PORTLAND – Violence in his African homeland drove Ahmed Isse from Somalia to the United States. Two decades later, Hurricane Katrina forced him to pull up stakes again.

“Its like being in a refugee camp all over again,” said Isse, who left New Orleans and resettled in Portland.

Of the estimated 350 Katrina evacuees still living in Maine, at least 40 are new Americans originally from Somalia, Kenya and Iraq. While some are recent arrivals, others like Isse have been in the country for many years and have children in U.S. schools.

Thousands of international refugees were among the more than one million people of all backgrounds who were displaced last summer when the most destructive hurricane in the nation’s history struck the Gulf Coast.

“Many of these people experienced such tremendous loss earlier in their lives,” said Lorraine Martin, a disaster-relief volunteer for the United Church of Christ in Maine. “Now they are going through another type of disaster, but the impacts are the same. They are starting over again with nothing.”

Isse, who ran a taxi company in New Orleans with his brother, headed north a week after Katrina struck. All he had left was his family, a government check for $1,800 and a cramped Toyota Camry.

Isse had thought about resettling in Dallas, Houston or Atlanta, but his Somali connections told him that Maine was a place where his children would be safe and would find good schools.

More than 2,000 Somalis have settled in Portland in the past decade, and another 2,000 or so have come to Lewiston since 2001.

“I just wanted the children to start to have normal lives back,” Isse said. “I knew they would not get back their old neighborhoods, their old friends. New Orleans was destroyed.”

Isse found housing, but his job search has yet to bear fruit. His family has been living on vouchers, two government relief checks and the generosity of strangers.

“I didn’t have the best jobs in New Orleans,” he said, “but at least I could put food on the table.”