They nail the American Dream

ALBANY — Steah Htoo carefully aimed a hammer and pounded a nail in a second-floor bedroom of her new Habitat for Humanity home in the South End.

The Delaware Street home near Lincoln Park is a world away from the bamboo hut where she lived for 20 years in a refugee camp on the Myanmar-Thailand border.

A wide smile rarely left her face during a work session this week at the construction site. She said the closet in the master bedroom is roughly the size of their hut in the camp.

"I'm excited," said Steah Htoo (pronounced STAY two), a Burmese refugee who came to Albany four years ago. "It's the American Dream."

She has taken pictures of their new house and tried to describe the concept of home ownership to her parents, who still live in the refugee camp.

"They are surprised," she said in halting English. "They don't really understand."

Htoo, her husband, three children and some Burmese friends are helping to build the two-story, three-bedroom, 1,700-square-foot, brick-faced rowhouse with 350 hours of sweat equity. They labor alongside professional contractors and Habitat volunteers who range from students to seniors. Construction and the closing should be done at the end of April.

It will be the first time anyone in Htoo's family has owned property.

She works as a cleaner at the Holiday Inn Express in downtown Albany. Her husband, Aung Nge, is a forklift operator at World Logistics, a shipping facility in Feura Bush. The couple are in their early 30s; Htoo is not sure of her exact birth date. Their two daughters, Htoo Hay Ma, 11, and Mya Noe Aung, 9; and son, Aung Nai Oo, 7, attend Giffen Elementary School.

The family currently rents an apartment on Grand Street for $670 a month. Buying the house at cost from Habitat and taking advantage of a low-interest, 20-year mortgage, the family expects a monthly mortgage bill of about $600 a month.

"It makes good sense financially, but it's also the thrill of owning your own home," said Bill Hammarstrom, a Habitat volunteer who was assigned to Steah Htoo and her family as a family partner. He helps guide them through confusing details of construction and home ownership.

"She's a joy to work with and everything has been going smoothly," said Hammarstrom, who works in the financial division at New York State United Teachers, or NYSUT. "I just mention to her what needs to be done and she gets it done."

Htoo is helped by her friendship with Debbie Taylor, a volunteer with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, or USCRI. Taylor has been assisting Htoo and her family, as well as several other Burmese refugee families, since they came to Albany in 2009.

"It's really hard, but they're becoming more independent," said Taylor, director of corporate services at the School Administrators Association of New York State, or SAANYS. "I'm so proud of Steah. She's like my second daughter."

Htoo is Karenni, a tribal subgroup of the Karen people in Myanmar, formally Burma. There are about 300,000 Karenni. As an indigenous ethnic minority, the Karenni people were harassed by the Burmese military junta since Burma's independence in 1948, following six decades of British colonial rule. The Burmese military spent decades persecuting the Karenni people, including killings, imprisonment, burning houses and crops, and seizing land. Tens of thousands of Karenni fled into the jungle or sought shelter in camps.

About two dozen Karenni people and a few hundred members of the larger Karen ethnic group are among the Burmese refugees who have been resettled in Albany over the past several years with the help of USCRI. Each refugee receives $900 from the federal government that is meant to support them for their first three months as they try to learn the language and culture.

But assimilation and gaining competency in English can be a long and incremental process.

Steah Htoo, for instance, is called upon as an English translator for the Burmese refugees. She appears with them at court and government proceedings. She is a beacon for other Karenni people, mostly illiterate subsistence farmers in Myanmar. Since they were constantly fleeing military harassment, formal schooling was not possible.

She recalled a terrifying childhood in Myanmar. Soldiers burned her family's hut and the entire village three different times. After one of the attacks, the military booby-trapped the smoldering village with land mines. When she was 12, Army soldiers shot and killed many people in her village and she fled with her family into the jungle. They hid there for more than a year, barely surviving on bananas and a meager supply of rice they grabbed as they ran away.

In letters to her parents, Steah Htoo tries to describe her comfort level in Albany after living in fear for so many years in Myanmar.

"I feel safe here," she said.

"She's good to work with because she's a super-positive lady," said Bob Garland, Habitat's Albany site manager. He oversees construction of the six two-story attached rowhouses on Delaware Street and 10 on Alexander Street. The project is called "Morton's Walk."

Garland started the job in December after working as a commercial contractor. "It's much more rewarding to help people own their first home than just making dollars," he said.

Several weeks after working on her new home, she met the next-door neighbor, working on his family's Habitat house. He is Bakary Janneh, a Burmese refugee case manager at USCRI who is from Gambia in West Africa.

"Bakary is so nice. He's our friend," Htoo said. "We are happy."