No electricity, poor food rations and meager work meant the couple had little hope for their daughter’s future.
Their opportunity for a new life came last spring in the form of a series of thick application packets, security clearances and a few lucky breaks.
The Tamang family is among a growing number of legal refugees relocating to Hampton Roads in search of the American dream, even as the nation continues to struggle from the worst economic downturn since the 1920s.
Just four months after arriving on the Peninsula, Bir Bahadur now has a job. The couple’s daughter, Samichya Tamang, started school Tuesday. The family’s apartment has basic amenities — air conditioning, a refrigerator, separate rooms — that weren’t available to them in the refugee camp.
From the time they landed at Newport News-Williamsburg International Airport in early May, the Tamang family allowed a Daily Press photographer and reporter to follow them as they assimilated to their new surroundings.
As refugees, they have attended English classes and workshops teaching them about nutrition, public transportation and banks.
Helping them become self sufficient within the first five to six months of moving to Hampton Roads is the goal, according to the officials helping to relocate the refugees.
At an inch or two shy of 6 feet tall, Bir Bahadur is tall compared to his fellow countrymen who have moved here. He parts his black hair to the side and he often wears button-up shirts. His handshake is remarkably soft, although he is quick to offer his hand to greet strangers.
Deo Maya often wears long floral-print skirts. She has not taken to English as quickly as her husband and often looks to him to translate dialogue into Nepalese.
Since moving to Hampton Roads, the couple has reconnected with friends and family from the Nepalese refugee camps who have also relocated to Hampton Roads.
Fleeing Bhutan
Bir Bahadur, 31, and Deo Maya, 27, grew up in Bhutan, a mountainous country in south Asia bordered to the north and east by China and to the south and west by Nepal and India. As ethnic Nepalis, they were stripped of their citizenship and forced to leave Bhutan in the mid-1990s by the ethnic majority.
More than 100,000 Bhutanese fled to Nepal where they were shepherded into refugee camps, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Bir Bahadur’s family was first forced to pass through neighboring India on an eight-hour bus ride before they arrived in a camp. Some Bhutanese people made the journey on foot, which took as long as six days, he said.
Bir Bahadur arrived in the United-Nations-controlled camp at age 12 or 13. He finished his education in the camp, met his future wife in the camp and eventually watched his daughter grow up in the camp.
Throughout that period he ate only what the United Nations provided him, and vegetables from small neighborhood gardens. Only worked on jobs available to him within the confines of the camp’s walls.
Sitting in the living room of his two-bedroom apartment in Regency Square Apartments in Newport News, Bir Bahadur says he choose to move his family to the United States to open new opportunities for his 7-year-old daughter Samichya.
With limited job opportunities in Nepal and little chance of returning to his home in Bhutan, Bir Bahadur said he hit a breaking point. The Tamang family applied for, and received, refugee status from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an organization that seeks to ensure refugees can find a safe country to reside if they are exiled from their homes.
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