Despite the Horrors of Home, Longing Never Ends for Many Refugees

Most refugees can tell a harrowing tale of how they came to America, and Pahoua Yang is no exception. She was just a baby, strapped to her mother’s back, when her family fled war-scarred Laos in 1975, stealing through the jungle and rafting across the Mekong River into Thailand.

Yang remembers none of those defining moments of her life. What she recalls is being touched by an angel.

Her family, Hmong villagers from the highlands of Laos, resettled in Gahanna, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. They spoke no English and knew nobody, but a woman named Louise Blankenship took them under her wing.

“My family still remembers her as an angel,” says Yang, now 25 and a senior at the University of Minnesota. “It was Louise, not my mom, who went with me on my first day of kindergarten. She taught my mom about grocery shopping and how to write a check. It’s amazing what she did for us.”

Since 1975, more than 2 million refugees have settled in the United States, the State Department says.

Their changing faces reflect the world’s trouble spots. More than a million came from Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. The crumbling of the Soviet Union brought more than 350,000 refugees. In recent years, refugees have arrived by the tens of thousands from Somalia, Ethiopia and Iraq.

And now there may be more from Kosovo.

The U.S. government has offered to grant temporary asylum to 20,000 ethnic Albanians forced out of Yugoslavia by Slobodan Milosevic’s forces. Whether the plan will go forward is uncertain, government officials say, because conditions for refugees have become more stable in camps in Macedonia and Albania and because many expressed reluctance to go so far away from their homes.

If Kosovo refugees do make the trip, history suggests some will eventually become permanent refugees in the United States. What would they face here? History provides a guide for that too.

Listen to America’s adopted refugees, whether from Laos, Kurdistan, Cuba or Bosnia, and a common thread emerges. Even among those who have adapted to life in the United States--and most do--there is a lingering sense of loss of what they left behind.

Despite the U.S. reputation as an immigration magnet, most refugees “don’t want to come to America,” says Karen Johnson Elshazly, director of international programs for the Minneapolis-based American Refugee Committee. “All they want is to go home.”

*

In 1991, Mithat and Senada Sadovic were corporate lawyers in Mostar, Bosnia’s second-largest city. They lived in a plush apartment with a big piano. They took their three children on monthlong seashore vacations.

“We were so happy,” Senada said. “We thought we would never move anywhere.”

But they were Muslims, so they fell into the maw of civil war as Serbians sought control of the region.

Senada and the children went to a refugee camp. In May 1993, Mithat was forced into a concentration camp, where soldiers one night roused him and took him outside. A soldier placed a gun in Mithat’s mouth and taunted: “We will play a little. We will slaughter a little.” Then they let him go back inside.

Three months later, the family came to America. They settled in Utica, N.Y., drawn there by the presence of other Bosnians and help offered by the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees.

After a difficult year trying to learn a new language and legal system, Senada gave up hope of being a paralegal and now is training to become an immigration counselor.

Mithat, a county planner on a public bus project, often feels stifled by his imprecise English. “I think my education is higher than my language can express,” he says.

They have done well, considering they started with nothing. Together they make between $40,000 and $60,000 a year, and they bought a $60,000 house with a swimming pool.

Their best friends are other refugees, and they get together weekly with other Bosnians. Their 16-year-old daughter, Emina, has thrived in school; her two younger brothers have had trouble with schoolwork from the beginning and still haven’t caught up.

Mithat can discuss the war calmly, but his wife grows more emotional.

“My husband was lucky to survive,” she says. “Even though they didn’t kill him, I can’t forget that.”

*

Nancy Lledes clambered aboard a makeshift raft in 1994, joining an exodus of Cubans aiming for Florida.

Her raft soon began sinking, so she and her fellow travelers climbed onto a passing boat to save themselves. A Coast Guard ship eventually picked them up and took them to Guantanamo.

With more than 20,000 refugees at the military camp, it took Lledes a month to track down her husband, Federico Falcon, who had arrived a month earlier.

The U.S. government was reluctant to accept the Cubans as refugees, saying most appeared to be seeking a better life rather than fleeing persecution. But after several months, amid complaints that the Guantanamo encampment had become less like a humanitarian gesture and more like punishment, the doors were opened. Most of the refugees eventually were allowed into the United States.

Lledes and her husband flew to Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami on Dec. 16, 1994. Like many of the Cubans, they had relatives waiting.

“Everyone helped us a lot,” Lledes said. Her husband found a job for a company that sells aviation equipment.

Now 37, Lledes works at the Human Rights Institute at St. Thomas University in suburban Miami, helping immigrants apply to become legal U.S. residents.

She and her husband have two cars. They bought a home on more than an acre with avocado, coconut and mango trees.

“We had to begin from zero,” she said. “I tell you this is the best country in the world, because from zero you can have whatever you want. There is no limit.”

*

Just as soon as Saddam Hussein is out of power, 35-year-old Rebwar is going back to Kurdistan in northern Iraq. Until then, he is afraid to give his last name for publication even though he is thousands of miles away in America.

“I don’t want trouble,” he says.

He and his wife arrived in the United States two years ago, fleeing Iraqi soldiers in Kurdistan, where Rebwar had helped United Nations personnel build irrigation systems.

Now they live with their two young children near Boulder, Colo., where Rebwar works as a mechanic. He can earn up to $3,000 a month, compared to about $250 back in Kurdistan. But he felt richer there, where life’s necessities are far cheaper.

“I had an excellent life there: a car and a house and a shop,” he says. “Here, I make more money, but I have to pay more for everything.”

He doesn’t want to appear ungrateful. “Many things are nice here,” he says. “And the best thing is, we’re safe.”

But Rebwar has faith that Saddam Hussein will be forced from power. And then, he says, “I don’t stay one more day here.”

Associated Press writers Ian James in Miami and Jennifer Jordan in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this report.