Qassim Showaeel sat among hundreds of university students bagging sand at the Fargodome in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, his red-and-white checked keffiyeh scarf sticking out amid a sea of T-shirts, sweat shirts and blue jeans.

A young girl, his teenage daughter Abeer, hoisted shovelfuls of sand. A young boy, his son Mohammad, hoisted the bags onto a pallet.

This is what peace looks like for the Showaeel family of Baghdad.

One year ago they fled their war-torn country and landed in the Fargo area, some of the 141 Iraqi refugees resettled in North Dakota last year and among the first of thousands expected to arrive in the United States. Now they are part of the round-the-clock scramble to save their new city.

"This country brought me over here and brought my kids to safety," said Qassim, speaking through a friend who translated his Arabic. "I'm very happy to help."

As he sat on an orange bucket turned upside down on the concrete floor, he held open plastic bags for others to fill. Trucks and forklifts clattered across the floor behind him, bringing fresh sand and bags to several hundred volunteers laboring in the dusty air of the indoor stadium.

Seriously wounded in a 1985 explosion during the Iran-Iraq war, Showaeel, 47, first learned he might qualify for resettlement in the United States while seeking treatment at a United Nations-run hospital for his bomb-shattered leg. It was a tantalizing offer.

He came to know some of the U.N. staff at the hospital and one day they told him to bring his passport and those of his family -- he might be eligible for refugee status despite not having fled Iraq. He learned a short time later that he had been accepted.

"I cried," he said.

He left a small business in Iraq and a house. "This is all I came over with," he said, fingering his shirt.

If peace returns to Iraq someday he may go back, he said, but he loves North Dakota. "Everywhere you go the people are nice," he said.

The Fargo hospital treated his wife for her depression; his school-age children -- the family has six between the ages of 3 and 17 -- are in good schools. Abeer said she now dreams of becoming a civil engineer.

North Dakota took in 403 refugees last year, 141 of them from Iraq. This year, about the same number of Iraqi settlers are expected, said Darci Asche, of the Fargo office of Lutheran Social Services.

The state typically took in 10 or fewer Iraqis a year, said Asche, but in 2008 thousands of Iraqi families were allowed into the United States under an agreement to help resolve the refugee problem that arose in Syria and Jordan, where many Iraqis fled during the war.

"There's always a time of adjustment, but they'll do well here," she said.

Qassim and his two children filled sandbags from midnight to 5 a.m. Wednesday, a time when they knew volunteers would be needed. His wife and younger children slept in their Moorhead apartment. As Qassim worked, a front-end loader shot past him with pallets stacked high. A truck emptied a fresh pile of sand on the stadium's concrete floor, its rear door banging loudly.

Is this what he expected of America?

"No," he smiled, "but I'm used to this. Back in Iraq we had a lot of problems, too."

Matt McKinney • 612-673-7329