How Do You Spell Hope?: The Story of Rochester's Burmese Refugees (Part One)

By Carlet Cleare

Rochester, NY – A wave of refugees from Myanmar, the former Burma, is resettling in Rochester.
Most come with little formal education, and have lots of health problems. That's creating some serious challenges for the refugees, as well as local educators and healthcare providers.

WXXI's Carlet Cleare introduces us to one Burmese refugee and explains how he, and many others, got here.

Nay Thorn is a Burmese refugee living in Rochester.

"It's like yesterday for me."

Petite in frame, he calmly sits across from me, with his folded hands resting on the table. Smiling every once and while, he tells me - - in broken English - - about his escape from Burma 17 years ago. His family was fleeing the military junta that took over Burma, changing its name to Myanmar.

"My parents, we had run and hide in the jungle for years, when our village was burned down. It was really hard."

Nay Thorn says he and his family survived for nearly 4 years in the forest, eventually crossing into Thailand.

"When we arrive in refugee camp we think 'awe this is better than hiding in the jungle.'

For the next 13 years, Nay Thorn lived in a cramped space with more than one hundred-thousand other refugees. He couldn't leave, or get a job. Education, medical care, and even food were scarce.

"Food like, can you imagine eating the yellow bean for 20 years?" Nay Thorn says. "Nobody can eat that. Being a refugee in really, is really hopeless, and a very difficult life."

Jim Morris is the assistant director of the Refugee Assistance Program at the Catholic Family Center.

"The refugees that are in the refugee camps in Malaysia and Thailand, they will, if they'd like to be resettled in a third country like the United States will register with the UNHCR."

That's the United Nations Higher Committee for Refugees, which places refugees around the world. Hundreds of them end up at the Catholic Family Center in Rochester every year.

"The UNHCR will work with the U.S. government to identify an appropriate resettlement site. And sometimes that'll be determined by whether or not they have relatives in the city in the U.S. already present."

Nay Thorn did not have any relatives living in Rochester when he and wife came here a year ago. It was a random placement, but they joined 600 other Burmese refugees living in Monroe County. In all of New York, only Erie County has more Burmese. Nay Thorn says he considers himself lucky.

"Here we have opportunity, opportunity and hope," Nay Thorn says" And this is the main thing for me, and the rest of the refugee[s] too. You work hard here. You have opportunity. You can go, you can walk. You can have a better life here."

Morris says Nay Thorn is fortunate.

"There's 12-million refugees in the world, and only about a half of one percent will get resettled in another country," Morris says. "So to maintain your hope and faith that things will get better is difficult."

When Nay Thorn arrived in Rochester, someone from the Catholic Family Center picked him up at the airport, put some food in his belly, and found him a house to stay in. Morris says within his first week here, Nay Thorn received a health screening and school placement.

"We help them get social security cards, we plug them in to service providers like the Rochester City School District for adults and children. We help them get in to health care in coordination with the Monroe County Department of Public Health as well as our refugee healthcare provider, which is Rochester General Hospital. We get the food stamps and Medicaid. And some times wealth fare from the County Department of Human Services."

The Catholic Family Center helps refugees with basic resettlement needs for 3 to 6 months. After that, they receive occasional employment assistance or legal support from the agency until they become eligible to apply for U-S citizenship five years later. It's not much time when you consider how fundamentally different Rochester is compared to the place they came from.

"What is interesting about the Burmese is that they are not a homogenous group," Morris says. "They are very, they're numerous different language dialects ...there's different ethnicities within the Burmese population.

There are literally hundreds of dialects within the Burmese language, which makes it very hard, if not impossible, to find interpreters to help teach these refugees how to speak English. Not knowing how to read, write, or communicate makes building a new life in the Flower City a daunting task.