By KIRK SEMPLE


Nearly every immigrant group in New York City has a neighborhood, or at least a street, to call its own. But for refugees from the tiny South Asian nation of Bhutan, the closest thing to a home base is a single building in the Bronx - a red-brick five-story walkup, with a weed-choked front courtyard and grimy staircases.

Eight families - more than 40 people - have taken up residence here in the past several months, part of a stream of thousands of Bhutanese refugees who have flowed into the United States in the past year and a half. With the help of resettlement agencies, many have found apartments in the Bronx, and the largest concentration has ended up here in the building on University Avenue.

The only life most have known was in the rural plains and Himalayan foothills of Bhutan and the dusty refugee camps of Nepal. Few have ever lived in homes with electricity or indoor plumbing, or between walls made of anything but bamboo.

Now they dwell among high-rises, contending with wild traffic, a miasma of cultures and languages, and New York’s frenzied pace. Their challenge now is to bridge those two worlds - finding jobs and enrolling in classes - and move beyond the building.

“We have started inventing our lifestyle,” said Abhi Siwakoti, 24, who arrived last November and lives with his family in Apartment 5G.

That style has none of the standoffishness of the typical New York apartment block. Neighbors drop in on one another for advice and company.

A porridge of humidity and street noise oozed through the open windows one sweltering morning as Suk Man Tamang, 30, sat on a bed in his groundfloor three-bedroom apartment.

Mr. Tamang arrived on August 3, joining his parents, who arrived a week earlier. But in this busy building he could already see a glimmer of a future neighborhood.

“There’s Chinatown, there’s Koreatown, there’s Indiatown,” he said. “One day there will be a big Bhutanese community.”

All of the newcomers are Bhutanese of Nepalese origin who had migrated to Bhutan or were descended from immigrants. In the early 1990s, Bhutan expelled tens of thousands of Nepali Bhutanese, most of them from poor farming families, accusing them of immigrating illegally. The majority ended up in seven refugee camps in Nepal, where they lived in bambooand- thatch huts.

Bhutan refused to take them back, and Nepal refused to give them citizenship. In 2007, the United States agreed to resettle at least 60,000 of them. The first arrived in early 2008.

Through an elaborate process, about 170 Bhutanese refugees have been placed in New York.

There was no significant Bhutanese population in New York to receive and help assimilate them. So they rely largely on one another to solve the puzzles of American city life and, for the first time since they were exiled, become self-reliant.

Inside the 60-unit building, where they are a distinct minority, they share meals and information about job leads and education. One morning, the Tamang family needed to go shopping but their food stamps had not yet been issued. So the Siwakoti family lent some of theirs.

In Apartment 2H in the 60-unit building, T. P. Mishra, 25, who edited a monthly newspaper in Nepal, has been using his blog, Journalism in Exile, to share his and other refugees’ experiences. He had been bracing for “serious cultural shock,” he said, but his fears evaporated when he walked into the building.

“Because the moment I’m about to enter my apartment, there were dozens of Bhutanese around me,” he recalled. “Some looked like my mother, some looked like my father. They said, ‘You will be O.K.’”


PHOTOGRAPHS BY SUZANNE DeCHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMES / Naramaya Chimoria, 72, is among more than 40 Bhutanese refugees living in a building in the Bronx.



The United States has agreed to resettle at least 60,000 Bhutanese. Dhan Darji Tamang, left, at home in the Bronx. Prem, Oma and Abhi Siwakoti share an apartment in the building.