Burmese refugees find the city a friendly place to live

Burmese refugees find the city a friendly place to live

By MICHAEL OVERALL World Staff Writer

Ching Touthang (right) helps Burmese refugees Nei Hoi (left) and Vung Let fill out paperwork at Good Samaritan Clinic in July. MIKE SIMONS / Tulsa World file

After dark, Thang Let's village had a sort of neighborhood watch program, and on this particular night it was his turn to patrol the streets.

A small group of Buddhist monks, drunk and boisterous, came in from the countryside around 10 o'clock and began harassing the village women.

"I chased them away because I had to," Let tells the story through a translator. "It was my duty."

The next day, however, other villagers accused him of insulting the monks and throwing them out of town for religious reasons.

As a Christian, Let belongs to a persecuted minority in his country, officially known as Myanmar but colloquially still called Burma.

"They say they will wait until I am alone in the fields. Then they will get a hand on me and maybe they will kill me."

That's why, like thousands of other refugees in recent years, Let, 32, fled the country last year with his wife and two children, both still in diapers.

Even as they sneaked through the jungle and slipped quietly into Malaysia, Let already knew where he wanted to go.

By word of mouth across remote southeast Asia, one city has apparently gained an international reputation as a friendly and welcoming place where refugees can find the help they need to start new lives.

Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Living in Tulsa

Visiting Let in a low-rent apartment complex behind a Walmart on South Lewis Avenue, Ching Touthang takes off her high-heeled shoes before sitting down on the disco-era couch.

"You look tired," she tells Let, speaking to him in a Burmese dialect before repeating herself in English.

He nods and, as if on cue, begins to yawn.

"He works all night as a — what do you call it? A custodian," Touthang says. "Then he comes home to watch the kids without sleeping so his wife can run errands."

Sometimes, those errands involve asking Touthang for a ride, and that's why she's here this morning.

Later, Touthang will take other refugees to see a doctor, help others apply for jobs, argue with a utility company about another one's bill, then give more refugees a ride to a grocery store.

It's become a daily, full-time job for Touthang, who estimates that more than 600 Burmese refugees are living in Tulsa, most of them since 2007.

And many of them have come at least partly because of her.

'I felt useless'
Touthang grew up in a region of India about three hours from the border, and she often went to visit family members on the Burmese side.

Spread out across separate villages, Touthang's relatives spoke several different dialects, with one set of grandparents not able to speak to the other without a translator.

"I talked to everyone," she remembers, "because I learned everybody's language. I think I was the only one."

As an adult, Touthang taught elementary school in India — where the students, like her own family, spoke a cacophony of different dialects.

"I learned all of their languages very quickly," Touthang says. "I think it's easy for me. I think it's a gift."

But it's a gift that didn't seem to have much value in Tulsa, where Touthang moved in 2007 for her husband, Sei Touthang, to become an associate pastor at Yale Avenue Christian Church.

"I felt useless," Touthang says. "I went to my husband and asked him: 'What purpose does God have for me? Why am I here?' "

'Word got around'

The families have been waiting for two hours already, sitting in rows of orange plastic chairs under dim fluorescent lighting.

If they knew English, they could pass the time reading Sunday School slogans and the Ten Commandments, posted on the walls. But they don't even all speak the same dialect of Burmese, so they sit quietly, waiting to see a doctor at this makeshift medical clinic.

Outside in the parking lot, steps lead to a door in the side of an 18-wheeler's full-size trailer. The sunset casts long, dark shadows across Evangelistic Temple School, near 55th Street and Peoria Avenue.

Inside, nurses elbow past each other in the tight corridor, disappearing into fully equipped exam rooms, where bright lights glare off the stark white paneling.

This mobile health clinic, operated by Good Samaritan Health Services, parks at this spot every Tuesday night, offering free care to anyone.

Touthang began volunteering there around August 2007, before any refugees began showing up. By all accounts, it was a coincidence when the first Burmese family walked into the waiting room a few weeks later.

Touthang offered to step into the exam room to translate for the doctors.

"Word got around that I was here, you know, and that I could speak all the dialects," Touthang says. "That's why, I think, everybody started coming here."

Before long, Touthang began raising donations from Yale Avenue Christian, furnishing apartments for the refugees, giving them clothes, taking them to job interviews, helping them apply for food stamps — whatever they need.

"I'm not the only one helping them," Touthang says. "Tulsa is a very good city, a very generous city."

'Everyone is a slave'

To escape Myanmar, Hau Lam Thang hid inside a crate on the back of a truck.

For eight or nine hours a day, the truck would creep along the narrow, muddy roads toward the border. Thang held his breath through military checkpoints, knowing that if somebody opened his crate it would mean a long prison sentence, if not a bullet in the head.

At night, the truck pulled off the road and Thang slept in the jungle, climbing back inside the crate before daybreak.

It took him a week to reach freedom.

"A lot of people are dying this way," says Thang, who taught himself English years ago by studying an old dictionary. "They can't find enough air to breathe, and when somebody opens the crate, they are dead in there."

Once safely in Malaysia, Thang found a job and saved enough money to have his wife and children smuggled out the same way — in crates.

"The babies want to cry, but you have to keep them quiet," he says. "You know how desperate people are when they are willing to do something like that."

Since a military coup in 1962, a Marxist dictatorship has imposed strict, Soviet-style central planning on the Burmese economy, making the government one of the most repressive in the world and the population one of the poorest.

Trained as an electrician, Thang was often forced — under threat of prison or death — to carry wood, harvest rice, or do whatever else his government masters demanded.

"In Burma," he says, "everyone is a slave. You can't live with a government like that."

'Democracy and freedom'

After escaping to Malaysia, the refugees usually seek help from Catholic Charities or other sponsors to pay airfare to the United States, where they immediately receive political asylum, making it legal for them to live and work in the U.S. indefinitely.

Thang first landed in Idaho, because that's where his charity sponsor sent him from Malaysia. But Tulsa was always his goal.

"People tell me, even in Malaysia, that 'in Tulsa, somebody will help you.' "

And somebody did.

Touthang helped him move into an apartment, arranged to have the utilities turned on, collected donations for clothing and furniture, even brought toys for the children.

"The hardest thing," she says, "is to find jobs."

On top of a bad economy, most of the refugees have no formal education, no work history, no references and no English skills.

"Everyone is afraid they are illegal," Touthang says. "But I tell them: 'It's OK. They can be here. They have papers.' "

With her help, Thang eventually found work as a janitor. But he still dreams about going back to Myanmar.

"If the government would change, if there was democracy and freedom, I would go back," he says. "It's my country. It's my home. But I can't take my children back there the way it is now."

'Here to help'

Every other Monday evening, Touthang offers a parenting class for Burmese mothers, who meet in a Sunday school room at Yale Avenue Christian Church.

Sitting around a U-shaped table, half a dozen mothers cuddle babies on their laps or bounce toddlers on their knees while their older children play quietly in the hall.

When her 6-month-old gets cranky, one mother stands to unfold a "naopoh pon," translated literally as a "baby carry cloth."

Bending over, she delicately balances the baby on her back, wraps the "naopoh pon" around both of them and knots it in front before standing straight again, the baby safely peeking over the mother's shoulder.

Frankly, it's not the kind of maneuver that a typical American mother could repeat. But these Burmese women have come here tonight to learn, in a sense, how to be typical American mothers.

"Buy puzzles for your children. Read to them. Teach them to sit still and listen," Touthang tells them. "When they get older and go to school, they're going to be expected to know a lot of things that children don't know in Burma."

But when these babies grow up someday, will they know how to use a "naopoh pon" with babies of their own?

Will they ever be able to return home to Myanmar?

Will they even consider Myanmar home?

Or will they simply blend into America's melting pot?

Touthang wonders.

"I don't know what's going to happen," she says. "But I thank God that I'm here to help right now, because helping them is my way of helping him."



Country suffers from tyranny, mass unrest

In May 1990, after more than two years of massive protests and unrest, Burmese voters went to the polls for a truly democratic election – the first since a military coup in 1962.

The National League for Democracy, led by worldfamous human rights activist and Nobel Peace Price recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, won the vast majority of seats in the national legislature, making her destined to become prime minister.

The Marxist government, however, annulled the results of the election, and Suu Kyi has spent the bulk of the last 20 years under house arrest, refusing to accept exile to another country.

Since 1989, military authorities in Burma have promoted an alternative name, the Union of Myanmar, for their country. Myanmar means “fast and strong.” But the change has remained controversial both internally and internationally.

Burmese refugees in Tulsa continue to use the traditional name.

The country has a centrally planned economy that has made its population one of the poorest in the world.

Citizens, especially ethnic and religious minorities, are often forced to work on government farms or in state-owned enterprises for little or no pay.

The country continues to endure periodic uprisings and mass unrest, most recently beginning in August 2007, when the government unexpectedly lifted fuel subsidies and caused energy costs to nearly double overnight.

Soon afterward, Tulsa began to see a wave of refugees.