Paw Wah Tamla bounces between getting her people to remember and forget.Her people are the Karen who fled oppression to come here from a land they still call Burma.
As a community leader, she wants them to remember their proud history and customs. For several weeks, she’s helped plan today’s celebration of the Karen New Year, a pageant complete with traditional costumes, food and dance.
But as a parent liaison for the North Kansas City School District, she works to get them to forget the crude ways of the refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border where they all lived before coming to Kansas City.
She tells them they can’t let toddlers go outside to play unattended in a big city. When children have to go to the bathroom at school, they can’t just run somewhere and drop their pants.
But in just hours of flight time, the Karen families went from jungle camps to American suburbia. From open sewers and no electricity to subdivisions, Starbucks and schools with media labs.
Tamla, 31, who lived half her life in one of those refugee camps, tells of a little girl who got hot in her North Kansas City district classroom.
“She took off her shirt and used it to fan herself,” she said. “Her parents didn’t understand why she can’t do that.”
•••
“Security” seemingly is one of the first English words learned by the Karen.
Men who struggle to say where they work or what they do or even how old they are will quickly cite “security” as the best thing about coming to America.
“Security is good here,” Eh Tee Ta said haltingly one morning this week. He was waiting in the snow outside a North Kansas City apartment complex waiting for seven other Karen to crowd into his white Dodge Caravan for the ride to a meat processing plant in St. Joseph.
History explains his mindset.
The Karen, one of several ethnic groups in Myanmar (formerly Burma), suffered years of oppression by Burmese kings. Things improved under the years of British colonial rule, but after World War II the Karen again found themselves at odds with the country’s leaders.
Burmese nationalists, who would run the country, had sided with the Japanese invaders during the early part of the war while the Karen fought with the British and Americans.
After the war, in 1948, Burma became an independent state, free of British influence. In 1988, a group of generals seized power and established a repressive military junta to rule the country, which they renamed Myanmar (the U.S. government, in support of opposition forces, still uses “Burma”).
The junta unleashed a reign of terror against the Karen and other ethnic groups. Persecution, forced labor, imprisonment, relocation and torture. Thousands fled across the border to refugee camps in Thailand. With nowhere to go after that, they stayed for years.
During Tamla’s 17 years in a camp, one of her brothers died; another disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. Her father also perished.
“He wasn’t that sick, but there was no modern equipment to help treat him,” she said.
A few years ago, with the help of agencies such as Jewish Vocational Services, the Karen finally were allowed to migrate as part of a resettlement program.
Nearly a thousand made their way to this area, settling mostly in Kansas City, Kan., and the Northland.
“I knew immediately we would need help — someone to communicate with these people,” said Laura Lukens, ELL (English language learners) program coordinator for the North Kansas City School District.
“They had lived in horrible conditions for years. Warehoused. Little better than animals. Some of the kids had never been to school. They didn’t speak English. I knew the learning curve would be very steep.”
As part of a child nutrition program, on Fridays the district sent snacks home for students. The Karen children’s snacks came back Monday unopened. They didn’t know what the Vienna sausages were.
In August 2008, the district hired Tamla as a link to the families. Rice is now the weekend snack.
Tamla had worked with the Karen Women Organization, a relief agency in the camps, and through that work later studied in South Africa and the Philippines.
So she spoke English and knew ways of the modern world.
And how much did her new clients know when they arrived?
She smiled. “Nothing.”
•••
On a recent cold Saturday afternoon inside a church in Kansas City, Kan., teenage girls in pink and lavender dresses and white scarves on their heads walk across a stage.
This is rehearsal for today’s New Year and Revolutionary Day celebration that will take place at J.C. Harmon High School, 2400 Steele Road. The event that runs from noon to 10 p.m. is sponsored by the Karen Community of Kansas City. The public is invited.
Tamla directs the teens, most of whom, despite being here for only a short time, are dressed like typical American youth. Sweatshirts, backward caps, baggy pants. One girl wears a purple T-shirt that says. “Only vampires will love you forever.”
Like other immigrant groups, the teens’ English is better than their parents because of school.
The skits, music and dance are important, Tamla says. The young must remember the good parts of their homeland.
But some of the skits depict the Burmese brutality against the Karen.
The boys in the group know that well. Some want to join the U.S. Army after graduation and learn to fight so they can someday return to their homeland and kill those who terrorized their people.
Eh Hitkaw, 17, a junior at North Kansas City High School, spent 10 years in a camp.
“What they did to me and my family wasn’t right,” he said this week.
•••
Tamla crawls on the floor from mother to mother.
Each of the Karen women has a stack of mail and no idea what the words mean.
Doctor bills, insurance explanations of benefits, notices from schools about shots, bus routes and parent-teacher conferences.
Tamla speaks Karen to a mother, who nods when she understands.
Tamla says she will make telephone calls for her, then moves on to the next mother. Despite the seven or eight barefoot children, the apartment is roomy because it has hardly any furniture. The Karen families work hard and live in the midst of American plenty, but they have little.
Several bulk-sized bags of rice take up a kitchen shelf. The TV is a 12-inch. About the only wall decor is a U.S. map.
Tamla, who smiles easily, has arrived early to go over the mail and also because she’s brought donated toys for the children. But her main purpose is to translate for the district’s parent educator who soon arrives to check on the progress of the children.
“This little girl should be in a booster seat,” Amy Hines tells a mother.
She then turns to Tamla. “This little girl should be in a booster seat.”
Tamla repeats the message in Karen. The mother nods.
Hines has brought the seat and shows the mothers how it is used.
One then puts a child in the seat. Backward.
“Car seats, immunizations, even birthdays — they don’t know,” Hines said later. “They don’t know you can’t let a 2-year-old out by themselves.”
Some of them also don’t know they can’t send out a young child to walk to a school that might be miles away. It’s happened. That’s how children got to school in the camps. But on dirt paths, not busy suburban streets.
Those are the things Tamla hopes to change. She lives in one of the same apartment buildings as several other Karen. Her mother and fiance live there, too. Like many Karen men, he works at the meatpacking plant in St. Joseph.
The living room wall of the apartment is covered with Karen flags, photos and other reminders of Burma.
She wants her people to remember.
Except for the parts she needs them to forget.
