Fall 2006 - #15. VBF Grant Recipient Profile: Vermont Immigration Assistance Project.

Vermont Bar Journal

2006.

Fall 2006 - #15.

VBF Grant Recipient Profile: Vermont Immigration Assistance Project

THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL FALL 2006

FOCUS ON THE VERMONT BAR FOUNDATION

VBF Grant Recipient Profile: Vermont Immigration Assistance Project

The Vermont Immigration Assistance Project provides pro bono legal services on behalf of low-income immigrants and refugees. Through the South Royalton Legal Clinic, VIA accepts appropriate cases from throughout Vermont, but focuses primarily on five of Vermont's fourteen counties: Chittenden, Orange, Washington, Windham, and Windsor. Over the past year, VIA has represented eighteen clients in twenty-six cases. VIA has represented clients from countries all over the world, including Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Congo, Egypt, France, Germany, Guyana, Honduras, India, Israel, Jamaica, Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Nigeria, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam. At age twenty, Htar Yu had already seen more horror than most people witness in a lifetime. Born into a family of political activists in Burma, Yu spent much of her childhood watching her country's military try to hunt down her family and friends. She has seen three of her six siblings die from diseases that are easily treated in the United States but are often fatal in Burma, a nation of nearly forty-three million in southeast Asia that its military leaders call Myanmar. Yu's family, which is part of the Tavoyan ethnic group, became a target of the military junta that rules Burma after her father became active in the democracy movement. Her parents fled to the jungle in the early 1960s when the military took power and lived there until 1998, when they relocated to a refugee camp on the border with Thailand. Yu, who learned to speak English in Thailand, said that the military would often arrive and shoot at members of her ethnic group. She described one battle in which her aunt died, along with twelve other adults and seven children.

Yu first came to Vermont three years ago, after a local aid worker at the Kalk Kani refugee camp met Yu and her family and offered to send her on an exchange program for a year at Spaulding High School in Barre. "We became friends, she knew about me, and I told her I want to go to school," Yu said. "I want to be educated and I want to help my...