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Louise Bennett spent more than 25 years as a physician on the west side, treating patients at Woodward Health Center and the clinic at Brown Square.

But these days, you're more likely to find her in a classroom, teaching English to a large group of refugees at a church on South Avenue.

Her students, who come from Somalia, Nepal and a handful of other countries, are part of a growing community that gathers each weekday at the Holy Spirit Greek Orthodox Church. It's home to an all-volunteer, refugee-led organization, providing English classes, job training, and other services.

Learning a new language is a certain kind of challenge, but it's largely a matter of matching an English word to an existing word in another tongue. Learning a new culture is another challenge entirely. The English classes can help them learn about those things the rest of us take for granted.

"It's important to learn about American culture," Bennett said, and it's why she had the class reading Christmas stories in early December. "The story of Santa Claus is not a religious thing. It's a cultural thing. It's something that every American child knows."

Bennett's medical practice included a large number of refugees, and she wanted to get more involved in helping the growing refugee community after she retired. She gravitated to this group, called the Somali Community in Western New York. It was founded in 2002 by Somali refugees, but over time the group has expanded to include people from a dozen countries, including Cuba, Burma and Iraq.

The organization is in the process of changing its official name to "Refugees Helping Refugees" to reflect not only their diverse membership but the cycle of giving that they've created.

"It's one refugee who's been here for five years helping another refugee who's been here for one day." Bennett explained. "Helping them get off the airplane, helping them shop, helping them get a job and get their children into school, and helping them to become a citizen."

It's people like Sadiya Omar, who fled a civil war in Somalia. She spent ten years in a refugee camp in Kenya before she was resettled here. Now, after more than a decade in Rochester, she's become a visible leader.

"Everything is hard when you come as a refugee, when you don't speak the language," Omar said. "As a refugee you've lost everything. You've been traumatized by war, so it's hard to trust people that you don't know."

Because Omar had been through that experience, she knew the concerns that newer arrivals have, the challenges they face and the hurdles they must overcome. She knew that the language skills help build the foundation for everything else.

"All of the classes we teach, even cooking, we teach them through vocabulary." Omar said. "They not only learn what a tomato is, but they learn to ask for it by name when they go out to buy one."

The core mission is to have refugees become self-reliant and to help them succeed in the United States.

A sizable group gathers each weekday morning to study English from 10 a.m. to noon. After lunch they hold classes on sewing, cooking, citizenship, and other topics.

The language program is certified by Monroe County as an ESOL training site, and they have a certified work experience program through Rochester Works that provides hands-on work experience.

"Very well meaning people can do a lot of good things, " Bennett said, "but there's something wonderful about empowering people to help themselves."

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