Waterbury and the muslin gray sky has yielded to a pale, hopeful blue. It has been hot this week, which, coupled with a cottony humidity, has lured apartment dwellers outdoors, where they sit on cement stoops, nursing fussy infants and slurping down plastic cups of cool ice water. At the corner of Central Avenue and West Main Street, mushroom-shaped satellite TV dishes point hungrily westward and windows lift to capture a merciful breeze.

In the distance, a large, broad-shouldered African-American man in a blood-red T-shirt leads a small parade of caramel-colored children, saddled up with backpacks, their tiny feet stuffed into black high tops, their thumbs stuffed into nylon straps. Their leader is Tyrell Zimmerman, a strapping football player whose menacing body belies his expansive heart. Today is the second day these 11 Karen (ka-REN) refugees from Burma, now settled in Waterbury, have been immersed in an American institution: Camp.
Make that “Fun Camp.” Four months ago, when JoAnn Robertson, a retired Watertown teacher, hatched the idea of sending all the Karen refugee children to the YMCA’s Camp Mataucha, she found she had stumbled on to a loaded word. To the refugees living in Waterbury’s inner city, “camp,” means the Mae La Refugee Camp, a clump of wooded huts along the limestone cliffs of western Thailand, where most of them were born. But Robertson, a retired teacher with topaz blue eyes and a warm, reassuring smile, has a way of putting children at ease — even if they speak halting English and she speaks no Karen. For the last four months, Robertson, a member of Watertown’s First Congregational Church, has been gathering permission slips and pay stubs, medical forms, camp applications and signatures from parents who are frequently illiterate, for this one goal: These children will attend camp.

‘A great initiative’

“It really was like a village raising a family,” said JoAnn Reynolds-Balanda, United Way’s vice president of community impact. The United Way administers the Greater Waterbury Campership Fund, which raises money to allow underprivileged children to attend 22 camps in the area. Children’s eligibility is based on household income. This year, United Way received 693 applications for scholarship, of which 561 were deemed eligible, including the 11 children who attended the YMCA camp. Reyonlds-Balanda said she was particularly moved by Robertson’s initiative and tenacity in obtaining the scholarships for all of the children.

“You could hear the compassion in her voice in terms of her experience with these families,” says Reynolds-Balanda. “I was moved by the uniqueness of the situation — these were kids who have been displaced and are feeling pretty alienated. I thought it was a great initiative on behalf of these private people.”

For Robertson, the impulse was straightforward.

“At home, all they have is those bikes and that parking lot,” Robertson said of the children, who typically restrict their play to the asphalt lot in front of their eight-story apartment complex.

But for two weeks this July, 11 children for whom Robertson obtained scholarships through Greater Waterbury’s Campership Fund, spent their days at Camp Mataucha, 50 acres of wooded forest in Watertown’s North End. The camp is within walking distance of Robertson’s home. Every morning, she waited in the camp’s rustic parking lot, armed with 11 lunches, each labeled with individual Karen names, labeled water bottles and pocket change for the ice cream man, so the Karen children would not be exempt from the clamorous gaggle of children who swarm to the boxy truck each noon.

Tony Sharillo, camp program director, says he has never seen anybody else do that.

Roughly a dozen volunteers

Robertson has always been generous with her volunteer time, but her husband, James says the Karen have affected his wife in a deeper way. “She will wake up in the middle of the night and worry about what the children need, or where they are,” he says. Joanne Robertson has created floor plans of each Karen apartment to determine what appliances or furniture each family needs. “She had it all mapped out as to what apartment will get what furniture. She bears an acute sense of responsibility for them.”

So do a dozen or so devoted volunteers, mostly women, who began by dropping a few bags of clothing or rice off to Karen refugees and have become so besotted with them, that many consider them friends, or even members of their family. The volunteers have logged thousands of hours in the apartments of the Karen, deciphering complex public assistance forms, making physician and dental appointments and then accompanying them to the visits. They have driven them to grocery stores, taught them English, explained the operation of stoves, microwaves and toaster ovens, and stocked the Karen cabinets with food.

They have taken them to daffodil festivals and fireworks displays. They have brought them to their homes, churches, swimming pools and to a specialized Asian grocery in the bowels of Hartford — all with gas prices soaring to $4 a gallon. Most, but not all, belong to two churches — Living Faith Christian Church in Waterbury and First Congregational Church in Watertown. One middle school teacher, Kate Lockwood, of Waterbury’s West Side Middle School, was so moved by the plight of the Karen that she flew to Thailand this summer, where she is now teaching English in refugee camps.

“They take us to hospital, to store, buy what we need,” said Ler Bweh, 26. “What I need, they give me.”

Friction and frustration

Ideally, this is the way the U.S. State Department would like refugee resettlement to work — the community and non-profits helping refugees assimilate. In Waterbury, however, friction developed early between volunteers and the International Institute, the non-profit agency that brought the refugees to Waterbury last fall, and volunteers responded by doing more. The Institute has subsequently been reprimanded by the U.S. State Department and has been forbidden from processing more refugees, but a degree of frustration — and anger — remains.

“If these people didn’t have us, where would they go?” said Caren Smith, the Living Faith volunteer who has spearheaded physical and dental appointments, meaning she is in these clinics up to four times a week. “These kids were running around with six to eight teeth rotting in their mouth. I mean rotting.” Smith has been helping Karen refugees since November and estimates she, or a member of her family, is in the refugees’ homes three to four times a week. She says during all that time she has not seen an institute staff member.

“[Jo Ann's] fear is that if she and the other volunteers don’t do something, there’s no other safety net available,” said James Robertson, a Waterbury lawyer. “Who will help these people if not them? If there were a superstructure, a well-developed network that took care of them, maybe these volunteers would not be as energized.”

“The International Institute has really been a disappointment,” concedes Mike Monti, assistant pastor at Living Faith. “Fortunately, there’s a group of folks trying to help these people in spite of the lack [of attention] on the International side….[The refugees]just left to the mercy of someone who would knock on their door and say, ‘Can I help you?’”

‘They tugged at my heart …’

In Greater Waterbury, there have been many such people, including Diana Monti and Smith, of Living Faith, who began to orchestrate all the medical appointments of the Karen and then transport them to the doctor’s offices last fall. That has helped stem a stream of no-shows at the Saint Mary’s Children’s and Family Health Center, which frustrated staff there, said Benjamin Doolittle, program director. “The people who really stepped up were the volunteers,” said Doolittle. “Mostly, we just did our job. These are volunteers who had jobs and things to do and they’ve made a commitment to these people that went above and beyond.”

Smith says the International Institute had been setting up physician appointments and then alert the refugees about the time and date through the mail, all in English, which the refugees did not understand.

“I felt for them,” said Smith, who estimates she puts 100 miles a week on her Ford Expedition, transporting the Karen. “They tugged at my heart when I first met them….I have a heart for them. I love being with them. It’s my calling. It’s something the Lord has put in my heart.”

“The community has taken up every responsibility beyond what I could have imagined,” says Drucie Bathin, the Karen activist who was a translator for the International Institute until she was laid off last month. “The people here are wonderful,” says Bathin, who lives in Waterford. “I was shocked because I heard bad things about Waterbury — it is not nice and such. When I came here, I was surprised by the support of the volunteers. This is the best place to bring refugees. The community and all the volunteers are so charming, so supportive.”

What happened between the 69 Karen refugees and the dozens of volunteers who tend to them started out as compassion, moved to frustration and concern and has blossomed into an abiding friendship.

“I enjoy being with them,” said Cheryl Newland of Living Faith Christian Church, who was among the first to meet them as an English teacher last summer. “In spite of them not having much, you go to their apartments and it’s so cozy.”

But not always. When Ellen K. Rutt, associate dean of admissions, financial aid and career services at the University of Connecticut, first came to the refugees’ apartments with her 11-year-old son last November, she was shocked. “We opened the [kitchen] cabinet and there was nothing in it,” said Rutt, who had read about the arrival of the refugees in the Republican-American. Rutt and her son had traveled frequently to underprivileged countries, but was unprepared for the refugees’ need.

“My son had been to India. He’d seen real poverty, but he had never seen an empty cupboard in the United States,” she said. “His jaw dropped. He almost died that some place a couple of miles from his school had no food and no furniture. It was so upsetting.”

Rutt went home and e-mailed dozens of people she knew, asking them to help. One of them was Robertson.

Within days, she, Betsy Maxwell, Sandra Skyrme and other volunteers from Watertown First Congregational Church arrived with 400 blankets, baby clothes and dozens of pieces of furniture. “As I look back, that was so easy,” Robertson said wistfully. “I really thought I would stop there. I could just see there was so much else that needed to be done. They were in those apartments all day long.” She stops and nods, thoughtfully. “It was the children, really.”

“This has been coming entirely out of Jo Ann’s soul,” her husband said.

Meanwhile, at Camp Mataucha …

On the morning of July 8, the second morning of YMCA camp, Jo Ann, along with fellow volunteer Betsy Maxwell, paced along West Main Street, hands stuffed into their khaki shorts, looking for the broad, reassuring shoulders of Zimmerman, who volunteered to walk to the Karen children’s Grove Street apartments and bring them to the bus that takes them to camp.

“There they are,” Robertson said to Maxwell, raising her hand over her head and waving to the group of children, who skipped toward her. Zimmerman explained that one of the Karen girls, Lah Kweh Paw, 13, was getting an award that morning because she had helped translate for camp counselors. Robertson did not want to miss the ceremony, and had brought her digital camera to record the brief event.

At Camp Mataucha, Lah Kweh Paw sat with two new friends, Savannah Villalba, 12, of Watertown, and Mariah Gibson of Naugatuck, knotting bright blue and fuchsia strands of plastic.

“The shyness brings people in to her,” says Villalba. “Then you learn more about the places she’s been and the things she knows.”

“It’s got to be hard,” says Gibson, “because she’s from, like, Thailand, but she’s here with us. We have conversations with her and we make sure she understands the game.”

Asked whether she enjoys camp, Lah Kweh Paw nods to the girls, “I like swimming, playing with the soccer ball, baseball,” she says. “Friends.”

When camp director Tony Sharillo praises Lah Kweh Paw to the 400 or so campers who sit on the hillside of Camp Mataucha, Lah Kweh Paw slunk diffidently toward him to receive her bright silver star. Robertson raised her camera, but the moment passed too quickly and Lah Kweh Paw was back up the hill. “Oh, come back, come back,” she said, like a proud grandmother, and took two more well-composed pictures of the Karen girl and the camp director. She smiled and hugged Lah Kweh Paw. “I have such feeling for these people,” she said.

As fellow volunteer Newland said, “I consider them my friends. I feel very close to them. They have enriched my life. I took them to a July 4 fireworks display. They had never seen fireworks. They had never had popcorn. I taught them ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ It just made the Fourth of July so special. I see them and look at the world through their eyes. And it’s all new again.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 9:17 am and is filed under Nursing Online, Nursing School. Tags: 4th of July, Baseball, Benjamin Doolittle, Betsy Maxwell, Burma, camp applications, Camp Mataucha, career services, Caren Smith, Central Avenue, Cheryl Newland, Christian Church, Connecticut, Department of State, Diana Monti, digital camera, Drucie Bathin, Ellen K. Rutt, Faith Christian Church, Family Health Center, First Congregational Church, food, football, Ford, Ford Expedition, Fun Camp, Greater Waterbury Campership Fund, Greater Waterbury's Campership Fund, Grove Street, Hartford, India, International Institute, James Robertson, Jo Ann, Joanne Robertson, Karen, Kate Lockwood, Lah Kweh Paw, Ler Bweh, Mae La Refugee Camp, Mariah Gibson, Mike Monti, Reynolds-Balanda, Sandra Skyrme, satellite TV, Savannah Villalba, soccer, swimming, Thailand, the Star, Tony Sharillo, United States, University of Connecticut, Waterbury's West Side Middle School, Waterford, Watertown, Watertown's First Congregational Church, West Main Street, YMCA camp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.