique, friends, grades and extracurricular activities mark a student's place in a complicated and often unforgiving caste system. And in a process that many American teenagers find difficult, the Somali students -- and in particular, the five girls -- are under even more pressure to decipher where they belong.

All the Somali immigrants -- members of a group of about 150 Somalis the federal government is resettling in Pittsburgh, and more than 14,000 being resettled throughout the nation -- are Muslims who fled civil war and ethnic persecution in their native Somalia. About 70 percent of the refugees are children.

Now living in a society of material wealth, the Somali students dress mostly in second-hand clothes donated by Catholic Charities and the Pittsburgh Refugee Center, the organizations resettling them and their families in Pittsburgh. And in a culture in which skin-tight jeans, high-heeled boots and trendy hairstyles are the fashion, the Somali girls, as required by their religion, cover their hair with a head scarf, and typically wear loose-fitting outfits such as long skirts over pants. The requirement not only enforces female modesty, but also expresses the idea that women's minds rather than their bodies should be prized.

Sowdo said she doesn't want to look more like the American girls around her. She is Muslim, and in Somali culture Muslim women cover their hair. "We can't change our religion because we're in America," Sowdo said. "I'm not going to change."

The Somali students, however, already have changed dramatically since starting school in September as they have accumulated knowledge, acclimated to American culture and learned new skills, from sounding out unfamiliar words to riding the Port Authority bus to school from their homes in Lawrenceville to making snowballs with the first snow they have ever seen.

Last month, for instance, Sowdo arrived at class wearing a top and pants, her long skirt abandoned at home.

"She said, 'Today, I am American' and that was it," said the Somali students' teacher, Kathy Ramos. "No more skirts."

The other girls soon followed Sowdo's lead, although one or two wear their skirts to school and put them on again before going home. And last week, in a giddy moment after lunch, Sowdo and Amina, 15, tried to see what their pants looked like from behind, craning their heads around to look into small hand mirrors they had angled toward their backsides.

"I want to make sure my back looks all right," Sowda told Ramos, smiling hugely.

"You look fine in the front and fine in the back," Ramos said, urging her to put away the mirror and get ready for social studies class.

"It is big," Amina said, giggling, as she looked at the part of her backside reflected by her tiny mirror. "It is big enough. Big enough for me."

The girls, finally putting away their mirrors, settled into their desks to listen to Ramos read a children's book about the American Revolution.

Ramos explained the Stamp Act, in which King George III of England taxed all paper products, and the American colonists -- in what is called a boycott, she said -- stopped buying paper products as a result. Sowdo and a few of the others who are most fluent in English listened intently, while the less fluent students fidgeted as they tried to follow along.

How did King George react to this boycott? Ramos said.

"He explained," Amina said.

"He did not explain," Ramos said. "He sent his soldiers."

The students' eyes widened.

"They will shoot the people?" Sowdo said.

"They don't want to shoot the people," Ramos said. "They want to scare the people and make them pay attention."

But in a confrontation called the Boston Massacre, Ramos continued, colonists threw snowballs and then rocks at soldiers, and eventually five colonists were killed and three others were injured. The colonies were soon at war with the British Army and after many battles over the following eight years, the colonists eventually won their independence.

The students, however, weren't sure the colonists' freedom was worth the war required to win it, however.

"It's not good because they kill each other," said Muya, 17. "They are not better to be free, because they kill each other."

England and its colonies should have tried harder to avoid conflict and stay united, Sowdo said.

"I'm not happy for that war," Sowdo said.

With the final bell ringing, the six Somali students put their books aside, pulled on jackets and backpacks, and ran down Schenley's steps into the wintry air.

Outside, they scooped up snow in their gloved hands and packed it into snowballs. Unsure at first of what to do, one student tentatively tossed a snowball at another. Then, seeing the snow explode harmlessly against their friend's coat, the Somalis began pegging each other with snowballs, shoving snow under each other's backpacks and down the backs of each other's necks.

Then attackers and victims, laughing and shouting, gathered more snow and chased each other to their bus stop, all wars but snowball fights forgotten for the moment.