Having welcomed incoming waves of refugees from Vietnam, Tibet, Bosnia, and Africa over the last 20 years, Burlington-area residents would do well to get up to speed on the Karen.

The Karen (pronounced ka-REHN) are a Southeast Asian ethnic group who have fled the military government in Myanmar by the tens of thousands for refugee camps in adjoining countries and who are arriving in Vermont in rising numbers.

Two Karen families transplanted to Vermont this summer typify the huge cultural and economic challenges that refugees confront here. None of the four parents speaks English, and they didn’t know much more about the United States than they had managed to pick up from TV shows or in the refugee camp in Thailand where they spent the last 11 years.

They’d never been on a plane before they were spirited halfway around the world to Burlington International Airport, where they soon encountered a rental-housing crunch.

That’s where the University of Vermont stepped in. With 120 apartments at Fort Ethan Allen assigned mostly to graduate and nontraditional students, and with some of the units vacant over the summer, UVM put both families up, rent free, until more permanent accommodations could be found.

According to Sharon Pitterson-Ogaldez, assistant director for apartments and family housing, six refugee families have stayed in UVM apartments this summer for up to three weeks. Three were from Myanmar — formerly Burma — and three from Iraq, which, with Bhutan, has become another major source of refugees in northern Vermont.

Last week, the two Karen families agreed to discuss their experiences with a reporter, through an interpreter. They assembled in a meeting room of UVM’s apartments and family housing complex at Fort Ethan Allen, although one family had already moved on to an apartment in Burlington.

The four parents, all in their 20s, came of age, married and had children in the No Po refugee camp, just across the border of Myanmar in northern Thailand. Much of what they knew of American society, they said, came from movies.

The most popular American movies in the refugee camp were action movies. Which ones?

“Rambo,” they said.

From camp to town house

There’s a reason “Rambo” was popular in the Karen refugee camp. The fourth film featuring Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo opened in January. The plot involves Rambo’s exploits to rescue Christian missionaries abducted by the Myanmar military after the missionaries provided humanitarian assistance to oppressed Karen villagers.

The conflict between Myanmar’s rulers and the Karen and other ethnic groups flared up soon after Myanmar’s independence in 1948 and has been called the longest-running civil war in the world. With the Karen playing a prominent role in the insurgency, their villages suffered repressive consequences, said So Khai, 26, who with his wife, Eh Mwee, 23, and their three children arrived in Vermont in June. Both fled into the jungle in 1997 after soldiers came through their villages shooting, they said.

Hei Poe, 29, who with his wife, Byu Na Moo, 23, and two children, are still living in a two-bedroom UVM apartment, said he fled after the military forced people in his village to build a railroad.

They all came from rice-growing farming families and were not members of the opposition, they said. So Khai, Eh Mwee, and Byu Na Moo went to school through the eighth grade.

They spoke in Burmese to the interpreter, Htun Sein, who has been in Vermont four years but does not speak Karen.

They said they preferred “Burma” to “Myanmar” — the national name the ruling junta adopted in 1989 — because they believed Burma to be a more inclusive term.

The hardest part of life in No Po, they said, was the shortage of food. The adult ration was about a pound a day of rice, and there wasn’t much else beyond fish paste and cooking oil, they said. For water, they had to line up at a well. About 10,000 people lived in the camp, they said, housed in closely set huts.

After more than a decade in these austere circumstances, suddenly they found themselves living this summer in a furnished UVM town house, with electric lights that work and with appliances — electric stove, refrigerator, washing machines — they’d never used before.

At the camp, they cooked over charcoal. Hei Poe’s first try cooking rice on the electric stove didn’t work out too well — it turned out too watery — but now he’s getting the hang of it.

Breathing room


The new housing arrangements required some adjustments on UVM’s part, too. New leases had to be drawn up. The housing staff at the complex, which already had an international flavor (tenants come from 25 countries), took the new arrivals in stride and helped get them settled, Pitterson-Ogaldez said.

“It’s a wonderful way for the university to give back to the community, and also to receive from the community,” said Susan Comerford, an associate dean and professor of social work at UVM who helped organize the arrangement. “It’s a marriage made in heaven — a win-win.”

UVM’s offer was especially welcome, said Judy Scott, director of Vermont Refugee Resettlement, because rental apartments are getting harder to find on short notice.

“We’re finding that these days, the rental market is getting more competitive,” she said, “with more people looking for apartments than there used to be.” The refugee program’s office typically hears of a new family’s arrival just one to three weeks beforehand, she said, which means the selection is often limited to what’s available. That’s why the UVM option is so helpful, because it provides some breathing room in a tight market.

Since April, about 60 Myanmar refugees have come to Vermont, she said. This week, English language classes for them began in the UVM housing complex’s community center.

Karen refugees have also wound up in Scandinavia, Australia and England.

As for the bigger picture, Scott said: “There are about 18 million refugees in camps around the world. The United States accepts about 50,000 or 60,000 a year.”

“We’re taking a tiny number out of millions,” she said.

Some Karen refugees didn’t want to leave Thailand because they hoped to return to Myanmar, the new Vermont arrivals said.

Did they entertain such hopes?

“They know it’s not happening soon,” Htun Sein said.

Tim Johnson
25/07/08
Burlington Free Press
Image: Hei Poe and Family

Editor's Note: Readers might want to read the comments made to this article to see how local communities view the new arrivals.