Coming to America

In a rundown refugee apartment complex a new world city is taking shape, and one teenage girl is at the center of it.

By Eric Scigliano

Martinez gushes about the self-help projects the Somalis, the most established of the refugee groups, are launching: a community center in the old Chips Casino, a day care in another apartment complex. The Burundians secured a grant to rent a farm in Kent. They’ve already started plowing.

Compared to the Africans, refugees from Burma are at several disadvantages. Many come from a barter and subsistence-agriculture economy and know less of modern ways. One family sat in the dark in their new home till someone noticed and showed them how to turn on the lights; they’d never had electricity. When Webb and another volunteer obtained donated bicycles and set about teaching the kids in the complex how to maintain them, the Burundians snatched up wrenches and screwdrivers like old hands. One of the Burmese kids tried to adjust a derailleur with a hammer.

Photo: Gregg Snodgrass

Parking lot as playground at the refugee apartment.

The Burmese refugees are also divided by language—Chin, Kachin, and Karenni, plus other groups that haven’t arrived here yet and three Karen dialects. Many but not all speak Burmese as a second language. In the 1970s and ’80s, when the United States took in more than a million people fleeing communist regimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, larger concentrations made it easier to field interpreters, build community associations, and assemble grassroots financing for small businesses. “Now it runs the whole gamut,” says Bob Johnson, Seattle programs director for the International Rescue Committee (IRC). And the system is swamped. Providing interpreters in every tongue is all but impossible.

And so 15-year-old Helber Moo became a trilingual translator, interpreter, and life counselor of last resort. One evening one of her aunts, who’d wound up here in the complex with her five children after losing two husbands to the war, appeared at the door. Looking puzzled, she proffered a letter. It was from IRC headquarters in New York, informing Helber’s aunt that she was past due on the $2,179 she still owed from the “travel loan” the IRC had extended her family to fly to America. Her “payment history” was being reported to a credit bureau.


Welcome to America, where no lunch is free and everything goes on your credit report. The IRC says travel loans enable refugees to establish credit so they can borrow later for cars and homes. Helber handed me the letter and asked me to tell the IRC that her aunt would pay as soon as she could, but she didn’t have a job and didn’t know when she’d have the money.

Being a refugee is much harder now than it was during the 1970s and ’80s. At first, the Vietnamese and others received open-ended federal financial support till they got on their feet. The inevitable result, says the IRC’s Bob Johnson: “People tended to sit around and not get jobs.” And so a firm cutoff was instituted—first 36, then 24, and finally just eight months.

Next: Helber sets her sights on the future, one step at a time.

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Published: July 2009