A dozen hungry teenagers filed into the basement of a converted church on Milwaukee’s South Side in mid-February to mark the first night of Ramadan around folding tables. The building belongs to the Burmese Rohingya Community of Wisconsin (BRCW), a bare-bones nonprofit serving hundreds of Rohingya refugee families who are setting down roots in the city. Brand-new carpets muffled the sounds of worshippers in the mosque one floor up.
Nearly everyone in the nonprofit’s Clarke Square community center spoke Rohingya, but not a single printed word in the language appeared on the whiteboards in the center’s classrooms where recent arrivals study English and prepare for citizenship exams. Flyers advertising a food giveaway were in English, as were posters listing prayer times and an illuminated sign over the center’s front entrance.
Printed Rohingya words could be found only in a small stack of children’s books and loose-leaf dictionaries in an office just off the prayer hall — raw materials for an experiment in cultural preservation…