Photo by Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Ba Doh Htoo and his wife, Eh Eh, live at Valley View Village Apartments. They met at a refugee camp in Thailand and have lived in Roanoke for a month.

Video

• See video from an interview with Burmese immigrants.

Ba Doh Htoo sat in a doctor's office in Roanoke this week, waiting for his wife to return from her checkup. He picked out words he knew from a New York Times article about recent raids in Myanmar:

Buddhist monasteries raided. Monks killed. Arrests, tear gas, military junta, shooting into crowds.

Ba Doh Htoo (pronounced Ba-DO-too) came to Roanoke a month ago from Myanmar via a Thai refugee camp. He speaks some English, not a lot.

But the descriptions of brutality and violence in the newspaper were all too familiar. The 40-year-old fled his village in 1988 under the same conditions that are fueling current violence in Myanmar -- the southeast Asian nation formerly called Burma, a name exiles and pro-democracy activists still prefer. The 1988 peaceful uprising was crushed by the military, which shot into crowds and killed 3,000 Burmese -- but narrowly missed Ba Doh Htoo.

In August, Buddhist monks began a series of peaceful demonstrations against economic hardships and political repression. The protests angered the ruling military junta, which began a violent crackdown earlier this week.

While Ba Doh Htoo, his wife and stepchildren are happy to be removed from the brutality, they are scared for the friends they left behind.

Daily, they watch the news on an old television donated by Roanoke's Refugee and Immigration Services. From their new home at Valley View Village Apartments, they phone Burmese friends exiled in Australia.

"We were demonstrating because there's nothing to eat, no work, and you couldn't even get basic foods to eat," Ba Doh Htoo said through Cloverdale-based interpreter Bea Sellinger, who fled Burma as a teenager in 1971.

Now, according to Ba Doh Htoo and other recent Burmese-refugee arrivals in Roanoke, conditions are worse than ever.

"You are so fearful, you can't leave the house," Ba Doh Htoo added. "Even if you are wearing clean clothes, the soldiers will steal them right from your back."

Tearful translations

Sellinger winces as she translates the family's story. She has been doing a lot of that lately as she translates for and generally assists 28 Burmese refugees who have landed in Roanoke in recent weeks.

A suburban homemaker whose husband works for Norfolk Southern, Sellinger was a child in 1962 when the Southeast Asian nation first imposed iron-fisted military rule, then called the Burmese Way to Socialism.

Her father's photography store was immediately taken over by the government. Food and freedoms became scarce, and it took the family nine years to get permission to emigrate to Pennsylvania.

Though Sellinger dreamed of becoming a missionary, she went into science instead, working as a cell geneticist in a Philadelphia hospital and then Temple University before her husband was transferred to Roanoke in 1999.

There were a handful of Burmese living in Roanoke, but Sellinger didn't know about them until recently, when refugee office director Barbara Smith asked her to help greet the new arrivals at the airport. She has been taking them to doctor's appointments and helping them settle into life ever since.

The experience has been as unsettling as it has rewarding, she said. Last week, while taking a 19-year-old Burmese man to a doctor's appointment, the doctor became disturbed during the physical examination, asking Sellinger to ask him what happened to his genitals.

Sellinger burst into tears as she listened and then translated that the young man had been imprisoned and mutilated by soldiers. Other recent arrivals have shared similar trauma they have witnessed or experienced, much of which has not been reported in the media, she said. The refugees told her that some of their friends were injected with who-knows-what upon their release from prison -- only to die a slow, painful death two months later.

A Harvard study on refugee trauma reported that 89 percent of Burmese dissidents have suffered interrogation, 78 percent imprisonment and 38 percent torture.

Many, including Ba Doh Htoo's wife's first husband, were forced to labor without payment. "They made my [first] husband be a porter," recalled his wife, whose full name is Eh Eh. "He had to carry very, very heavy rice sacks and do whatever the soldiers asked."

When he contracted malaria, he was given neither medical treatment nor relief from work, and he died. She found herself a widow with three children, ages 11, 13 and 15. She knew they had to flee their village to escape -- before the soldiers had a chance to rape her daughters.

They made their way to a refugee camp in Thailand, where she met Ba Doh Htoo. At the camp for three years, they waited and they prayed.

Ironic timing

It's happenstance that Roanoke and other resettlement cities across the country are receiving Burmese refugees at the same time violence has reignited in the country, Smith said. Most had been waiting in Thailand or Malaysia for approval to immigrate for years.

Although President Bush has pressured Myanmar's chief international patron, China, to use its influence to facilitate a peaceful transition to democracy, earlier this week China blocked efforts by the United States and European countries to have the United Nations Security Council condemn the violence.

On Friday, Myanmar state television reported that nine people had been killed and dozens more wounded, though exile groups said the numbers are likely much higher.

"I would imagine that what's happening now could accelerate the flow" of getting other waiting refugees into the United States, Smith said. She anticipates about 100 Burmese living in Roanoke by the end of the year.

Many are from different ethnic tribes within the country and don't speak each other's dialects -- though most from the cities speak Burmese. Though 80 percent of the country is Buddhist, most of those arriving in Roanoke are Christian.

Smith picked a young single man up at the airport on a recent night and took him to his new home. "Just as I was getting ready to knock on the door, it swung open, and there behind the door were 12 Burmese faces there to welcome him to Roanoke," Smith said. "They're getting together every night" to visit and watch international news reports.

Many have just received work permits and Social Security cards and are eager to find jobs.

Most recent arrivals have already committed Bea Sellinger's cellphone number to memory. The woman who once dreamed of being a missionary is finally seeing her wish come true.

"In America, I've been able to be what I wanted to be, and we have all these extra things we don't even need," Sellinger said. "But you never forget what the people back at home have been going through."

Helping the refugees from her homeland "is like. ... " Sellinger searches for the right word.

"It's like, 'Oh my goodness.' There is such great importance in it."