On the Monday after standard time went into effect, Lee Mo's children missed school. The Burmese refugee family knew the American ritual of moving clocks forward and back, but they didn't know on which dates that happened, so the school bus left without them.
Even if she had known the date, Mo couldn't read a calendar. For much of her five years here, she has had to estimate time based on the position of the sun. She doesn't know her age. She can't make a phone call. Like about half of the people in Iowa who speak her native Karenni, she can't read in any language. Neither she nor her husband went to school.
The civil war that has plagued their homeland, now called Myanmar, is the world's longest-running, spanning nearly 66 years. Many from her ethnic group fled to Thai refugee camps and stayed there for 16 years on average. Since 2006, refugees from Burma have been turning up in Iowa, becoming its largest incoming refugee group.
There are an estimated 6,000 refugees from Burma who are here, divided about evenly between three main language groups (though there are dozens of less-spoken languages), according to Henny Ohr, executive director of EMBARC, a new Des Moines nonprofit to help them. The Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services counts 1,667 refugees from Burma in Iowa, but that doesn't include secondary migration from other cities. Yet Ohr says no Karenni speaker in Iowa is fluent in English.
For all of the deprivations in the refugee camps — houses of bamboo and leaves, lit only by candlelight; dug pits for toilets; no electricity or running water; no health care or police to fight crime — Mo says that life was easier. At least she knew how to navigate it.
This world is one of flushing toilets and telephones, packaged pasta and canned ham. Of cars, thermometers and male obstetricians. Of rules about how many people can live in an apartment. The family has lived in four since arriving. And children suddenly have power over their parents because they are more adept at learning the language and technology.
Any single piece of this adjustment process would be unsettling. Taken together, it can be overwhelming.
Help is limited
Iowa has once again opened its doors to a refugee population in crisis. But unlike the massive, multi-pronged relocation effort led by former Gov. Robert Ray for war-displaced Southeast Asians in the 1970s, today's refugees can count on 90 days of official help, and then have to patch together services depending on their circumstances.
Refugee resettlement core services from the U.S. State Department were always limited to 90 days, and there is a one-time per capita grant of $1,800, of which $700 can go to agency staff for management, says John Wilken, chief of the Bureau of Refugee Services in the Iowa Department of Human Services. But in the past, income-eligible single people or couples without young children could also get cash assistance and medical care for five years. That was cut back to eight months.
"In the old days, agencies doing resettlement often went beyond 90 days, I presume because they had private dollars or volunteers," said Wilken. "As the landscape has changed and resettlement has become more costly, resettlement agencies have had to limit their services to exactly what they're getting paid for."
Low-income refugees with children get welfare benefits under Iowa's Family Investment Program, with a lifetime cap of five years. The Bureau of Refugee Services uses federal funds for refugees here less than two years to pay for employment-related services primarily. The bulk of that $550,000 last year paid for bureau staff, job transportation and telephone interpretation services. Language instruction was limited to "self-learning" on computers using Rosetta Stone programs. The bureau has no Karenni-speaking employees.
There are other federal grants, including some to prepare elderly refugees for citizenship, or targeted to Des Moines Public School children, and partnerships with Lutheran Services of Iowa, Catholic Charities and the Des Moines chapter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But as Wilken says, "All of us would say there's a pretty substantial gap in comprehensive case management."
And when families are resettled in Iowa from other states — for meatpacking jobs or because relatives are here — the 90 days of assistance won't follow them, and the Bureau of Refugee Services won't help. Wilken said it didn't compete for such funds; the Committee for Refugees and Immigrants administers them. Yet secondary migrants are the biggest group of refugees from Burma.
Ohr calls it a crisis.
So many barriers
It's not just the inability of parents to communicate with teachers, or pick kids up or help them study. It's someone being prematurely cut off food stamps because the paperwork wasn't done due to language barriers. It's the child who missed two years of schooling because the mother didn't know to enroll her. The man who couldn't read his eviction notice until a week before he had to move with the 14 people sharing his one-bedroom apartment. It's the untouched FIP benefits debit card loaded with $900 that someone didn't know what to do with, even as she fell behind on rent.
"We have people getting surgery, but they don't know what surgery they're getting," said Ohr. One woman lost seven fingers in meat-packing accidents, not understanding the safety training. A newborn died after being kept waiting in the emergency room. People have lost parental rights for lack of "cultural awareness" or an attorney who spoke their language.
"It's a crushing of the spirit," said Ohr.
In 2012, just a year after their families moved to Iowa, three Karenni-speaking children drowned in the Iowa River at Marshalltown. The mother of two was so distraught she tried to jump out of her apartment window.
Mo's sister was in the hospital recently recovering from a suicide attempt. Alone, depressed and unable to find work, she stabbed herself in the stomach with a knife. Depression is widespread.
One in five Des Moines Public School students is a refugee from Burma. A lone Karenni interpreter has to translate for several hundred kids. And everyone who is bilingual feels a responsibility to volunteer with those who aren't, even if they are also just getting a foothold.
"They'll call my cellphone. If I don't answer, they come to my house," said a woman who speaks Chin. She said everyone gives her their papers to translate and makes her their emergency contact. She gets all their appointment reminders. "Some days I have 50 to 100 calls on my phone. ... But what is the point of my being here if I cannot help my community?"
Where to turn?
Ohr, who is Korean rather than Burmese, has refugees from Burma on her board who are frequently tapped for help. She says they deserve pay, but some institutions require degrees or certification to hire them. "Where's the middle ground?" she asks.
She hopes the Legislature will pass S.F. 2270, sponsored by Sen. Janet Petersen of Des Moines, to create a pilot project to train and pay refugees as community navigators helping newcomers become self-sufficient. The bill allocates $750,000 a year for three years at four sites. The project would be under the Iowa Department of Education, but Petersen says, "Trying to find a state agency that was able and willing to take on this grant was very difficult."
Sen. Jeff Danielson of Cedar Falls has tried to locate services for secondary migrants in his district. He says the departments of Human Services and Human Rights should take more responsibility for refugees. "We have two agencies for that purpose and they're silent on it," he said.
Paw Moo Htoo has been in America seven months with her husband and six children. A child of poor farmers in Burma, she finished fourth grade. She speaks a less common language, Karen. She is withdrawn and expressionless.
"I don't know how to go to the store, to doctor's appointments, to my children's school," she said through an interpreter. She can watch TV only if one of her kids turns it on. "I struggle with so much. I would love to stay here, but because of the language barriers, I can't communicate with anyone."
Htoo says her case worker only showed her how to turn on the lights and oven, but said nothing about enrolling her kids in school. So at first, they didn't go. Money is tight. Her husband earns $1,200 a month at a Marshalltown meat-packing job, working 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. He pays $160 to be in a carpool and $740 for the 3-bedroom apartment they are required to have. And they're paying $290 a month to reimburse the cost of their $8,000 airfare here.
One journey may be over for these refugees, but it could be a long time before they're at home. Still, there are breakthroughs. A volunteer named Mary, who has been helping teach Lee Mo English, dropped in to see her and spoke of how well she was progressing. "I put my arm around her and said, 'I love you Lee Mo,' " she recounted. "And she said, 'I love you.' " Lee Mo laughed, suddenly radiant. "I am so happy to be with you, every time!" she told her American friend.
This group, which has seen too much trauma and displacement, needs all the help it can get to live productively as our neighbors. Passing the legislation would be a start. But to really give them a fighting chance, state government, individuals, businesses and nonprofits need to pull together. Thankfully, we've seen that work before, but it took strong leadership from the top.
By the numbers
2006
The year refugees started arriving in Iowa from Burma, now known as Myanmar, located in Southeast Asia.
6,000
The estimated number of Burmese refugees in Iowa, becoming the state's largest incoming refugee group.
66 years
The length of the country's civil war, the world's longest-running.
http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/basu-new-challenges-are-now-facing-burmas-refugees-living-in-iowa/
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