{"id":1255,"date":"2007-07-14T00:57:42","date_gmt":"2007-07-14T00:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/07\/coming-to-america.html"},"modified":"2007-07-14T00:57:42","modified_gmt":"2007-07-14T00:57:42","slug":"coming-to-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/07\/coming-to-america.html","title":{"rendered":"Coming to America"},"content":{"rendered":"

300 Burmese immigrants headed for Fort Wayne over the next couple of months…<\/a><\/p>\n

…joining the 3,000 already here, the largest concentration of Burmese refugees in the US. This resettlement is being coordinated by Catholic Charities:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

The Fort Wayne Catholic Charities office usually closes at noon Friday. For Nyein Chan and his resettlement staff, the day isn’t even half over.<\/p>\n

\u201cRefugee development is just starting,\u201d says Nyein Chan, director of the department. Taking a quick lunch break at his desk, he ponders his day. Already, he has met with 17 newly arrived refugees from Burma, and two more families are coming in at 10:30 this night. Between now and then, he and others need to pick up furniture and groceries for the arriving families, plus check that their apartments are ready. Last night, and the night before, he also went to the airport to pick up arriving families.<\/p>\n

It’s not an unusual day, at least not for the next three months.<\/p>\n

About 300 refugees from the Thai-Burma border will resettle in Fort Wayne this year, more than twice as many as last year. The bulk of them will arrive by the end of September.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is an extremely large amount of people,\u201d said Deb Schmidt, executive director of Catholic Charities. \u201cIt’s a tremendous amount of work, and they’re all coming in so fast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anticipating the increase, Catholic Charities has hired additional staff in the last few months. Fortunately, Schmidt said, the burden does not rest on the resettlement department alone. \u201cEvery person who works in this agency is aware of what’s going on and doing what they can to help,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Last year, 127 refugees came here from Tham Hin, a refugee camp where conditions are rapidly deteriorating. This year, that movement continues. In addition, another camp called Mae La, the largest on the border, is sending 16,000 people to the United States, also by the end of September.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you’re in the area – what you can do to help. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

300 Burmese immigrants headed for Fort Wayne over the next couple of months… …joining the 3,000 already here, the largest concentration of Burmese refugees in the US. This resettlement is being coordinated by Catholic Charities: The Fort Wayne Catholic Charities office usually closes at noon Friday. For Nyein Chan and his resettlement staff, the day…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nComing to America - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/07\/coming-to-america.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Coming to America - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"300 Burmese immigrants headed for Fort Wayne over the next couple of months… …joining the 3,000 already here, the largest concentration of Burmese refugees in the US. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}