PROVIDENCE — Three years after Mohamed Alshawaf came to the United States as a refugee from Syria, he can now have a basic conversation in English.
Yet, as with any learner of a second language, some words still escape him.
“Do you know this word, survivor?” Leonard Newman, Alshawaf’s English-language tutor at the Refugee Dream Center in Providence, said slowly, to make sure Alshawaf understood the question from a Journal reporter. “You survived the terrible things in Syria. My parents survived Hitler.
“Is this important … that you are a survivor and my parents are also survivors?”
Alshawaf did not answer. Newman — the son of refugees from the Holocaust — said that even if outsiders see symbolism in their relationship, for them it’s just two friends, helping each other out.
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