Hiding in Burma's rain forest from soldiers pillaging her village, Ma Thein found weaving calmed her fears.

The mother of six tied one end of her loom to a tree. The other end she strapped about her waist.

She then sat on the ground and wove, passing a shuttle that unspooled white thread between upper and lower expanses of colorful threads stretched between rods.

With meticulous care, Ma Thein transformed dozens of taut threads, arrayed like harp strings, into a roll of elaborately patterned cloth to be fashioned into clothes and shoulder bags.

Several times in the 1990s, Ma Thein and her family fled for days into the jungle to escape the soldiers. Burma's authoritarian government for decades had harassed the Karen, a minority ethnic group of subsistence rice farmers agitating for independence.

Then, in 1999, things got worse for the family. The marauders returned, and this time they burned the crops and bamboo huts.

Looming loss

Ma Thein and her husband, Maung Ya, decided it was time for their family to hike through the jungle, cross the Thai border and join the tens of thousands of Karen refugees living in crowded United Nations camps.

In a basket on her back, Ma Thein carried the pieces of her backstrap loom.

It was 12 years later that Ma Thein again packed her loom, this time for the biggest journey of her life as she left Thailand on a series of flights that ended last June with the family moving into a modest apartment in Lancaster.

The family had no money, little education and knew no English. When Carol Byers of Manheim Township visited to tutor Ma Thein and her family in English, she was struck by the 54-year-old mother's subdued manner.

"From the time I met her," Byers said, "I saw sadness in her eyes and movements."

Byers communicated with Ma Thein mostly by pointing at things and pictures. She had no way of knowing that Ma Thein was unhappy about life in America because she was missing her loom. It had been confiscated when she entered the country.

At customs, an agent at the scanner pulled from Ma Thein's luggage a hand piece known as a batten because it had a metal edge. He then took out nine other wooden rods of varying diameters.

Ma Thein tried to explain what the pieces, bound in a cloth, were. But she spoke a tongue no one understood. The agent carried away the pieces, and another waved her on.

A passion rekindled

Attending the November wedding of Ma Thein's 23-year-old son, Byers, through an interpreter, learned of Ma Thein's loss. At their next tutoring session, Byers brought photos from the Internet showing women at looms.

Ma Thein's demeanor instantly changed. She pointed at the pictures and chattered. Using two pencils, she demonstrated how she had set up her loom. And, with a sweep of her arms behind her back, she conveyed a backstrap.

"What we saw that day was hope," said Byers' husband, John, who also tutors the family. He agreed with his wife that he had to make her a loom.

The task was not difficult. John Byers, a woodworking hobbyist, bought dowels and an eight-foot length of a two-by-four. He drilled holes where Ma Thein directed and fashioned a wedge-shaped batten.

And last Sunday, the Byerses watched Ma Thein get to work. Fastening a strap around her hips, settling on the living room floor and manipulating the shuttle and batten amid a colorful web of threads, she lost herself in her craft.

Ma Thein was home at last.

jhawkes@lnpnews.com