She smiles briefly.

"From no-man's land in the Sudan to the city--to Cambridge," Argaw says.

She speaks of one woman who was sold across the border of Ethiopia. She escaped, made it to Cambridge and heard about Argaw's organization.

"When she came to our office, she had no one," Argaw says. She pauses to think, looking slowly around the small room. "She is so brutalized, she sometimes makes me cry."

The obstacles facing these women and their families extend far beyond poverty or difficulty learning English, Argaw says.

"People think--oh, they're poor, we should help," Argaw says. "But there is nothing that prepares me, when I go deep inside, to understand the life of the woman who was married when she was 15, came here with her children and started working."

These issues extend into the schools. Argaw often has to call teachers and explain when a parent refuses to sign a report card. It is not that the parent is being uncooperative, Argaw says, it is just that she is embarrassed because she does not know how to write her own name.

And the children have their own struggles.