Wave of Burmese refugees calling East Bay home

By Momo Chang
Oakland Tribune

OAKLAND — On a windy afternoon in January, Eh Kaw Heh anxiously stood with his mother, Thweh Wah, at the Terminal 1 waiting area at Oakland International Airport.

They were there to greet Thweh Wah's nephew, Eh Kaw Mu, 19, who is about to start a new life in Oakland after living in refugee camps for years.

Mu is part of a recent wave of Burmese refugees who have arrived in the Bay Area since summer. He is also Karen — an ethnic minority from Southeast Burma that makes up the majority of Burmese refugees.

Burmese are the fastest growing refugee population in the United States. In 2007, the United States accepted about 15,000 Burmese refugees, more than any other refugee group, according to data from the U.S. State Department. Officials expect another 15,000 by the end of the fiscal year, in September.

At least 150 Burmese refugees have resettled in the Bay Area, mostly in Contra Costa, Alameda and San Francisco counties, according to resettlement agencies. Most of them now call Oakland home — about 120 since last summer, according to the International Rescue Committee, an international organization with which the U.S. government contracts to help refugees resettle.

For more than 60 years, the Karen (pronounced KAH-ren) have been embroiled in conflict with a Burmese military regime in their fight for independence. Many Karen were driven violently from their homes, their villages burned, during the 1980s.

Several hundred thousand Karen have fled across the border to Thailand, where many then lived — for an entire generation — in prison-like refugee camps.

These Karen and other ethnic minorities lived in limbo, unable to return home to Burma — now called Myanmar — and denied citizenship in the Thai refugee camps.

For years, refugee rights groups have pushed for acceptance of more Burmese refugees, in part because of the amount of time they've lived in refugee camps.

One of the reasons Burmese have been barred from entering the U.S. is because of anti-terrorism acts like the Patriot Act. Many Karen and other ethnic minorities from Burma have been a part of or associated with militias that fought against the Burmese military regime, which puts them in the broad category of "terrorist group."

The United States has been accepting more Burmese refugees since 2006, when waivers were granted to some groups previously barred from entry because of the Patriot Act.

Now, halfway across the world, toting their only belongings in single large bags, they arrive to start a new life.

Refugee generation

Eh Kaw Heh, 24, spent nearly 23 years in various Thai refugee camps, fleeing Burma with his family when he was 1.

"We want our own independent state, but Burma would not allow us," Heh said about the Karen's situation.

For more than 20 years, his family stayed in three refugee camps in Thailand. Several times, a Burmese military regime or other militias burned down the camp where his family lived, forcing them to flee yet again to another camp.

Heh, who arrived in June, lives in a modest apartment in Oakland's Eastlake district with his two younger brothers (who were born and raised in refugee camps), his mother, and, now, his mother's nephew.

This same neighborhood just east of Lake Merritt served as a hub for Southeast Asian refugees in the 1980s, after the war in Vietnam. The ethnically mixed neighborhood now also includes many new Burmese refugees.

Heh said when officials in Mae La refugee camp — the largest one in Thailand with about 45,000 people — announced that the United States was accepting refugees, they, like thousands of other Karen families, applied.

"When you live in the camps, if you compare, it's like you live in prison," he said. If refugees leave the camps, they could be caught by Thai police, he said.

There was little work, little education and myriad health problems plagued the overcrowded refugee camps.

In the camps, students can only get up to the equivalent of a 10th-grade education, and a majority of recent refugees do not speak English, though Heh does.

The younger generation, which spent years — many their whole life — in refugee camps, have little or no work experience when they arrive in the United States. Most of the elders were farmers in Burma before they were left the country.

For Heh, his first job was packing clothes in a warehouse in San Francisco.

A better future

Heh's prospects are bright — his main advantage being that he speaks English pretty well, unlike most of the recent Burmese refugees. He would like to get a college degree, something unthinkable in the camps, where many struggle to receive the equivalent of a 10th-grade education.

He found a new job in March, one he said he enjoys. He is learning bookkeeping and office management at an auto parts company in Oakland.

Despite early struggles of resettling — worrying about learning a new language and finding a sustainable job — many of the refugees interviewed say they are happy to be here.

Because of the recent influx of Karen people, Oakland Burmese Mission Baptist Church started offering services once a month in Karen. Some Karen refugees are not fluent in Burmese, the language in which regular services are given.

During one of the services, hundreds of Karen dressed in their traditional colorful, weaved clothing sang Christian songs in Karen and ate a buffet lunch of Burmese food prepared by church members.

While life here is vastly different from that in Burma and the refugee camps, many said they are glad to start a over.

"Life (in the refugee camps) is very hard and there is no hope, no future, at all," Pa Eh Ko, who arrived with his wife and two children, said through a translator. "Here, we have challenges, but we have a future here if we work hard."