This is an update of a tragic story we wrote about last April. The Christian family of murdered 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo is still grieving. But, I haven’t seen a word written recently about the investigation of the fellow Burmese refugee who was arrested and charged with that brutal rape and murder.
Here the reporter for the Salt Lake City Tribune (in the series I mentioned yesterday) tells how difficult a time the family had when they arrived in the US, demonstrating once again that the federal contractors are not doing their jobs for which they are being paid by us, the taxpayer.
Thank goodness there were citizens in the community who could help them.
Shortly after their arrival in Utah in August last year, they were hungry and couldn’t find their resettlement caseworker. Today, they laugh remembering the man – who they called Mr. Tomorrow, because he never seemed to follow through on his promises.
“We didn’t know how long it would be for Mr. Tomorrow to bring us [things] right now,” Cartoon Wah said.
Within weeks, the family met Carrie Pender, a refugee specialist for the Granite School District, who had stopped by their apartment to help enroll their children. They soon asked her for help getting food – they told her they did not have food stamps yet. She bought them groceries.
She also took them to the Department of Motor Vehicles to help them get Utah identification cards, needed to open a bank account. No one had ever connected their phone, another task Pender took on.
As the temperatures dropped, the family grew cold at night. It was an LDS service missionary assigned to their family, Paul Van Dyke, who brought them blankets and winter coats. It was also Van Dyke who found jobs for Cartoon Wah and two of his sons at Deseret Industries, and helped them sign up for English.
“I think [resettlement agencies] . . . they do the best they can,” Van Dyke said. “What we’ve found is that usually [refugees] could go for weeks before their caseworker can get back to them.”
It is the same old story from one end of the country to the other.