Area groups ready to help foreign outcasts rebuild lives (Reproduction)
By Mary Warner
Gunaraj Luitel, a chef at an Indian restaurant in Susquehanna Twp., was a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Katmandu, Nepal, 18 years ago when thousands of refugees expelled from nearby Bhutan reached his country.
It was a huge story, one he helped cover for years afterward.
Now, he'll be part of a new chapter in that story as 15 Bhutanese households resettle in the midstate. He'll be a translator for the new charges of Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement in Harrisburg.
The Bhutanese are among the latest refugees to seek new lives in the midstate, beneficiaries of a program begun in the 1970s to help Vietnamese endangered at home by their relationship with the U.S.
The refugee program slowed as screening was reassessed after the 2001 terrorist attacks, but Vietnamese continued to resettle here, along with refugees from Africa, Cuba and the former Soviet Union.
Now the focus has turned to southeast Asia, where Bhutanese have spent almost two decades in refugee camps and people are fleeing the military regime in Myanmar, formerly Burma.
Refugees from the war in Iraq also are beginning to gain admission to the U.S.
In coming weeks, the Catholic Charities office in Harrisburg will welcome dozens of refugees who need English classes, job training, housing and help adjusting to an alien culture.
The office expects 15 cases (each an individual or a family with as many as seven children) from the camps in Nepal, seven from Vietnam, four from Myanmar, three from Cuba and one from Iraq.
Almira Rzehak, who came to the office as a Bosnian refugee 12 years ago and now directs it, said the new cases will arrive in the next two months, and it's possible they could all show up at once.
That's the scary part of my job," said Rzehak, who is looking for volunteers to help.
Refugee numbers drop
Immigrants who come to the U.S. for economic or family reasons far outnumber refugees, who face persecution at home because of who they are or what they believe and are given special help to resettle in the U.S.
Refugees are screened by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and resettled by agencies such as Catholic Charities in Harrisburg or the Lancaster office of Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service.
For the last quarter of the 20th century, the average number of refugees admitted annually to the U.S. was about 90,000, but it dropped sharply after Sept. 11, 2001, and has not fully recovered, according to Ralston Deffenbaugh, president of Baltimore-based LIRS.
In 2002, Diakon Lutheran Social Ministries and Catholic Charities closed programs that brought refugees to the Harrisburg area.
The Catholic Charities program reopened two years ago.
The U.S. has said it expects to admit about 60,000 refugees in the fiscal year that ends in September. That would be the largest number since 2001, Deffenbaugh said.
Expelled from homeland
The Bhutanese refugees resettling in the midstate are Nepalese-speaking Hindus, minorities in their country, who were expelled 18 years ago and have lived since then in camps in Nepal.
A 2007 report from Human Rights Watch describes crowded camps where refugees are forbidden from making money and remain dependent on international aid, which grew thinner as years passed.
Camp schools offer a 10th-grade education, but the report describes leaky roofs in classrooms and students discouraged by a bleak future.
There's no lighting at night, so studying is hard, the report states.
Luitel predicts the refugees will bring few employment skills.
Even as he welcomes them ("Swagat chha," in Nepalese), "my personal worries will be there," he said. "I'm just expecting some kind of problem, to try to be familiar to this land."
Rzehak said her office's intensive care for the refugees will continue for six months, and they have access to English classes and employment services for the next five years.
Jonathan Witmer, who manages those services for Catholic Charities, said the Bhutanese are likely to end up in warehouse, janitorial or general construction jobs.
"We have employers who have worked with us since the '70s," he said. "In some places, supervisors are refugees who look out for them."
Luitel, 36, is not a refugee, but he said his experience may be an example for the Bhutanese. "Sometimes people who come from the outside world have to twist their plans," he said.
He came to the U.S. for a conference five years ago and hoped to do advanced studies in journalism, but he said complications with finances and visa status closed that door.
So he became a chef and works at Aangan Indian Cuisine, founded by some of his friends.
He has become a resident of the U.S. and hopes someday to return to journalism, he said.
(Source: The Patriot-News, June 20, 2008)