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

Today’s refugees are expected to learn English and find jobs in a grueling recession, while laid-off natives scramble for the menial jobs that traditionally went to immigrants. Helber’s father paints fishing boats at a Seattle boatyard, when work’s available there. Her mother, though she’s learned more English than her husband, is still seeking work. Even the educated fall through the cracks: Helber’s Burundian neighbor Tatu Marie-José, a single mother of three, is fluent in English as well as French and Kirundi. In Tanzania she earned a degree in journalism and worked as a teacher until she left for America, where she arrived on July 4, 2007. She’s searched for work since then, finding only about 12 hours a week at one school. The day she told me her story, the Seattle School District announced it was laying off 174 employees. “Many of my students [from Tanzania] are now scattered around this country,” she says. “They call me and can’t believe I’m not working. It is almost easier for the people without education. They’re used to farming and labor. They will try anything.”

Helber doesn’t yet have to job hunt for herself. But as an informal interpreter and community liaison, she must negotiate all the messy business of adult life. One April weekend Sally Webb asked Helber to take five newly arrived refugees to meet the P-Patch director at their patch. Helber called after office hours to confirm the rendezvous. The next day brought cold driving rain. Unable to bicycle in the rain, she and her charges trudged the five soggy miles to the patch. The director, who hadn’t heard Helber’s message, never showed.


Through all the fumbles and lessons learned, Helber keeps her eyes on the future. “I want to be a doctor,” she announced one day. “If I can’t do that I will become a nurse, and I will go back to my country and help my people.” Is that country Burma, where she’s never lived? “Of course!” Silly question.

Still, distractions may beckon. “How much does a doctor make?” she asked later.

The road home and the road to riches are paved with homework. At first Helber found the schoolwork in immigrant-entry classes easy, “like beginning school back home.” Now, for someone still working on her English, regular classes are more challenging. But she deftly turned our interviews into homework sessions. I asked her questions, she asked me questions.

After we worked through one binomial equation, she was off and running with the rest. But she puzzled more over her reading assignment: a brief scholastic biography of Anne Frank. She tried to explain the contents to her parents, and an animated conversation ensued, the Karen words occasionally punctuated by “Jew” and “Nazi.” Her parents nodded in sympathy but did not seem particularly surprised at this horror. They already knew some people did horrible things to other peoples.

Helber described more of the Karens’ own centuries-long trail of tears. “The Burmese took away our language,” she said, “but the missionaries kept it for us.” The Baptists built schools and devised a Karen alphabet based on the sumptuous round Burmese characters. And so the Karens could record their history—very much a living history for this 16-year-old girl. “But when Karen people speak their language, the Burmese beat them, and when they see them reading they cut off their hands.”

She recounted how the Burmese enslaved the Karens and made them dig a lake in the capital with their bare hands—picturesque Inya Lake, where troops massacred demonstrators in 1988 and which an overwrought American recently swam across seeking to talk to the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (which gave the regime a pretext to prosecute and imprison her in preparation for elections next year). And Helber recalled what one Burmese military official said several years ago: That in 50 years the only place anyone would see a Karen would be in the museum, behind a glass case.

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Published: July 2009