The long road to freedom

Sui Ting Cinzah and her four children are hiding in the jungle. There are flies, lots of them, biting, and they lose their shoes in a river. There are leeches, it rains, and they have only the clothes on their back.

An agent tells them to run and Sui loses sight of her children. It's excruciating, not being able to see them. Are they in front? Behind? Where are they? The youngest, Rosie, is 8 years old.

"I'm always hiding part of my story, but I will tell you today. I feel really strong. I am not crying today."

Sui is sitting on a comfortable couch in a modest rental home in Nelson. It's a far cry from the horrors of her past life, escaping Myanmar as a Burmese Chin refugee. There are academic and sporting certificates on the mantelpiece and walls, and a photograph of Sui's parents, who are still in Myanmar, in traditional Chin costume. There is a family photograph with Sui, her husband Bual, their daughters Bawi, 25, Lily, 23, and Rosie, 16, and their sons Lal, 21, and Lian, 19.

Sui's voice is high-pitched, sweet and animated. She runs to get a map of the world, and draws a path from Myanmar to Malaysia through Thailand with her finger. She gets a pen and writes words on a piece of paper, to help explain what happened in 2005. One of the words is "prison".

Sui says her life was "pretty" and happy until 1988. She grew up in a small village in the Chin state, got a good education in the city, and became a teacher - "a good job". She married Bual in 1984, they had five happy children, and a big garden. There was no need to buy fruit or vegetables. "We loved our life."

The family's village of about 800 people, surrounded by forest in Chin State in Myanmar, was only three kilometres from a military camp in the town where Sui and Bual taught at an intermediate school. There was "no car, no bike, no horse". Bual and Sui walked to work every day - from Bungkhua to Lungler.

But one day in 1988, says Sui with a small voice, 3000 students were killed by the military. The pro-democracy protests were the largest uprising in Myanmar's political history. Everything changed. Things got "worse and worse", the army people were "rude", and did "terrible things". They kicked villagers' doors while they were sleeping, killed their animals without permission, hit people and forced them to be porters. They killed three people in Bungkhua one day, while Sui was away at a teachers' training course. 

Sui's husband fled to Malaysia in 1996. It was too dangerous for him to stay, because "he helped democratic people". He was in and out of prison in Malaysia because he was an illegal immigrant, until he got refugee status two or three years later. Sui didn't hear from him until then. She thought he was dead. It was, she says, "so hard". When they finally reunited, nine years after he left, she didn't recognise him. Her husband had no front teeth.

"I said, "No - he is not my husband". I couldn't recognise my husband."

Sui says when she fled Myanmar with her four youngest children in 2005, leaving her sick eldest daughter with her parents, the journey looked like "a big hill". She never would have dreamt of a life in New Zealand, gaining citizen ship last year and her children winning awards at school prize-givings.

The memory of one incident is the hardest to talk about. It's when the paper comes out. And the pen. In 2005, Bual paid for an agent to help Sui and their children get to Malaysia, but they were arrested and thrown in jail with about 20 other Burmese refugees just before getting to Thailand. They were together for three days and then separated like dirty washing.

Sui and Lily were put in a female prison, Lal, a teenager, was put in a men's prison, and Rosie and Lian were put in a child prison. Sui gets out her tattered Chin-translated Bible, and points to a passage that she underlined in jail. It's Matthew 10:26-31 - "fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul". Sui says it gave her energy and stopped her from going mad. "That time was very hard. I had never been in jail. I was a school teacher, and very proud of my life," she says.

Sui and her children were freed 18 days later and carried on their journey. They couldn't go back, only forward. She laughs nervously as she describes the fishing boat they used to get to Thailand in darkness. It was a 10-person boat, and took 40 people.

She says 16 of them squashed into a small car from there, which dropped them at the edge of the jungle. They walked and walked, only at night, and when they got close to Malaysia, an agent's car came and picked up the two youngest.

The car was intercepted and the children were put in a Malaysian prison for two weeks, until the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reunited them with Bual. They didn't recognise their dad at first, and vice versa, after such a long separation. It was, as Sui says with another understatement, a "very strange situation".

The Cinzah family came to New Zealand in 2006, and Bawi joined them three years later. Sui's job is to help new arrivals in Nelson as a cross-cultural worker for Refugee Services. Lily has finished an accounting and commerce degree - the first Chin woman to graduate from a New Zealand university, and has been accepted for a masters programme in Melbourne. Lal is studying civil engineering at the University of Canterbury, and Lian will join him there next year, with hopes of becoming a mechanical engineer.

Sui describes being at a Nelson College for Boys prize-giving in 2007, only a year after they arrived in New Zealand. She was crying, but the Kiwis around her would have had no idea why. When she was in the jungle she thought her family would die, but here was her boy on stage getting an award.

Sometimes when Sui sleeps, she is in the jungle again. She wakes up and tries to run. But then she remembers where she is. She is in Nelson. And life is pretty again. 

http://www.stuff.co.nz