Southfield woman makes a safe place for foster children from Myanmar

By Neil Rubin
Detroit News

They're teenage boys, so what do you expect? They wrestle and sometimes they crank their music up too loud, and no, you can't play soccer in the house!

They're teenage boys from halfway around the world, and they've seen and survived things most of us can't even fathom. One of them has a tattoo across his chest from an army that made him a soldier at a point when American kids are still learning to drive.

But boys will be boys, whether it's in Myanmar or Southfield.

"They know I don't like the burping," Denise Burroughs says, and her silver hoop earrings quiver as she laughs.

Burroughs, 33 and single, could have bought herself a tidy little condo when she went looking for a home last year. Instead, she made God an offer. "You bless me with a house," she said, a good-sized ranch at a near-miraculous price, "and this will be my return favor to you."

He came through, Burroughs says, and so did she. One acre, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and now four foster sons who will build the rest of their lives atop the foundation they're forming with their surrogate mom.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, shares its largest borders with India, China and Thailand on the Indochinese peninsula. The band of generals who run the overwhelmingly Buddhist nation are so secretive and dictatorial that they have throttled attempts by the rest of the world to help victims of Cyclone Nargis, which killed upward of 20,000 people early this month.

Two of Burroughs' boys are ethnic Chins and all are Christians, and neither of those is currently a good thing to be in Myanmar. The United States admitted nearly 14,000 refugees from the country in 2007, eight times more than the year before.

Her wards fled military service or the threat of it, made their way through the jungle, found refugee camps in Malaysia and were welcomed by Lutheran Social Services in Lansing, one of only 14 agencies nationwide that works with unaccompanied refugees younger than 18.

Now they are learning about pizza and the peculiarities of English, and she is learning that no dinner is complete without spice and rice.

A home away from strife

Burroughs took in her first two foster kids, a brother and sister from Rwanda, when she was only 26.

She was a renter with two bedrooms in Rochester Hills, and she had paid minimal attention to the Rwandan genocide. A social services manager she knew floated the idea and told her to pray on it.

"Like God's going to say 'no,' " Burroughs says. The siblings were with her for two years, and when they went on with their lives the way they're supposed to, "it left a hole in my heart.."

In September, the boys from Myanmar filled it.

A former middle school teacher, Burroughs has a degree in social work and works as a residential care specialist at a private psychiatric hospital. She read about Lutheran Social Services someplace, dialed the phone, loaned a friend her Chrysler Sebring, bought a Town & Country, and switched her shift to overnights so she could drive her new kids to school.

School starts at 8 a.m. -- half a day of English, half of standard education. They're ready by 7:20.

Adjusting to a new life

Amawong, the oldest, turns 19 in August. He arrived in the United States in June, three months earlier than the others, and tends to speak for all of them because he's better at it.

He's the Alpha dog, the one who automatically sits up front in the minivan. Before Lien went door-to-door over the winter, Amawong wrote a note for him on an index card: "The weather is bad today. I would like to shovel your snow."

Thang, 17, is the least fluent and most extroverted. He'll phone Burroughs' mother in Detroit, "and I'm thinking he's talking to someone from his country," she says. "He starts out in English and then he gets excited and doesn't realize he switched to Burmese."

Sai Sai, 18, bears the tattoo. He's a talented artist, something he didn't realize until he arrived here. Translating, Amawong says Sai Sai "was not interested to draw" in Myanmar.

Lien, 18, is the only one of the four without a nickname. He likes movies. He left a girlfriend back home.

The proper pronunciations are Amung, Tung, Sigh Sigh and LEE-an. Amawong is an orphan, but he has a 15-year-old brother at a refugee camp who will meet with a United Nations caseworker soon. They all have friends or relatives in Myanmar, so out of caution, they don't want their last names in print.

Thang and Sai Sai call Burroughs "Mom." Amawong and Lien call her "Auntie." All four are learning guitar, all four keep asking when they can go to work, and all four have become protective of their foster mother: "Where are you going? How long?"

They share a range in height from 5 foot 2 inches to 5 foot 5 inches and musical tastes that range from country to Christian. Within minutes after Burroughs picks them up from school, someone has an Olivia Newton-John song playing: "If you love me, let me know ..."

They do not expect to return to Myanmar, which they call Burma, and where as far as they know their relatives survived the cyclone unscathed. When Amawong outlines their plans, the others nod. They will go to college, and they will become doctors and lawyers.

Burroughs reminds them that the first step is to improve their English. "You have to speak it to learn it," she tells the quiet ones.

"It's like having babies," Burroughs says. "I'm the only one who understands them."

Oreos, lost in translation

Burroughs has rules and concerns, just like any parent. She worries about influences the boys might find outside the house.

"You start walking around looking crazy with your pants hanging off your butt," she tells them, "and you will not be employable."

She wants them to be optimistic but also realistic. They drove through some of the dicier parts of Detroit one day, just so they understood that "America is no instant scratch-off ticket."

Not that they'd have grasped the concept if she'd phrased it that way. Some references don't translate. Neither, she discovered, do Oreos.

The first box she bought sat untouched for a week and a half. Finally, she took them into the boys' bedrooms with glasses of milk to demonstrate the concept of cookies.

Judy Burroughs, Denise's mother, says her daughter was always giving and always precise. She would keep a dictionary open on her lap when she talked on the phone with friends, so she could respond if someone challenged one of her new words.

"When Stormey was little" -- it's Stormey Denise Burroughs, but she's never liked the first name -- "she'd get out of kindergarten and stop by all the old people's houses," Judy says. Denise would tell their 90-year-old neighbor, "I'm going to have 100 kids when I get older. And guess what, Aunt Mary? You're going to be the babysitter."

She has opted so far for temporary dependents, teens with accelerated childhoods who move on to independent living when they turn 20. Plenty of kids here need help, too, she realizes, but there's no other safety net for someone from Rwanda or Myanmar.

There's nowhere else for them to sling their cargo shorts over the chairs in their rooms, to strum their guitars, to thumb through "My First Picture Dictionary." There's no other way to make such an enormous impact in such a fleeting amount of time.

At Christmas, she gave Lien a rice cooker. Months later, she realized he had never used it, and she asked him why.

"So when I get married," he told her, "I can say, 'This is the rice cooker my Auntie Denise got me,' " back when everything was new and strange and there was someone who showed him how much she cared.

Reach Neal Rubin at (313) 222-1874 or nrubin@detnews.com.