NEW IN TOWN.

On a misty autumn morning in south-central Maine, a small group of Somali women--Seynab Ali, Hawa Ibrahim, Habiba Nor--are harvesting or-ganic vegetables in fields near the town of Lewiston. There are orders from a couple of high-end restaurants in Portland: ten pounds of tomatoes, four pounds of kale, five pounds of chilies; green beans, a watermelon, six butternut squash, thirty-five pounds of potatoes. The women wade into the fields, yellow cornstalks rising above their heads. Each has her own plot. Seynab Ali loses a shoe in the mud, and peals of laughter echo to a line of trees in the distance.

Ali emerges, her arms full of produce. She is a short woman with a commanding gaze. She holds up a dark leafy vegetable. Collard greens, she says, through an interpreter. There's a lot of this in Georgia, and African-Americans like it; she learned that in Atlanta, where she spent seven months before moving to Maine, in 2005, with her husband and five children. Another son, who is twenty-two, is in a refugee camp in Kenya. Ali was a subsistence farmer in Somalia before fleeing the civil war that has consumed the country for the past two decades. Like the other women in the fields, she speaks very little English, and is illiterate in her own language.

The women come in from their plots, their head scarves gilded by the mist. They carry sacks of carrots and corn for their families, along with the produce ordered by the restaurants. The women also sell vegetables, two afternoons a week, at local farmers' markets. They got their start--leased land, tools, seeds, even a van they take to the fields--from some of the foundations and charities that have taken an interest in the Somali refugees, who started arriving in Lewiston almost six years ago. But their income from farming is minuscule. Ali's husband sometimes works as a janitor in a hotel near the coast; that helps to pay the rent. Their children are in school.

A lanky young American, William Burke, waits at the edge of the field with a scale and a notebook, ready to record the women's contributions. Burke is an AmeriCorps volunteer, working for the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project. As a college student, he cooked with one of the Portland chefs whom he has persuaded to order from the Somali farmers.

I ask Burke if the menus will note that the butternut squash was grown by local Somali refugees.

"We haven't done any real branding yet," he says, his tone finely balanced between earnestness and irony. "That will become more of the project later."

"Who authorized this?" Lewiston officials say that this is the question they heard most often when the Somalis began showing up in town. The answer was: Nobody did. The Somalis had simply decided to come. Most had been resettled by government agencies in large American cities like Atlanta and Columbus, and were not happy with the crime, drugs, and schools they found there. The first few families had landed in Lewiston in February, 2001, after housing could not be obtained for them in Portland, Maine's largest city. Word quickly went out that Lewiston had good schools, a low crime rate, and cheap housing. By Greyhound bus and minivan, Somali families started arriving, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds.