LEWISTON – Why? It’s the first question new immigrants hear, according to Hussein Ahmed, owner of the Barwaqo Halal store on Lisbon Street.

Why did they come to the United States? And why Lewiston?

The answer is simple, Ahmed told a lunchtime crowd at the Great Falls Forum on Thursday.

“Do we know that the United States is one of the main countries trying to fight diseases like HIV?” he said. “Do we know that the United States advocates for democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of speech? That is what the United States is blessed with, and that makes people think about coming to America.”

Ahmed, United Somali Women of Maine Executive Director Fatuma Hussein, and THRIVE cultural competency coordinator Sheikh Mohamed outlined the life of refugees for about 70 people in the Lewiston Public Library’s Marsden Hartley Cultural Center.

Hussein was among the first Somalis to arrive in Lewiston in February 2001. Ahmed arrived in 2002 and Mohamed came here in 2006, after first being settled in Syracuse, N.Y.

They talked of the difficulty of being refugee parents and having children who adapt to American life more easily than their parents, and of having to learn a new language and find a job at the same time.

“It is very hard to be a refugee,” Hussein said. “It would not be anyone’s first choice. If they had a choice, they would have stayed home – and home would have been Somalia.”

Hussein and her children were among the first wave of Somali refugees who came to America in the late 1990s, many from refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. International aid groups began settling refugees in Georgia and Massachusetts.

By 2001, Somali immigrants were looking for safer places to live. They found Lewiston.

“It’s a great place to live,” Hussein said. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to maintain her culture. She wears a Somali head covering, and that makes her stand out from others.

“If I was wearing a pair of jeans and a shirt and my hair was out there, nobody could tell the difference,” she said. “But when I’m wearing my clothes and I’m everywhere in town, then I’m well known. And people can tend to pick on you.”

But she’s the wrong person to pick on, she said. She’s not shy about defending her culture or explaining some of the differences, and she tries to pass that on to her children.

“There is nothing wrong with being Somali,” she said. “You can be Somali and be a medical doctor. You can be Somali and be an airline pilot. There is nothing wrong with it.”