The Garden City Telegram

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Seeking a better life

Published 7/3/2010 in Local News

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of stories about the area's refugee populations and the resettlement resources available to them.

Last Saturday's story detailed the integration efforts of the region's Somali refugees. Today's story focuses on the struggles of one local Burmese family and the endeavors of the Coalition of Ethnic Minority Leaders, spearheaded by a chaplain at Finney County's Tyson Fresh Meats plant, to help families such as them. Next week's final story, to be published July 10, will focus on the challenges facing local social service organizations and government agencies in assisting refugees in southwest Kansas.

BY SHAJIA AHMAD

sahmad@gctelegram.com

For more than a decade, No Ra Jan and her husband, Aye Be, dreamt of a better life for their family while living at the Mae La refugee camp in northern Thailand, near the Myanmar border.¬  Each day, the family bought and sold vegetables to scrape together a few Thai coins for themselves. UNHCR camp workers would give them small portions of rice and salt.

Using bamboo, the family made a small hut at the Karen refugee camp, home to more than 45,000 displaced persons who have fled Myanmar, the war-torn country formerly known as Burma and ruled by military leaders since 1962.¬  Before the family was driven out of their village of Nabu by members of the military junta, they were farmers -- poor but able to live quietly and self-sufficiently, they said.

Members of a Karen anti-government rebel group helped the family find their way to Mae La across Burma's jungle terrain, but the sardonic pursuit for safety left them feeling helpless. Once they reached the camp, they could not leave its enclave, lest they face arrest by the Thai police for trespassing, they said. "We didn't think too much about the next month," Jan, who is learning to read and write in English, said through the aid of a Burmese translator. "As long as we were safe, we felt OK."

After a dozen years of living meager lives at the camp, officials told the family they were eligible to apply for asylum to a select few countries.

They chose America, where distant relatives already had been relocated. Be, 58, and his son, Ismail, in his early 20s, flew to Chicago in 2007.

Jan, a longtime widow who wasn't yet legally married to Be, her second husband, flew to Dallas, with her daughter, Sa Jee Da, 23, a year later.¬  Be worked at a Chicago meat-packing plant while waiting for the rest of his family to arrive.

The family moved together to Garden City two years ago, when they heard there was work at the Tyson Fresh Meats beef plant and a burgeoning Burmese community.

A changing Midwest

The influx over the past few years of Somali and Burmese refugees to the area is a cycle borne by the community nestled hours off the interstate, said Levita Rohlmann, a director of the Catholic Agency for Migration and Refugee Services in Garden City.

Rohlmann has worked for 35 years at the office that serves as the only primary refugee resettlement agency for the sparsely populated southwest quarter of the state.

Its newest residents, "secondary refugees" who have come from other states, are drawn to the area due to the availability of work at the beef-packing plants, where there are four in a 70-mile radius. They have historically brought and continue to bring newcomers here, Rohlmann said.

Nearly three years ago, not a single Burmese man or woman lived in Garden City to her knowledge.

Then in the fall of 2007, the resettlement officer helped guide seven single Burmese men who had flown into Kansas City, Mo., to her side of the state with the help of resettlement officers in their anchor city. Today, local officials estimate a few hundred Burmese families live in Garden City, along with several hundred Somali refugees, and trying to enumerate and help them integrate is a brewing challenge.

During the first half of the 20th century, the slaughtering of cattle took place in large cities like Chicago and Kansas City, Mo. Only as recently as the 1960s did meat-packing plants follow the cattle feedlots that were being established in rural areas like southwest Kansas. The Finney County beef plant was built in 1980.

While the Census Bureau does not track immigration status, Kansas' foreign-born population has risen from 2.5 percent in 1990 to about 6 percent currently. Similarly in the heartland states, communities are rapidly diversifying, a relatively new phenomenon in the Midwest caused by an influx of refugees and other immigrants who work in labor shortages.

In depopulating rural areas, the incoming migration of refugees is coupled with an exodus of college graduates to other more heavily-populated states; low fertility rates among whites couples along with higher birth rates among ethnic minorities, including Hispanics and Latinos; and a rapidly aging white population, according to Mark Grey, a professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Iowa.

While some argue that immigrants and refugees are saving cities from depopulation and decreasing tax bases in remote areas across the Midwest like western Kansas, others are leery of newcomers, especially those who don't speak English. Those hesitant to embrace the new residents point to the challenges they pose to social service and health agencies, school districts, and area housing needs.

Meat-packing

Around the perimeter of the processing floor at the Tyson plant where no cameras and few visitors are allowed, 850 workers simultaneously perform their assigned tasks, separating cuts of meat with large knives or cumbersome slicing machines that hang suspended from above.

Some of the women on the processing floor are African and Muslims, visible because of their dark skin and heads covered in fabric. Others are less distinguishable. Between cuts, some workers rapidly sharpen their knives before performing the same motion again.

Six-thousand head of cattle are slaughtered daily at the "disassembly plant," where workers pack 35,000 boxes of beef cuts daily, plant officials said during a tour in May.

More than half of Tyson's current 3,100-member workforce identifies itself as Hispanic or Latino, reflective of the community at large. In 2008, the rapidly growing minority community in Finney County outnumbered non-Hispanic whites, tipping the southwest Kansas county into majority-minority status.

The second largest group at the plant is Asians, followed by African-Americans or blacks and then whites.

The meat-packing workers -- referred to by Tyson officials as "team members" -- are paid $12.30 to $15 per hour, non-union wages with benefits, and make up an $80 million annual payroll.

They speak nearly a dozen different languages, and Tyson employs about 25 translators who speak Spanish, Somali, Burmese, Vietnamese, Laotion, and various Ethiopian languages, plant officials said.

However, sometimes the work becomes a "show and tell of how to do things," the plant's manager, Paul Karkiainen, said during the same May tour. It's along the meat-processing floor that Jonathan Galia, a full-time chaplain at the plant, visits the men and women at work, signaling thumbs up or down signs or exchanging head nods with the workers who don't speak English.

Pending approval from a supervisor -- in an assembly line, manpower must be replaced -- the chaplain also pulls aside those who need some personal time to talk about their day-to-day struggles, he said.

"I always want to reach out to them," Galia said. "But over time, I found that supporting team members means supporting them not only inside but also being concerned about their welfare outside (the plant)."

Little by little over the last few years at Tyson, the chaplain who originally immigrated from the Philippines began actively encouraging the minority groups he met to organize and identify community leaders.

He wanted to see them effectively communicate among themselves, across communities and with local government leaders and social service agencies, he said, and also recognized that elders of many of Garden City's various ethnic groups feel a level of responsibility to their respective communities.

"They may live here for a long time, or they may also go," Galia said. "In either case, we need to listen to them, to really understand what kind of life they have here and their struggles or how can we accept them."

The chaplain brought the various men and women from Somali, Filipino, Oromo, Burmese, El Salvadorean and other communities together for the first time earlier this year.

Coined the Coalition of Ethnic Minority Leaders, the group consists of a board representing groups such as USD 457, the Garden City Police Department in addition to the council of ethnic leaders. Already the group has outlined a vision to "create and maintain an environment of mutual respect, understanding and cooperation among ethnic minority groups and empower them to responsibly participate in building a healthier Garden City" and have been meeting regularly on the last Saturday of each month. In its short time, Galia points to several strides the groups have made: The long-standing El Salvadorean community has been working toward establishing neighborhood watch programs with help from police officials, and the Somalis have opened a community development center where they hold their own English and citizenship classes on the weekends.

The overarching goal, Galia said, is integration.

"We want to empower them. We want to let them know that, yes, we have all this help from the government, but they have a role to play, too, if they want to be self-sufficient," he said. "We do not want to send the wrong message that they're refugees forever. If that's their mentality, then we'll always have to maintain giving relief to them."

'One day at a time'

At the small apartment where 70-year-old Saw Min, one of the Burmese elders in the coalition, lives with his second wife and two young children, a large desk in the living room is the only other piece of furniture in addition to the family's couch.

Min is quick on his feet despite his age and has worked for a few years as a translator at Tyson's beef-packing plant. He knows several of the families in his apartment complex at Garden Spot Rentals, where dozens of Burmese families have created something of a small village. Washed clothes are hung out to dry along the chain-linked fence, and children, their cheeks painted with circular patches of yellowish-white thanaka cream, play in the open parking lots, often weaving in between moving cars.

Min also knows many of those families must rely on food stamps and other government assistance to make ends meet. Thinking about the future, either for them or for their family, is far from easy for the breadwinners who are also beef-plant employees. Min admits that many of the families must pass the time in their new homes much as they did at the refugee camps, "one day at a time," he said.

Min has been attending coalition meetings, but he admits, too, that his community is divided along religious, ethnic and linguistic lines, making organization more difficult. The Karen people are Christians, Buddhists and Muslims, and the Chin are mostly Christians.

Galia, the chaplain at the Tyson plant, agreed.

"They are divided, and their pride is strong. They're very loyal to their tribes," he said, adding that his attempts to bring members of the local Burmese community together to aid in integration efforts has been more challenging than the Somali community, which is united along their Islamic faith.

"For the project to succeed, we have to break some barriers, cultivate some common ground, so there's only one voice: unite," Galia said.

Inside the older couple's two-bedroom apartment, also at Garden Spot Rentals, the living quarters are small and not much different from their neighbors' homes.

Inside the family's home, several pairs of shoes are aligned by the front door, two chairs in a corner of the main room serve as seating for guests, and a worn bookshelf next to a large bed in the living room doubles as a night stand, with a clock and other knickknacks on its shelves.

Jan and Be live with at least two of their older, unmarried children.

The 58-year-old man who used to be a farmer now slices open the bellies of cows at the Tyson beef plant for a living. His son and daughter also slice and pack meat.

It is not the life he had in mind for his family, and the aging father and grandfather said he doesn't see any recourse for bettering their economic situation.

"Things are completely different than I expected," Be said, also through the aid of a translator. "We are old, but for (the children), I think about them."

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