She is a steadfast ally to refugees

CARRBORO -- Flicka Bateman remembers a night in 2000 when she couldn't sleep because she had told the neighbors' girls she couldn't help them with their homework all the time.

That night she and Lily and Christine Wai had grappled with earth science and other subjects late into the night. Bateman, then a member of the Chapel Hill Town Council, was already tired from an earlier council meeting.

The girls, their brother and parents had arrived from a Thai refugee camp only months earlier. They had escaped a Burmese military government in the early 1980s that has persecuted its ethnic minority groups in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. The Wais belong to the Karen (pronounced kah-RIN) ethnic group.

Despite living on the Thai side of the jungle border, the Wais endured gun and fire attacks from the Burmese military. They saw neighbors die and endured poverty, limited schooling and hopelessness before finally securing U.S. visas.

"I kept thinking, 'What kind of person are you? You can spend hours fretting over setbacks and buffers, etc., in a development project, and you can't spend equal time helping somebody who's never had a break in her life?' " Bateman says.

The energetic community activist and principal of the Hospital School at UNC Hospitals decided not to seek a second council term. Instead, she devoted much of her free time to helping Lily, Loyal and Christine Wai succeed in middle and high school, and then college. She is like family to them now.

Almost a decade later, Lily is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. Loyal and Christine are upperclassmen at Georgia's Southern Polytechnic State University and Greensboro College, respectively. Their parents, on the custodial staff at UNC-Chapel Hill, have saved enough to buy a modest townhouse in Chapel Hill's Meadowmont community.

With the Wai family grown up and established, Bateman could be enjoying more leisure time with her husband, Lewis Bateman, and their two Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs. Instead, she works with Lily and Christine almost daily to help a growing population of Karen refugees in Carrboro.

"I would hear about all these other families. Lily would talk to one and hear about another. It just evolved," Bateman says.

In 2005, the U.S. State Department began a large-scale effort to relocate Burmese refugees of all ethnicities and religious backgrounds from Thai camps to the United States instead of considering families on a small case-by-case basis. Last year, Carrboro saw its biggest arrival of Karen refugees. Lutheran Family Services in the Carolinas alone resettled 118 Burmese refugees in Orange County. Most of those were Karen who settled in Carrboro.

The go-to woman

Bateman, with Lily and Christine as interpreters, spends hours each week helping newly arrived Karen with things such as sorting their mail and medical crises.

Christine Wai says Bateman is the go-to woman when Karens have a problem communicating with a teacher, employer or anyone else. "If something's wrong and she agrees with it, then she calls that person right away, which is awesome."

She has helped a newly arrived Karen man get shopping privileges back at a grocery store. The manager had barred the man from the store after he used his own bag instead of a cart while shopping, even though he unloaded everything at the register and paid for it all.

It's not uncommon to spot Bateman and Lily in the apartment complexes on N.C. 54 introducing new tutors to families, handing out Karen-English picture dictionary packets or explaining to young parents how to enroll their preschoolers in a Head Start program. They have organized clothing and car-seat drives, helped families sign up for food stamps or get their taxes done, talked about the refugees in churches and schools, organized a safety meeting with a Carrboro police officer, and held the first of several Habitat for Humanity meetings.