The Story of Dr. Thao Thi Thanh Bui

A Refugee From Vietnam

My biggest dream during early childhood was to come to the America.  I had heard from other people that the United States was the best country in the world; it had everything that anyone can ever desire.  My parents had the same dream of coming to the U.S.A. as I did, and because of this dream our family (consisting of my parents, my 6-year-old sis Tam, my 2-month old baby brother Thang, and myself who was 8 year-old at the time) escaped from Vietnam in May of 1982.  My 5 year-old sister Tuyen was too sick to come with us at that time, and thus she stayed behind with my aunt.

The trip, which took 5 days and 6 nights, was the most terrifying experience I have ever been through.  We were at the crossing between life and death.  The threat of stormy weather and encounter with Thailand pirates were hovering on everyone’s mind.  I had heard of horror stories about people getting lost at sea and resorted to eating dead corpses in order to survive.  I had also heard of heartbreaking stories of people being robbed, raped and sometimes even killed by sea pirates.  Fortunately with the blessings of God, our boat made it safely to a refugee camp in Indonesia.  After seven months, the Canadian government accepted my family for immigration into Canada.

We arrived in Cornwall, Ontario in early December.  A social worker, Theresa helped us get settled into our new life.  My family and I stayed in a motel for one month until an apartment was found for us.  My parents went back to college for job training and also to learn English.  My sister and I Started elementary school while my brother was placed in daycare.  During the first six months, my family received monthly allowances from the government to support us.

My parents started working after their courses were completed and we were now on our own financially.  Several months later after a lot of hard work and putting in extra hours for overtime, my parents managed to save enough money to buy a used car.  Even with full-time employment, my parents struggled financially to provide for the family during the first two years.  Since we actually left with only the clothes on our back, we did not have any personal asset to fall back on.  Most of our clothing was donated second-hand items given to us by the church.  All of our household needs were obtained from garage sales.  On several occasions my parents had to borrow money from their Vietnamese friends to get gas for the car.  Despite the financial hardship, our family was very happy because we knew that the tough times were temporary.  We knew that with hard work we would succeed.

I received my first straight A’s report card in grade five.  I was very proud of myself and so were my parents.  Things were much better for my family; my parents were being paid with higher salaries and thus were able to occasionally buy some nice things for us.  By the time that I was in high school, we had moved into a beautiful new home, which my parents bought.  My younger sister Tuyen had also came to Canada to join the family.

As the years passed, both my sisters and I continued to do very well in school.  I graduated from high school at the top of my class.  I was offered scholarships by every university that I applied to but decided to attend McGill University in Montreal because of its first-class education.  After completing my Bachelor of Science I left for New York to pursue a doctorate degree in Chiropractic.  I was attracted to Chiropractic because of its holistic principles.  Before I came to America, I had never taken any medication in my life.  I remember when I was sick in Vietnam; I was given eastern herbs and received various natural therapies to take care of my ailments.  I had always been amazed by the capacity and complexity of the human body.  Chiropractic was the perfect career endeavor for me since it allows me to practice the art of healing with the utmost respect for the body, enhancing the in born healing potential rather than hindering it. 

I graduated from New York Chiropractic Collage in July of 2000.  The tears of joy in my parents’ eyes summed up the struggle our family went through to get to where we are today.  Words cannot express the love, respect and gratitude I feel toward my parents.  They never once though about their needs and wants.  Everything they did was always in the best interest for their children.  Presently I am working as an associate doctor at CAPITAL CHIROPRACTIC CENTER in Harrisburg.  I am deeply thankful for the the blessings I have received and continue to receive in my life.

The World of Children At A Glance

(United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees – Report 2001)

• There are approximately 50 million uprooted people around the world – refugees who have sought safety in another country, and people displaced within their own country.  Around half of this displaced population are children.

• The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees cares for 22.3 million of these people.  An estimated 10 million are children under the age of 18.

• The majority of people flee their homes because of war.  It is estimated that more than two million children were killed in conflict in the last decade.  Another six million are believed to have been wounded and one million orphaned.

• In recent decades the proportion of war victims who are civilians rather than combatants has leaped from five percent to more than 90 percent.

• Children in 87 countries live among 60 million land mines.  As many as 10,000 per year continue to become victims of mines.

• More than 300,000 youths and girls currently are serving as child soldiers around the world.  Many are less than 10 years old.  Many girls soldiers are forced into different forms of sexual slavery.

• The 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child is the most important legal framework for the protection of children.  The Convention has the highest number of state parties of any human rights treaty, being ratified by all countries except the United States and Somalia.

• Last year, the U.N. General Assembly approved two Optional Protocols to the Convention, one on the sale of children and child pornography and another establishing 18 as the minimum age for participation of children in hostilities.

• UNHCR has recognized the special needs of refugee children and youngsters uprooted in their own countries.  In the last few years, the agency has introduced many new programs, expanded others and attempted to incorporate all of them into its operations.

• Children, whether accompanied by parents or on their own, account for as many as half of all asylum seekers in the industrialized world.  In 1996, Canada became the first country with a refugee determination system to issue specific guidelines on children seeking asylum.

• At any one time there may be up to 100,000 separated children in western Europe alone.  As many as 20,000 separated children lodge asylum applications every year in Europe, North America and Oceania.

• Between 1994 and 1999, the U.N. requested $13.5 billion in emergency relief funding, much of it for children.  It received less than $9 billion.

• The amount of assistance varied dramatically be region.  Donors provided the equivalent of 59 U.S. cents per person per day for 3.5 million people in Kosovo an Southeastern Europe in 1999, compared with 13 cents per person per day for 12 million African victims.

• AIDS has killed more than 3.8 million children and orphaned another 13 million.  In the last five years HIV/AIDS has become the greatest threat to children, especially in countries ravaged by war.  In the worst affected countries, it is estimated that as many as half of today’s 15-year-olds will die from the disease.

• In 1998 donor countries allocated $300 million to combat AIDS, though an estimated $3 billion was needed.

• More than 67,000 children were reunited with their families in Africa’s Great Lakes region between 1994-2000, thanks to a global tracing program organized by humanitarian organizations.

• An estimated 45,000 households in Rwanda today are headed by children, 90 percent of them girls.

• School buildings, like teachers and children, have become deliberate targets in war.  During the Mozambique conflict in the 19980s-90s, for instance, 45 percent of schools were destroyed.

• If developed countries met an agreed aid target of 0.7 percent of their gross national product, an extra $100 billion would be available to help the world’s poorest nations.

• An estimated 1.2 billion people worldwide survive on less an $1 per day.  Half of them are children.

• Ten million children under the age of five die each year, the majority from preventable diseases and malnutrition.

• Around 40 million children each year are not registered at birth, depriving them of a nationality and a legal name.

A Refugee From Cambodia – Sokubvery Var

My mother, father and I were sponsored through Tressler Lutheran Immigration Services in 1982 to come to live in the U.S.  We fled our homeland, Cambodia in 1979, fleeing the atrocities and devastations that occurred during the Khmer Rouge Regime.  I was the youngest of four children in my family and was very fortunate enough to have survived our civil war.  My two siblings, my eldest sister and my brother, had died of starvation and my other sister, Socheatea, was separated from us amidst the chaos when the Vietnamese Communist gained control of our country in 1979.  After staying at a refugee camp in Thailand for a year and resettling to the Philippines for another year, we were on our way to the land of “great opportunity and freedom.”  We arrived at Harrisburg International Airport in early 1982.  Our Cambodian friend, Mr. Prum Horn, had helped us find American sponsors, Mr. and Mrs. Henry who lived in Lebanon.  They played a very important role in helping us to adjust to the American culture over here.  We are grateful for everything they have helped us with until this day.

At the age of eight, I was very small and looked more like five or six year old.  Knowing very little English, I was temporarily placed into the second grade class at Cornwall Elementary School, a Lebanon suburban school.  I can still remember the long stares and looks I would get from the other children.  I didn’t know if I looked cute or weird to them.  Although I was able to learn to speak English fairly quickly, I still had to remain in ESL classes until the fourth grade.  There were maybe two or three Cambodians at my school, but they were much older and we didn’t really see each other very often.  Our family then moved to our own apartment in the city and I was then transferred to one of the Lebanon City schools.  There I met a couple of Cambodian children around my age and developed close friendships with them.  But soon after, they moved to California and some other states and I was again left alone, isolated and felt empty inside.  I later developed friendships with some American children, but it was not the same because I was still very different from these children.  They sometimes laughed at the way I talk and the foods that I eat because most Cambodian foods leave strong odors behind.  I could not really be myself, but had to pretend to be what others wanted me to be.  By the sixth grade I was becoming more and more Americanized both through television and school  I had no siblings to talk to, so I just kept to myself and the few friends that I had.  I began to do real well in school and I would win the “spelling bees” a lot.  I guess I wanted to be like, “the girl who spelled freedom,” a movie made about a Cambodian girl who won the national spelling bee competition.  But as I continued to do well in school, I would hear other schildren tease and taunt me more and more.  Mr. Hower, one of my sixth grade teachers would tell the other children about the essays I had written about my journey to America and the hardships I had to endure just to get to the states.  I think some children might have gotten a little jealous and thought I should return to Cambodia.  I can vividly picture a mean girl wanting to fight me after school when I told her to “shut up!” after she had say, “go back to your own country.”  During my teenage years was when I felt the most left out.  I had no family besides my parents and  really no other role models beside my sponsors and my parents.  There were only a few Cambodian families who we knew in Lebanon and rarely did we get a chance to see them because my parents were always working.  When I went to school I became more and more like an American kid, but when I came home I had to still be Cambodian.  Anger and tension grew within me because I felt that my parents did not understand all that I am going through.  In junior high school, I kept even more to myself and occasionally hung out with my old friends.  I guess making new friends would only mean being rejected by them.  I didn’t want to prove myself to anyone.  It was during those years, thought, that I learned to accept myself a little more and be just glad that I was still alive and well.  High school was somewhat a repeat of junior high; I kept to myself, saying little to not make myself stand out too much.  Although I was not the best student in the world, I graduated high school with honors and a small scholarship.  I later entered the military to gain more independence from my parents.  I was in the military that I learned that there was a whole new world out there waiting for me and that I may be able to offer it as well.  I began to have a more optimistic perspective of life and became more interested in helping others with the difficulties and challenges that they face.  At the same time, it helped heal some of my own wounds and I was much happier.  Later, I entered college and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Social Work.

I understand what it feels like to grow up here in the states with a lack of support from family and friends and few people who can be of real comfort to you.  As a result of my childhood experiences I have learned to become more and more understanding of those refugee children who experience painful problems and difficulties in their lives.  I would like to be able to help those refugee children and parents communicate more effectively with one another and possibly alleviate some of their anger/pain.  It would tremendously heal my own wounds and at the same time I would gain a great sense of joy and happiness when I am able to reach out and help others.

A major concern that refugee children and youth have is with family tension.  There is a configuration of forces contributing to family tension in refugee families.  Many refugee and immigrant groups have experienced widespread fatigue and depression as a result of relentless economic pressures and cultural alienation.  In turn, their abilities to raise children in a foreign country are somewhat weakened.  They often lack the failing to attend school, sunning away from home, engaging in sexual activity, using drugs, and involvement in criminal activities.  There are three factors that contribute to intergenerational tension.  First, refugee parents normally feel that they know almost everything about the world and that their children should listen to them no matter what.  Secondly, refugee parents have traditional standards for their children and for their behaviors, which are radically different than those of the American culture.  And finally, there is a lack of information on the part of the refugee parents concerning the American culture and society.  I strongly feel that both the schools and the private sector could work together to possible alleviate some of the family tension that arise.

In conclusion, refugee children and youth experience hardships not only in school but also at home.  Everyone working together to help resolve some of these issues would only be the right step for us to move forward.

The Lost Boys of Sudan

Contributed by: Panos Moumtzis

Twenty-one-year-old Kuol Jok and his four Sudanese friends had hardly touched down from a flight halfway across the world before they were off to explore the unfamiliar sights and sounds of their newly adopted country – the trim sunburn homes, bulging supermarkets, towering office blocks, electrical stairs’ and highways jammed with more cars than they had seen in their entire lifetimes.

A more familiar and worrying sight greeted them shortly after their return to their temporary accommodations – strangers brandishing weapons.  A suspicious neighbor had spotted the youths struggling to open an unfamiliar front door lock and called the police in the city of Richmond, Virginia.  As the officers milled around on the porch, the Sudanese  youths simply sat on the floor and waited for the situation to resolve itself.  The misunderstanding eventually was resolved.

The story of Kuol Jok and his extraordinary odyssey began many years earlier in 1987 on the savage savannah of southern Sudan.  The area had been wracked by years of fighting between government forces and various guerrilla groups, forcing untold numbers of civilians to abandon their homes.  After wandering across the wastes if the Horn of Africa, some eventually banded together and collectively reached Kenya where they became known as “The Lost Boys of Sudan” as they languished for years in refugee camps. 

In 2000, the United States agreed to resettle as many as 3,600 of the youths who parents were dead or missing.  They are being flown in groups throughout this year to 10 states across America in the largest resettlement of minors undertaken by Washington since the end of the Vietnam War. 

It has been a dangerous and bewildering experience for youngsters who for much of their lives appeared doomed to be, at best, permanent refugees.  But unlike many other displaced children around the world, these boys can now look toward a future with hope and almost unlimited opportunity.

Each “lost boy” can tell a tale similar to that of Kuol Jok.  His mother was killed during an attach on their village in the Bor area of southern Sudan.  His eldest brother was murdered in an attach a year earlier.  As he fled his village and began an extraordinary exodus he was seven years old. 

He walked for several weeks eating leaves and sometimes-even dirt to survive.  When the group he was traveling with had to cross a river, he said many children who could not swim were drowned.  He vividly remembers tiny hands reaching above the swirling waters before they were swept away.

Eventually he reached temporary safety in Ethiopia, but when civil war engulfed that country the refugees were forced to return to Sudan.  Their wanderings continued.  At one point Kuol was reunited with his younger brother, Elijah.  “He told me our father and younger sister had died and our village had been totally destroyed,” Kuol recalls.  “I was devastated.  I felt angry and hopeless, but I was happy I had found my brother.”  The two eventually joined 12,000 other youths who had been spared from being forcibly recruited into Sudan People’s Liberation Army because of their age in coordinated exodus to Kenya.  They reached Kakuma in Kenya, which grew into the largest camp for unaccompanied minors in the world.  By the time their trek ended, many of the boys had walked 2,000 kilometers, or the equivalent of hiking from Paris to Rome.  Top