Acclimating Refugees : The Lesson at This School Is Real Life

In a mountain-top classroom here last week, two dozen Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees watched in awe for nearly 40 minutes as Michael Jackson jumped around on a TV screen selling Pepsi and Ray Charles swayed at his piano pitching Coke and an anonymous slinky blonde model draped in diamonds tried to convince them that a Pontiac was really the only car to own.

After each commercial, the teacher paused and asked the refugees, “OK. So how did that make you feel?”

In another classroom nearby, an instructor was bombarding another group of dumbstruck Indochinese “boat people” with a litany of unprintable anti-Asian racial slurs common in many American factories. Then, the teacher screened a video showing inner-city Philadelphia blacks bad-rapping “those damned gooks coming in here and stealing our jobs.”

And, in yet another room of this most unusual school, a teacher spent hour after hour trying to explain the evils of the American welfare system.

“You want to go to the U.S., OK, but for what?” the teacher asked in one typical refrain.

“Freedom. We want to be free,” came the predictable answer from the refugee students, many of whom have lived with barbed wire and broken promises for too many years.

“Well,” the teacher concluded, “you are not going to be very free, even in America, if you become part of this welfare system.”

From welfare to toilet paper, pay phones to street crime, and supermarkets to racism, this innovative U.S.-run school in a Philippine jungle three hours west of Manila is teaching a culture. Its purpose: to prepare battered future Americans for life in a strange new world.

Population of 13,000

A virtual city--the population last week topped 13,000, not including the 1,200 teachers and staff--it is called the Philippine Refugee Processing Center. But the 700 acres of concrete school buildings and plywood residential neighborhoods overlooking the South China Sea may better be described as one of the world’s largest, most complex halfway houses.

Its residents are the Indochinese refugees who have won--the lucky ones who have survived a mind-numbing and seemingly endless obstacle course of bureaucracy and institutionalization. For almost all of them, the center is the last staging point at the end of a brutal odyssey through prisons, re-education camps, treacherous seas full of pirates, thieves and rapists and, finally, a dehumanizing network of human holding tanks called refugee camps.

It is the last stop before America, the new and unknown world of promise that has long been a distant dream or a tattered photograph for people who have survived on blind hope.

This year, 28,000 Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees bound for Los Angeles, New York, Houston and other American cities will spend their final six months here.

And it is here that the U.S. government has decided to try to prepare them for one of the greatest culture shocks imaginable.

“This is a sort of way-station between Saigon and Skokie, Illinois, if you will,” said Don Ronk, who has been a teacher, social worker and a moving force behind the camp’s evolving curriculum since 1983.

“We see it as our job to prepare them for the fact that they’re not going to this place paved with gold, that all of their problems did not end when they got out of Vietnam and will not end even when they reach the U.S.

“They need to think about that here and face some of these realities. And, at the same time, we try to use this time to teach them the basics of survival--attitudes they will need to face new things and cope with them.”

It was not always that way.

Opened in 1980

The processing and training center here did not even open until 1980, nearly five years after the exodus of boat people began when Saigon fell.

“At first, the center was really just a regulatory valve to even the flow of all these people,” said Steve Cook, the director of the International Catholic Migration Commission, which is the largest of a web of agencies that run the Morong center. Cook’s is also the agency that administers the center’s English education and American acculturation program.

When it opened, the center was little more than a holding tank where refugees who had been approved for migration to America by the U.S. government spent their final months awaiting last-minute paper work and airline flights.

“But it quickly became apparent that, as long as we were going to have these folks for four to six months, why not give them some skills that would help them cope better than the first wave of refugees,” added Cook, who has been the program’s director for more than three years.

‘Mom-and-Pop Operation’

“We started the orientation program in 1981 with 10 teachers, a real mom-and-pop operation. Now, there are 650 teachers and a total staff of 1,200.”

Indeed, the annual budget of this little-known camp has now grown to about $10 million, all of it provided by American taxpayers. But Cook pointed out that the program has become so sophisticated and its training so extensive that it now costs the commission 89 cents per hour to teach each refugee. And he added that the center’s budget this year was cut 20% from the 1987 allocation in Washington’s across-the-board budget cuts.

What the refugees get for that $10 million a year is also a vast improvement over the camp’s initial efforts. Instructors and the refugees themselves said the tens of thousands of Indochinese boat people who continue to enter the United States each year are far better prepared to cope than the relatives and friends who went before them.

Just Keep Trying

“No one from this kind of background is going to be totally prepared for America after just six months of anything. We just keep trying and continually looking for new and better ways to do it,” said social worker Ronk, who was instrumental in preparing a new approach to acclimating the refugees a few years ago.

“The biggest single realization we had was recognizing the information-overload factor. We realized that there are more important things to do than force-feed massive amounts of information about the United States, which is what we started out doing.

“A person simply cannot retain things like how much a bus costs in Los Angeles and a map of the New York City subway system.”

Instead, teachers now focus on the refugees’ attitudes and basic survival skills. In addition to the several hours a day that the refugees spend in English-language classes, which remain the largest part of the camp’s six-month program, instructors spend several hours each day teaching them how to apply for jobs, how to cope with crime and racism, how to deal with the stress of culture shock and, in general, how to ask questions.

Job Interview Training

“We don’t simply teach them how to fill out a job-application form, we also try to teach them how to behave during a job interview,” said Paulette Coburn, head of the center’s cultural- and work-orientation programs.

In a typical classroom, for example, an instructor will simulate a job interview.

“Why are you looking down?” an instructor demanded of one refugee “applicant” in such a simulation after asking why she should get the job over so many other applicants. “I know it’s only your shyness and lack of confidence, but an employer will take that as an indication you don’t really care about the job.”

Of top priority in the classes, Coburn said, is a constant effort to keep the refugees from going on welfare once they arrive in the United States. And it is an effort that, almost universally, the camp’s frustrated instructors complain is virtually negated by liberal welfare systems in America--particularly that of California, where nearly half of the 230,000 refugees who have come through the camp have ended up.

California Attraction

The attraction of California, the camp’s officials say, is in part the state’s welfare laws.

“Our teachers can talk until they’re blue in the face about the evils of welfare, but when that family of nine gets to Los Angeles and finds out they can make a lot more money on welfare than in entry-level jobs, we just can’t go up against that,” director Cook said.

Coburn, who spent six years running a U.S. government resettlement program in Tennessee, agreed.

“We didn’t have a problem with refugees going onto welfare in Tennessee, because you simply cannot survive on welfare there,” she said. “But then these refugees would talk to their friends in California, who’d tell them just how much they could make out there by not working, and they’d pack up and move to California.

“It is terribly frustrating for us here. When a state makes welfare more attractive than working, what can you do on this end?”

As the camp’s social worker, Ronk has been trying to go a step further. He has tried to understand how Indochinese, whose cultures venerate both dignity and hard work and who themselves say before they leave for America that they want only to work, could demean themselves by accepting welfare.

“You must understand that we are talking about people who have been trapped in a system for years,” said Ronk, who spends his days inside the refugees’ tiny dormitories listening to their problems.

“Most of them are what the world calls boat people, and from the moment they get picked up by the Thai police, they lose complete control of their lives. From that moment on, they’re forced to live by someone else’s rules. Something is destroyed in that process--the cultural values that may have prevailed before.”

Still, on this end at least, it appears that the camp’s new thrust on the welfare issue is working.

Curious 19-Year-Old

Meeting a reporter outside his family’s dormitory room, one 19-year-old Cambodian refugee whose family of nine has been at the camp for 11 months because of technical delays in resettlement, was obsessed with asking questions about work in Los Angeles.

Son Thai’s uncle had migrated to Bell Gardens, Calif., six months ago and written letters about the work situation, but, like most refugees who have been lied to again and again during their long trek toward freedom, Thai wanted another opinion.

“It is a very big city, this Los Angeles, but is it easy to get a job there?” he asked. He explained that his family was approved for resettlement with his uncle in Los Angeles mainly because his father was a sergeant in the South Vietnamese army before the fall of Saigon, one of the few remaining categories under which refugees are approved for U.S. immigration.

“What kind of work do you want to do?” he was asked.

“Anything--I will do anything,” the young man answered.

Asked what his dream job would be, he smiled nervously and answered, “A janitor. If I can get it. Maybe after that, if I get lucky maybe, I could be a welder.”

Tri Thien Tran, also 19, had similar concerns. He is due to leave for Long Beach any day.

He is the son of a South Vietnamese army colonel who was recently released after 10 years in a re-education camp in northern Vietnam. The young man was just 15 when he first tried to flee. He was captured and imprisoned for more than a month. Tran then completed high school in Saigon, but, as the son of a ranking officer in the former South Vietnamese army, was not allowed to attend college under current Vietnamese law.

So he paid an ounce in pure gold to join 27 others in a rickety boat a year ago. He reached his first goal, Thailand, but only after losing everything else he owned to Thai pirates who waylaid the boat. In Thailand, he spent six more months in a refugee camp.

Three Brothers Fled

Three of his elder brothers had fled separately several years ago, settled in Long Beach and agreed to sponsor Tran, who was then sent here for final processing.

Asked how he felt now that he was about to reach America, the young man said flatly, “Optimistic, but sometimes also pessimistic--both.

“Pessimistic, because I am somewhat afraid of violent crime, of racial conflict and of job discrimination. I am worried about finding a job. I want to work. And I have read a book on culture shock. I am somewhat nervous about how I will react; how the Americans will see me.”

“And the source of the optimism?” Tran was asked.

“Why?” he repeated, smiling broadly. “Why, the many opportunities, of course.”

Clearly, the positive side of living in the United States also is stressed by the camp’s instructors, who are all Filipinos trained intensively in American culture both by their upbringing in the former colony and by the 100 or so American supervisors who oversee the classroom instruction.

In one classroom for high school-aged refugees last week, for example, an English-language teacher was holding up words and asking the students to repeat after her.

“We are free to pray, or to go to any church or temple. If you don’t want to pray, it’s OK,” the teacher read, with the students repeating in unison.

“We call this freedom of religion.

“We are free to talk to people about anything. We call this freedom of speech.”

And, despite the array of cultural problems and the enormous weight of the psychological baggage that remains from their painful exodus, the refugees at the Morong center show many signs of a positive spirit--the spirit that has kept them alive.

A sign written by a teen-age refugee hangs on the wall of one of the camp’s hundreds of classrooms.

“I am alive,” it declares. “I thrill to (the) wonder of being alive, eager to do more and to learn more and to be more.

“For the life within me is the most precious gift of all.”