On separate bloody routes out of war into chaos, lifelong friends Ahmed Omar and Asad Mohamed thought they'd never see each other again.

In December 1990, another phase of an ongoing civil war overwhelmed Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

And Omar, now 26, and Mohamed, 31, were lost to each other in two huge crowds stampeding on two different roads toward Kismayu, 300 miles south.

"You could see people dying right in front of you," recalls Omar. "At one point, I thoughs the end of Somalia; this is the end of the world."

And in Kismayu, there was only the crush of what seemed like a million wailing people, wondering, "What next, oh Allah?"

But Omar and Mohamed found each other.

And over the next three years, they kept reuniting, sometimes quite coincidentally, even after they were separated three more times in teeming refugee camps and unfamiliar big cities from East Africa to Western Europe.

Once, for example, after each escaped from a Kenyan refugee camp, they came together after Mohamed, in a speeding taxicab, glimpsed Omar in a crowd near the doors of a Nairobi department store.

But this pattern of being torn apart and reunited finally ended when both men came to America.

One of Mohamed's cousins, who was in school in San Diego, sponsored him as a refugee in 1992. That was after the United States joined a massive international resettlement program launched by the United Nations around the time Somalia's government toppled a year earlier.

Mohamed filed the affidavits that helped bring his friend to San Diego in 1993 when Omar contacted him after a failed attempt to resettle in Italy.

Now working and, until recently, living together in a multiethnic stew kettle in City Heights, the two devout Muslims say the strength of their faith held them together as friends through their trials.

And it now binds them in a crusade to help thousands of fellow refugees through one-on-one community service and a long-established aid program for needy women and children.

Working together

Mohamed and Omar, humble men who speak in soft tones, work full time for the American Red Cross Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) in City Heights. The supplemental-food program helps mothers and children from low-income families eat healthfully.

Federally funded, WIC has operated through various agencies in communities nationwide since 1974. The Red Cross is one of five local agencies, including the county Department of Health Services, that run WIC programs in various parts of the county.

It teaches expecting mothers and mothers with children up to 5 years old how to improve their nutrition. And with financial assistance, in the form of food vouchers, it helps them purchase the essentials for sound diets.

The Red Cross WIC office at 5911 University Ave. is the busiest of the five offices in San Diego, according to records at state WIC headquarters in Sacramento. It also is near the heart of "Little Mogadishu," a section of City Heights so-called because of the number of Somali refugees living there, estimated between 2,700 and 4,500.

Little Mogadishu roughly encompasses pockets of a 2-mile stretch of University Avenue between 58th Street and Fairmount Avenue.

In Little Mogadishu, Somalis account for at least 2 percent of the average 400 daily client visits to the WIC office.

And when they come, it's almost always to see Omar, Mohamed or Ethiopia-born Abdirashid Osman.

Human resources Human staff of 22, Mohamed is listed as a nutrition assistant. Omar andthose jobs, they are charged with coordinating WIC services and advising clients about proper diet and nutrition.

But they do much more.

Between them, Omar and Mohamed speak four languages: English and three East African and Arabic tongues.

They graduated together from Somali National University with science degrees in 1990, just before the war hit Mogadishu.

And in San Diego over the past four years, through work as teachers' aides at Crawford High School and Horace Mann Middle School and through their associations with WIC, they've come to know the San Diego community at large.

With their knowledge and experience, they serve as interpreters and translators. They provide referrals and information on other health and human services.

And they become kind of surrogate big brothers to their Somali clients who, often, are the neediest of the needy.

Some of those clients are civil-war widows. Many are unfamiliar with the new language and customs, and most struggle with large families of young children.

Often, too, they are ignorant of the rules of nutrition, and they are malnourished after long stays in some of the same overcrowded and underfed refugee camps through which Omar and Mohamed passed.

Ubah Ali, severely underweight when she arrived in America nearly a year ago, is typical of those who come to Omar and Mohamed.

The 26-year-old mother of seven delivered her second set of twins late in May. She was three months pregnant with her now 4-year-old son, Olad, when she was shot during the fighting in Mogadishu.

Ali nearly bled to death twice. And the bullet, still embedded in her side, needed to be removed before she gave birth to her twins.

Omar and Mohamed helped her find a doctor. And they led her to WIC.

"It is good what they've done for me," Ali says, as Mohamed interprets. " WIC helps because of what it provides us. I am not worried about my condition. I feel safe in the United States."

Everyone's friends nonstop around here, and Ahmed and Asad are invaluable," says WIC program manager Robin Bradley. "They provide great help. And they are so respected in their community."

That respect is helped along by the fact that Omar and Mohamed don't confine their work to office hours.

On a typical day before and after work it is not unusual to see Omar and Mohamed filling in as chauffeurs and movers for one countryman or another in need of transportation.

And they've helped hundreds do all, from applying for jobs and enrolling in colleges to locating housing and filling out and filing necessary papers.

Word throughout Little Mogadishu is: "If you have a need, go see Ahmed or Asad."

"People depend on us and call on us at any time of the day or night," says Omar. "Sometimes they wake you up when you're sleeping, but what are you going to do? It's someone from your country who needs help -- you must help. It's like duty.

"We come from a basically community-minded people. It's natural for us to try to help others."

That might seem incongruous, coming from a displaced descendant of a nomadic people whose homeland has been ripped by coups and power struggles among huge clans and subclans for more than a quarter-century.

But many who are familiar with Somalia confirm that comparatively small groups of power-hungry clan leaders traditionally keep the conflicts stoked. Yet the reasons for their animosities, generally, are not universally shared.

And in Little Mogadishu, Somalis strive to keep a kindred spirit alive, say activists, including Abdulahi Aidid and Mohamed Keynan.

Kinship spirit Keynan are presidents and founders of Horn of Africa Community in North America and of Somali Community of San Diego Inc.

Theirs are the newest and the oldest of nearly a half-dozen nonprofit community-service organizations formed in the past eight years by longer-established Somalis, primarily, to help other Somalis become acclimated.

Omar and Mohamed work a lot in conjunction with Aidid and Horn of Africa. But both Aidid and Keynan agree that Omar and Mohamed are "vital community resources," all on their own.

"We don't think in terms of clans here. My people are so poor and have so many needs," emphasizes Omar. "We don't want anyone to think that we won't help them because of which clan they may have belonged to back home.

"Here, we are all Somalis, struggling to survive."

Resettlement workers within the community and with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) vary in their estimates of just how many Somalis live in the county.

IRC says 3,000. Community activists say it's more like 5,000. However, no one disputes that, whatever the number, 90 percent live -- bound by poverty -- in Little Mogadishu.

Some of the population came to San Diego in 1988, when the clan wars in Somalia began to increase in ferocity.

But most arrived between 1990 and 1995 as part of the massive international resettlement program launched by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The United States, like other participating nations, relaxed a number of restrictions in extending political asylum to many Somalis who had relatives or friends in America who would vouch for them.

(Along with participating in the resettlement program, the United States also became involved for 15 months between 1992 and 1994 in sending troops to bolster a now-ended U.N. peacekeeping effort.)

IRC workers and others in San Diego say that with a climate similar to that of Somalia, San Diego is attractive to many of the refugees. And this is one of three areas in the nation with the largest Somali populations.

The other two are in Minnesota and Iowa, where many Somalis are drawn to plentiful jobs in the meat-packing industry, a line of work familiar to them in their homeland.

But most Somalis, forced as they were to leave nearly everything behind -- including relatives -- were near-penniless and had limited marketable skills when they arrived in the United States.

Over the years, amid ever-harshening economic times, many refugees have experienced extreme difficulty overcoming impoverished beginnings in San Diego, the IRC workers and others say.

Sharing blessings are among the fortunate.

In 1993, Mohamed was scrambling, working odd jobs as a taxi driver and as a teacher's aide at Crawford High, when he applied for an aide's position at WIC.

At first, he thought of it as just a way to make money, he says. But he quickly changed his thinking when he recognized the job's value to his community.

"Understanding the importance of proper diet and nutrition is one of the hardest things for Somali people," Mohamed says. "We come from one of the poorest economies in the world, and our customs and beliefs about diet and eating are so different.

"For example, it is said in Somalia that a pregnant woman should eat very little so that her baby won't be born fat."

Omar says he was similarly inspired a year later when he learned, through Mohamed, that a job was available.

"We're talking nutrition here (at WIC). This is one of the best things I could do in my life because my people need me here."

Mohamed and Omar now take classes at City College in preparation for enrolling in master's programs at San Diego State University. Mohamed wants to be a nutritionist, Omar, a biochemist. And both want to use their educations to further their work at WIC.

The scourge of poor diet is only one of myriad complex problems haunting Little Mogadishu.

And yet the obstacles Somalis face are not unlike those confronted by countless other immigrant groups who've come to U.S. shores through the ages.

The log of those newcomers includes groups -- some from other African nations -- who live right along with Somalis, where they all struggle to survive today.

In the mix pot.

Asians, Hispanics, Russians, Jews, Ethiopians, Liberians and more live and work there, where it is said that as many as 24 cultures, speaking 32 languages, are plunked together.

But for some Somalis, familiar only with their own traditions and native tongue, communicating with some vastly different cultural groups is difficult. And, self-consciously, they tend to isolate themselves from the community at large, say Aidid and others.

Moreover, many say that Somali women, especially young girls, who wear veils and long dresses as symbols of their nation's Muslim heritage, often feel set apart, outcasts in social settings such as school and the workplace.

"Sometimes people look at us strangely and make fun of us," says a 15-year-old Crawford High 10th-grader. With shyness and reserve characteristic of many women of her culture, she asked to remain anonymous.

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