BARRE — The 18-year-old sits in a leather recliner in the living room of the Queen Anne-style home.She has thick red hair, laughs easily and wears stylish blue jeans and Donald Duck slippers — a Christmas gift, she says.
On the carpeted floor beside her sits the man she calls “Dad.” His arm rests on the chair above. Her fingers, a silver band circling one, touch his arm in familiar comfort. Snow can be seen outside. A fish tank bubbles in the next room.He brags of her success in school. Math is her best subject, he says proudly. She tells of a chilly overnight camping trip atop Mount Mansfield with her school’s outing club.
It’s a heartwarming scene. But despite the easy way she calls him Dad, she is not his daughter.
To say that she is his exchange daughter is not description enough. She is not the typical student from abroad, wealthy enough to experience and enjoy a different culture. She’s here to learn, to improve herself, to get her GED.
To call her a refugee is little better. There are plenty of refugees from war-torn countries such as Bosnia in Vermont. But there are few from Myanmar — formerly named Burma, and one of the world’s most impoverished nations — and even fewer, likely none, attending high school here.
Htar Htar Yu is a Burmese refugee attending Spaulding High School and living with Chet Briggs, a state employee, and his wife, Karen Lane, a local librarian. Yu is unique because she is here and because, remarkably, she fits in, says Chris Sivret, a Barre native and 1995 Spaulding graduate.Sivret befriended Yu (whose first name is pronounced Ta Ta) while working in Thailand — where Yu and her family had fled — and spent more than a year trying to bring her to Vermont. Here, finally, for the first time in her life, she feels safe.
Yu and her family were persecuted because of their pro-democracy beliefs in a country controlled by a military regime founded on socialism, she explains. Part of the Tavoyan ethnic group, her parents had been forced out of their village by military troops, and Yu was born in the jungle of what was then Burma. The military regime renamed the country Myanmar in 1989.
In the jungle, says Yu, she and her family moved often, fleeing machine gun- armed troops.
“It was a lot of fighting,” says Yu in surprisingly clear English. “The military troops come in the jungle. If we know that, we have to run, in the night, in the day. If we didn’t know they were coming, they would just shoot at the camp and many people die.”An aunt died this way. An uncle was taken away and killed, Yu says.
The jungle camps, where Yu lived until she was 7, were made up of mostly women and children. She explains that men, including her father, fought in armies divided by ethnic groups but united against the central government.In flight in the jungle, the family built bamboo shelters and ate monkey meat to survive. Scarce food and shelter were not always enough, however. Of Yu’s eight siblings, two sisters and two brothers died of illness in the jungle.“I don’t even remember their faces,” she says casually, but then is instantly in tears.
The conversation turns light.
It took a year of trying before Yu was brought to the United States. Her trip in August was facilitated through a national exchange program, Youth for Understanding. The airfare was paid by the Norwegian Burma Council, and program fees, nearly $5,000 worth, were paid by Hedding United Methodist Church in Barre.
Lane and Briggs became Yu’s host family after receiving an e-mail from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, asking if they knew anyone who would be interested in hosting her.“I sent back (that) we would be interested,” Briggs says.
It took Yu more than 20 hours to fly from Thailand to Japan to San Francisco to Washington, D.C., to Burlington, where finally, after a bit of miscommunication and waiting at different areas in the airport, Briggs and Lane came upon “one lone person looking sort of bewildered,” Briggs says.Now, only five months later, Yu can report that she loves Barre, the high school and her new family.“One of her comments was that it was the first time she ever felt safe in her life,” Briggs says.“I am so lucky. I am so happy,” says Yu. “I’m very happy and lucky to meet my parents here.”
Yu became a refugee in 1991.
Finally driven out of the jungle when the central government made a major offensive and Yu’s father’s army lost territory, Yu walked for 25 days to a refugee camp on the Thailand border, she says. The refugees walked at night to avoid being seen. Yu says she carried a younger brother in a backpack. Three children died along the way.The refugee camps were overcrowded and in other ways miserable, but Yu found some salvation in a school.
In the camps, Yu received a fourth- through eighth-grade education in a long wooden and bamboo building with dirt floors. The open school building was hot, had no electricity and was staffed, essentially, by the students, says Yu, pulling out photographs of her school. Students did all the cooking, gardening and cutting of wood before and after class.In 1998, she left the refugee camps for Thailand and lived in the office of a pro- democracy women’s organization where her mother worked, in Sangkhalaburi, and then in Chiang Mai, where Yu attended English-language classes.
For the last year and a half, Yu was in Mae Sot, Thailand, as an intern for the Human Rights Documentation Unit of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, where Sivret worked.The coalition is the democratically elected government now in exile, explains Sivret.
Yu is hopeful that democracy will come to her homeland soon, but for now, isolated Myanmar remains unstable, and human-rights violations continue, she says.
In Thailand, the situation is not much better for Yu’s countrymen, says Sivret. More than 1.5 million Burmese live in Thailand, she explains. Most have no legal paperwork to be there and can be sent back to Myanmar at any time, where they face possible jail and torture, Sivret and Yu say.Yu says her parents recently were forced to move back to a refugee camp.The situation is unstable, but it is one to which Yu must return.
She will travel back to Myanmar or Thailand this summer when her year as an exchange student is up. But she hopes eventually to return to the United States as a college student, but then to return again to her homeland. She says she wants to help her native land and is angry at those who stay away, leaving the country in a stagnant plight.
If her country ever becomes free, she will work there as an engineer, she says. She hopes other students from Myanmar come to the United States as she has. “Education is very, very important for our people,” she says.
Youth for Understanding has already agreed to send another Burmese student to the United States, and the Norwegian Burma Council will once again pay for the flight, says Sivret, rejoicing that finally — with Yu — “somebody who actually needs a year of high school got to do it.”
Yu, meanwhile, is educating Vermonters about life in her home country.
She has spoken at the Peace and Justice Center in Burlington and to a class at Spaulding High School and is scheduled to speak at Marlboro College in southern Vermont and the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H.
“I really want to describe what’s going on in Burma, also Thailand,” Yu says.
Lane, who has slipped in between her husband and new daughter, says Yu “is just incredibly generous with her life story.”
Yu has a college fund. To help, call 476-8777 or write to 2 North St., Barre, VT 05641.Contact Robin Palmer at robin.palmer@timesargus.com or 479-0191, ext. 1171.