Pan Yee is much more interested in talking about today than his years in a Thai refugee camp and his escape from Myanmar.

Now that his family is here in Lancaster, his son and son-in-law need jobs; maybe his single daughter too, though she and his wife are taking English classes. Two other children are in high school.

Only Yee has a job, working at Longenecker's Hatchery, but there are two rents to pay, one for his family and one for his daughter, son-in-law and their infant. There is food to buy and bills to pay.

His story is repeated by many of the 200-plus refugees from Myanmar, the former Burma, who have moved into the county in the past two years. The Lutheran Refugee Services in Central PA and Church World Service, Lancaster, are facilitating their resettlement. More than 140 more refugees from the former Burma are expected this year.

VIDEO: Chin National Day celebration

The local Burmese immigrants represent the Karen and Chin ethnic groups, who have different languages and who lived in different sections of the country. Both groups have been the target of religious, political and ethnic persecution.

Through a translator, Yee, 52, said he had to leave his country because it was unsafe. When the army of the ruling Myanmar military regime came to find Karen resistance groups, they shot anyone who was Karen, whether or not they were involved with the anti-regime groups.

Yee's story has been corroborated by numerous international human rights groups, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

In 1990, Yee fled to Thailand, where he lived in a refugee camp for 17 years. Yee met his wife, Say Kyi, there.

The camp was safer, Yee said, but not safe. Militants sometimes invaded the camps, shooting indiscriminately.

Yee said he worked general labor in Thailand, enough to buy water. Aid agencies gave them food, but it was not enough, he said. The houses were old (many Thai refugee camps are cities of bamboo and thatch), but the children were able to attend school, where they learned some English, Karen, Thai and Burmese.

Yee's family was able to get official refugee status from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which allowed them to be resettled in another country. It wasn't until 2006 that those refugees began arriving in the United States.

While most of the Karen people came from Thailand, which bordered the Karen state in Myanmar, the Chin refugees are more likely to come from Malaysia or Bangladesh.

Joseph Lian, 28, left the northwestern section of Myanmar, where many Chin live, in 2002 because he feared for his life. He wrote about a "social issue," Lian said, but the military regime viewed it as political.

The oldest of his family of five brothers and two sisters, Lian fled by land and by sea to Malaysia before he could be apprehended. He lived and worked as an illegal immigrant — with an ever-present danger of being caught, caned, imprisoned and returned — until he could get refugee status and emigrate to the United States in 2008.

Life for the Chin is very oppressive, Lian said. The Myanmar military regime would come to Chin-populated areas, take what they wanted and force people to do hard labor for them.

The regime removed a cross in a Chin village and replaced it with a pagoda. Chin are predominantly Christian, but the regime demands everyone practice Buddhism.

Learning tribal languages was discouraged, and travel without strict reporting and the appropriate passes was not permitted.

When you grow up under that kind of oppression, Lian said, you begin to think it's normal. It wasn't until stories of life in Malaysia and Thailand filtered into Chin groups that they recognized that other people have rights.

Lian was one of the few who had a high school education. He knew more English than most Chin, because his father was an English teacher. Knowledge of the language worked to his advantage in Lancaster, where he soon became a translator for other Chin refugees. He now is employed by Lutheran Refugee Services.

Moving halfway across the world and getting established in a new climate and culture has been difficult for the Chin and Karen immigrants.

For example, they are used to living in close communities that work together to survive, to socialize and to raise their children. Although the Chin and Karen are working to re-create that sense of community here, it's not the same.

For example, families are used to allowing their children to roam because they know someone else will watch out for them, said Barbara Witmer of Church World Service. They can't do that here.

At Lutheran Refugee Services, one family with four children in a two-bedroom house asked to let another Chin family move in with them. All six of them slept in one bedroom anyway, so the parents figured there was an extra bedroom, said Nan Garber, resource developer for Lutheran Refugee Services in Central PA.

The parents didn't understand why regulations wouldn't allow them to have so many unrelated people living together because they used to share a house with 20 people, Garber recounted.

The refugees are gradually re-creating community in Lancaster by spending evenings at each other's houses and Sundays at church together. Recently, the Lancaster Chin celebrated Chin National Day, to commemorate their participation in freeing the former Burma from British control in 1948.

Some refugees come in family groups, but some, like Lian, have come alone. Therefore, a community here is very important to them.

Lian doesn't expect to see his family again, unless the government changes. At 28, Lian worries that he is already too old to ever fit into the American way of life. Will he learn the language well enough? Will he be able to create his own family here, one whose children respect his Burmese heritage?

Nevertheless, Lian is happy, he said, to be able to speak freely in America, without fear of repercussion. "In my country, I can't talk like this, so I feel light now."

Eventually, Garber and Witmer believe, these new arrivals will fit into the fiber of the local community, contributing their culture to the increasingly diverse county.

They are hardworking people, said Sheila McGeehan, director of the Church World Service in Lancaster. "They don't have a lot of skills that convert to jobs here, but when they do find a job they can do, they're hard workers.

"They don't really expect anything from the government or from us. They're used to living with very little."

And yet, they have a bounce to life that is very endearing, said Garber. When you hear their stories, she said, you see the resiliency of the human spirit.

E-mail: Lespenshade@Lnpnews.com