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U.S., Vietnam
agree on emigration of detainees - Joint statement - transcript
US
Department of State Bulletin, Nov, 1989 E-mail Print Link
U.S., Vietnam Agree on Emigration of Detainees
Representatives of the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam at a
meeting in Hanoi July 27-29, 1989, announced that they hope to commence by
October 1989 a program for the resettlement in the United States of released
reeducation center detainees and their close family members who wish to emigrate
to the United States. The Vietnamese delegation was led by Assistant Minister of
Foreign Affairs Vu Khoan. The U.S. delegation was led by Senior Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State [for Refugee Programs] Robert L. Funseth, Acting
Director of the Bureau for Refugee Programs.
The
Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the United States of America, in order to
resolve one of the issues of mutual concern to the two countries and consistent
with their humanitarian policies and with the commitments undertaken in the
declaration and the comprehensive plan of action adopted by theUN
International Conference on Indochinese Refugees [June 13-14, 1989],
will--in addition to existing programs--allow those released reeducation
center detainees who were closely associated with the United States or its
allies and who wish to do so to emigrate, together with their close relatives,
to the United States.
The
U.S. delegation declared that released reeducation center detainees coming to
the United States would be subject to all U.S. laws, including those affecting
the activities of U.S. residents toward other countries. The U.S. delegation
reaffirmed that the United States has not encouraged nor does it have any
intention of encouraging or using released detainees to engage in any illegal
activities hostile or harmful to Vietnam--and is opposed to any such
activities--and that the United States will accept these persons solely for
humanitarian reasons and not for any hostile actions against Vietnam. The
Vietnamese delegation also reaffirmed that Vietnam has not and will not
encourage or use released detainees to engage in illegal actions hostile or
harmful to the United States.
The
two sides drew up a draft agreement, which included a technical annex, and
agreed to establish a joint working group to coordinate implementation of the
program. The two sides agreed that the program would be in addition to the
existing Amerasian and orderly departure programs.
The
two sides expressed great satisfaction with the results achieved and expressed
hope that the first group of 3,000 persons for resettlement in the United States
under this agreement will depart Vietnam before the end of the year after
processing is completed.
COPYRIGHT 1989 U.S. Government Printing Office
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Bibliography for "U.S., Vietnam agree on emigration of detainees - Joint
statement - transcript"
Vietnam Allows More Prisoners to Leave for U.S.
January 7, 1990
LEAD: More former inmates of re-education camps and their relatives arrived
here today from Vietnam en route to new lives in the United States. More former
inmates of re-education camps and their relatives arrived here today from
Vietnam en route to new lives in the United States.
It was
the second day of the first major resettlement of people who were imprisoned
because they served the United States-backed South Vietnamese Government, which
Communist forces toppled in April 1975.
A
total of 151 former inmates and their families arrived in Bangkok today on
charter flights from Ho Chi Minh City, said Komol Srinakul of the International
Organization for Migration. The agency handles medical processing and
transportation of the refugees. On Friday 156 arrived. To Join Relatives in U.S.
The
Vietnamese will join relatives in the United States after a few days at a Thai
immigration center.
A
State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said on Friday that the Bush
Administration hoped that at least 7,000 former detainees and their relatives
would be resettled by Sept. 30.
Those
who arrived in Bangkok on Friday expressed joy at finally leaving Vietnam after
many years of internment and waiting. Some described conditions in the
Vietnamese camps as bad, and one claimed to have seen guards shoot 25 prisoners
who had tried to flee.
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were subjected for years to a spartan
regimen of manual labor and political study after the fall of the South
Vietnamese Government.
'The Last Big Wound'
The agreement on
resettling former inmates was reached between Hanoi and Washington in July. The
American negotiator, Robert L. Funseth, said at the time it would help heal
''the last big wound remaining from the war.''
The Next Wave From Vietnam: A New Disability
By
SETH MYDANS
Published: October 15, 1989
LEAD: WHEN Nguyen Van Be, once a colonel in the South Vietnamese army,
emerged from 13 years in a re-education camp last year, he wrote to his wife in
Washington, wondering how to fit into a world that had left him behind. ''He
feels he got lost somewhere,'' says his wife. ''He feels like someone from the
jungle.''
Now
Colonel Be is among thousands of former political prisoners waiting for a chance
to move to the United States under an agreement reached last summer. Last week,
American officials began interviewing freed prisoners in Ho Chi Minh City, the
first step toward bringing the first 3,000 to the United States.
Another 100,000 former prisoners and their families have requested entry into
the United States. Vietnamese authorities have put the figure of former
prisoners and their families at 500,000.
Resettling this group will be a step
toward closing out this nation's debt to its Indochinese wartime allies.
''These people have been detained because of their close association with us
during the war,'' said Robert Funseth, the senior deputy assistant secretary of
state for refugee affairs, who has spent most of this decade negotiating their
resettlement. ''They are of special
humanitarian concern to the United States.''
The
United States has accepted more than a half million Vietnamese since the first
135,000 fled Vietnam at the end of the war in April 1975. The first were the
lucky ones among the South Vietnamese elite, the ones who succeeded in the
scramble for planes and helicopters.
During the mass escapes by boat that began in the late 1970's, the United States
committed itself to taking 14,000 Vietnamese a month. This exodus included
higher proportions of farmers, fishermen, and other villagers, people who did
not fit so easily into Western society. There were proportionately fewer ethnic
Chinese, with their economic hustle and Chinatown connections. At the same time,
the large numbers of refugees began to strain government and private agencies.
Some communities have been transformed by the influx. In California, a state
that officials say may be home to nearly half the Vietnamese refugees, the
center of Westminster, just south of Los Angeles, is now known as ''Little
Saigon.''
The
former prisoners, who could begin arriving in the United States before the end
of this year, include many former leaders of the South Vietnamese society that
the United States was fighting to keep in place.
''There's going to be a lot of the old political leadership, old generals, old
ministers, old party leaders,'' said Dawn Calabia, associate director for
refugee affairs at the United States Catholic Conference. ''Some of them are
going to be very embittered.''
The Lost and the Tough
Some, said Donald Cohon, a San Francisco psychologist who has interviewed former
inmates, are likely to be ''shells of people, brutalized to the point where they
are nonfunctional.'' Most, he said, will have suffered years of malnutrition.
But, as Ms. Calabia said, ''Some are going to turn out to be tough as nails,
survivors of the worst the Vietnamese could do.''
There will be men like Nguyen Hau, an
army major specializing in ordnance, who was released after being
severely injured in a camp, fled by boat to Malaysia, arrived in the United
States at the age of 52 and immediately went to school, after a lifetime of
military service, to study to become a mechanic.
Mr. Hau, who was a mechanic until the
small company he worked for folded recently, now heads a nationwide organization
of former Vietnamese political prisoners. Based in Westminster, it is one
of the groups that are preparing to help survivors of the re-education camps.
Another group, the Association of Families of Political Prisoners, is headed by
Khuc Minh Tho, the wife of Colonel Be, a Government clerical worker with two
children and a woman with a keen sense of the difficulties that some of the
released men will be facing.
In
his first letter after his release, she said, her husband asked the question
that was on the minds of most of his fellow prisoners: Have you been faithful to
me? Are you still waiting for me?
Some of the wives she knows here, Mrs. Tho said, have found new mates. ''They
tell me, 'I don't think the prisoners will ever get out of the camps,' '' she
said. ''They tell me they give up.''
Even now, women like Mrs. Tho cannot be certain whether their husbands will be
allowed to leave the country or will be held back by the capriciousness that has
marked refugee releases in the past.
''I
pray,'' Mrs. Tho said, ''that he will be one of the lucky ones.''
Ex-Viet Prisoners on Way to Rejoin Families in U.S.
January 05, 1990|
CHARLES P.
WALLACE and SONNI EFRON | TIMES STAFF WRITERS
BANGKOK — While
American relatives anxiously awaited word, 300 former Vietnamese
political prisoners arrived here today on the first leg of a journey
that will take more than half of them to California.
The emigres,
including former South Vietnamese military officers and government
officials who spent years in "re-education" camps, are the first
political detainees to leave with their families under an accord reached
between Washington and Hanoi last July after seven years of
negotiations.
"We're all very
happy. It's been long overdue and we've been waiting a long time to get
this chance to travel to the United States," said Nguyen Van So, a
former captain in the South Vietnamese Army.
Nguyen, who is
traveling with his wife and two teen-age children, has a brother-in-law
in Arleta, Calif.
"We won't forget
those of us who are still behind in Vietnam," said Nguyen, who received
a master's degree from UCLA in 1973.After the Communist victory in
Vietnam in 1975, he was sent to a re-education camp for six years. Tens
of thousands of former South Vietnamese military personnel and civil
servants were sent to such camps for manual labor and political
indoctrination by the Communist government because of their close
association with the old regime in Saigon.
The former
detainees, accompanied by members of their immediate families, arrived
in Bangkok from Ho Chi Minh City--the former Saigon--aboard chartered
Air Vietnam jets. They will spend about a week in the Thai capital
undergoing medical testing and administrative processing before being
put aboard commercial flights to the United States.
U.S. officials
said there was no clear idea how many might qualify under the refugee
program, but the figure could be as high as 100,000. One official said
he expected the number of former re-education camp prisoners leaving
Vietnam to reach about 1,000 a month in the near future.
Refugee resettlement officials in
Southern California confirmed that at least 70 people in today's group
were headed for Los Angeles County and at least 63 are planning to join
relatives who have settled in Orange County.
Ho Van Phuoc, a former South Vietnamese
air force lieutenant who was on a Friday flight from Ho Chi Minh City,
is joining a sister in Whittier. He said the situation in Vietnam was
"still very bad. There is no work."
He spent seven years in a re-education
camp and then said he struggled to survive as a tailor in Ho Chi Minh
City.
"I think we have a better opportunity in
America," he said.
Meanwhile, in Southern California,
friends and relatives anxiously looked forward to long-awaited reunions.
"The day is finally here when I will see
my brother again after more than 14 years," said Kim-Nhung Tran, 47, who
runs a dressmaking shop in Westminster. Her brother spent eight years in
prison camps in northern Vietnam.
Quang-Hoi Tran, 43, a former army
colonel, his wife and his two children were expected to be aboard the
first Air Vietnam flight, his sister said.
She said her husband, son and a second
brother drowned in an escape attempt from Vietnam in 1980. Undaunted,
she fled by boat five months later, landed in a Thai refugee camp, and
later settled in Orange County.
But a third brother, who also spent seven
years in prison camps, is still in Ho Chi Minh City hoping to be one of
the next to depart, she said.
Linda Lien Dao, 65, who works for the Los
Angeles County Department of Social Services, said her youngest brother,
Hung Anh Dao, 48, once an army major, his wife and three children are
expected to arrive at Los Angeles airport soon.
He was captured one week after the fall
of Saigon and imprisoned near Ho Chi Minh City until 1980, she said.
"During the first two years in prison,
they beat him all the time," said Dao, who communicated with her brother
by mail over the years.
"After three years in prison, his wife
was allowed to visit him," she said.
After his release in 1980, Dao said, "he
could not have a job and he dared not go outside because people watched
him. His wife supported the family with a black market business selling
everything, like medication and clothes," she said.
Dao, who has been trying to get her
brother out of Vietnam for 10 years, said her mother "dreamed of coming
to the United States with her son. Unfortunately, she died in 1986."
"He finished four years of college in
French and is very good in mathematics," she said. "Maybe he can learn a
job in computers."
Last July, the United States and Vietnam
reached agreement to allow former political prisoners who served
"substantial" periods in re-education camps to leave for resettlement in
the United States.
In the past, small numbers of former
re-education camp inmates have been allowed to leave Vietnam, but for
reasons other than their status as political prisoners.
The July agreement, negotiated by Robert
L. Funseth, a senior deputy assistant secretary of state, provided for
the resettlement of the former political prisoners and their close
families.
Old Soldiers: The Last Refugees Free to Leave Vietnam
By SETH MYDANSSEPT. 14, 1992
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September 14, 1992, Page 00010
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The men who missed the helicopters
fleeing Saigon in 1975 are finally arriving in the United States --
high-ranking South Vietnamese officers and government officials who have
spent much of their lives since then in Communist prison camps.
They are the last and saddest wave in a
17-year flood of Vietnamese refugees that first included their luckier
highly placed comrades, then a tide of desperate boat people, then
thousands of the half-Vietnamese children of American servicemen.
More than 50,000 former prisoners and
family members have arrived in the United States since the start of 1990
under an agreement with the Hanoi Government. Many of them are broken in
health and in spirit and unable to find jobs or to adjust to their new
lives.
The new arrivals are among the final
stragglers of the war, the emotional equivalent for the South Vietnamese
of America's missing in action.
"I am a soldier, so if nobody tells me to
leave Vietnam it is difficult for me to leave," said Gen. Tran Quoc
Lich, who stood his post and spent 13 years in a Communist internment
camp, arriving here last December, three years after being freed.
Continue reading the main story
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Continue reading the main story
"I wish to work for a living," said
General Lich, whose last command was as Inspector General of Fourth
Corps in South Vietnam. "I ask for work, but they say, 'Sorry, wait,'
because there is no place, no job, for me." 100,000 Under the Plan
By the time the waiting lists are
exhausted three years from now, United States officials estimate they
will have accepted 100,000 former prisoners and family members under the
new release program.
Already the flood of boat people has
shrunk to a trickle, and the program bringing in the children of
American servicemen will be completed soon, helping to push the
Vietnamese population of the United States past one million. No longer
will most of the immigrants be refugees; instead they will simply be
immigrants seeking to join family members.
The profile of the former prisoners is
similar to that of the first and most successful refugees from Vietnam:
military officers, government officials, professional men and women with
ties to the United States, said Shep Lowman, a senior policy analyst
with the refugee program of the United States Catholic Conference.
But now they arrive bearing the burden of
passing years and prison hardships, at a time when there are fewer
refugee assistance programs or job opportunities to sustain them.
Many expected to be welcomed as heroes,
and there was a widespread rumor among them that the United States would
provide back pay for their years in prison camps, said Yen Ngoc Do,
editor of the Vietnamese-language daily Nguoi Viet.
"They have come prepared to show the
courage of the former soldiers of South Vietnam," said Mr. Yen, "but
they are showing themselves only as a group of misfit people. Their
political and military past has been totally forgotten."
This has led to flashes of friction
between the new arrivals here in the Vietnamese community known as
Little Saigon and the now-successful men who left them behind.
"The high-ranking officers are afraid to
face us, because most of them told us to stay back and fight the
Vietcong," said Nguyen Le Kinh, 55 years old, who was a captain in the
South Vietnamese forces and said he had served 6 years 7 months and 11
days in an internment camp. Like other prisoners, he said he had
suffered humiliation and hardship in his homeland.
"Most of those who fled to the United
States told us to be brave, to stay in our units," he said in careful
English. "And at the same time they board the helicopters or they wait
at the airport."
In the years since then, he said, while
prisoners like him struggled against their Communist captors, some of
those same officers, safely settled in America, were already beginning
to make business contacts with their old adversaries in Hanoi. Reminder
of Collapsed Lives
For many residents of Little Saigon, a
bustling community of Vietnamese malls and markets 30 miles south of Los
Angeles, the new arrivals bring with them an unwelcome breath of
tragedy, a reminder of the collapsed world they all left behind.
And many of the new refugees have
embraced that sense of tragedy as their new identity.
Within the emigre Vietnamese world here
the former prisoners refer to themselves as "H-O" refugees, from the
bureaucratic designation given to them by the State Department. Each
successive group in the program was dubbed HO1, HO2, HO3, HO4, and the
refugees' new label became for them a symbol of their fate.
"In Vietnamese, ho means alas," said
Nguyen Duc, a 55-year-old former army captain who spends his sleepless
nights trying to write a book about his years in internment.
"I tell my wife often when she is
depressed that in English H means hope and O means opportunity," he
said. "But it is really too late for us. We are old. Our health is
broken, especially our mental health."
He said his depression often threatens to
overwhelm him. But he struggles to put it aside, he said, because "if I
am too sad I do not have the energy to support my family. Sadness is a
luxury for me now."
One great source of pain for many of the
refugees is their estrangement from family members who came to America
while the refugees were still in prison and who adapted and prospered in
their absence.
When the wife of Col. Nguyen Thanh Quan
fled to the airport in April 1975 with their four children, she could
see shells exploding on the bridge where her husband was commanding a
contingent of National Police troops.
"I knew he would stay and fight because
my husband was a very strong man," said his wife, Luong Thi Lai.
In seven years in prison, Colonel Quan
said : "To speak frankly, I was very afraid, very afraid at night. I
told myself, if I want to see my family again, the only way is to forget
them. Just do what I have to do and forget them."
While he struggled with his fears and
hardships, his wife was building a new life in California without him.
And by the time he rejoined her two years ago, she was the owner of her
own beauty school and their children were in college studying dentistry,
medicine, chiropractic and architecture.
For Colonel Quan, his reunion with his
family was almost as traumatic as his years in an internment camp. "When
he came, it was even difficult to eat together," his wife said. "We
sleep differently, we eat differently, we think differently, everything
is different. In the car, fight. In the school, fight. In the office,
fight." 'He Was Really Mad'
When his children, who now speak only a
little Vietnamese, ignored his wishes, she said: "He was really mad. He
would lie in bed and not move, or go in the bathroom and shut the door."
When she took him to look for work, she
said, "nobody wanted him.
"If you look at somebody and he is not
happy, not healthy, not attractive, you are not going to give him a
job."
Colonel Quan agreed. "It's hard for
people like me to come here," he said. "My mind is sad. I have many
worries. I forget things easily. My mind is not like the people who came
here in 1975."
Unlike many similar couples, Colonel Quan
and his wife have stayed together. The price has been an acceptance of
his inferior status. Mr. Yen, the editor, said that as more and more of
the former detainees gathered in Little Saigon over the years, a debate
over the true significance of their H-O designation developed into an
obsessive search to find a meaning in their fate.
"There were
at least five theories about it," Mr. Yen said. "But then people
discovered that it is not ho but only H. It is H-zero-one, H-zero-two,
for
US Ends Era of Welcome For Vietnam's Refugees
Official door closed last month. More
people in Vietnam elect not to emigrate.
October 14, 1997
By Lily Dizon Special to The Christian
Science Monitor
HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM
In 1989, when the US and Vietnam signed
an agreement that would eventually bring 34,300 Vietnamese former
political prisoners and their dependents to America, Tran Van Tam was
among the hundreds of thousands who registered to go.
But by the time Mr. Tam was summoned five
years later for an interview to leave, he felt Vietnam was where he
belonged after all. A booming economy has improved his life.
"Everything we have is here. We no longer
need to go," Tam says.
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For many Vietnamese who once wanted to
flee their country, and for many who settled in America, life has come
full circle: Vietnam is proving more and more attractive.
Hundreds of thousands of the 1.5 million
refugees - including those who left after Saigon fell at the end of the
Vietnam War in 1975, and the boat people of the late '70s and early '80s
- are returning to their homeland every year, some to stay.
Could you pass a US citizenship test?
Last month, the United States closed its
files on a program to accept former political "detainees," as they are
called, who are still living in Vietnam.
Although the US gives him some time to
change his mind, Tam says he won't.
"I am very much aware that this
[decision] would take away my current refugee status, which would give
me and my family emigration priority to America," says the man who spent
10 years in a government "re-education" camp for his service as a
commander in the South Vietnamese Navy. But "everything we have is here.
We no longer need to go."
Less repression
Tam's decision reflects what he, and
others like him, say is their reality. Politically, the country is no
longer as oppressive as the years after South Vietnam fell to the
Communist-run North in 1975, leading to the eventual emigration of about
1.5 million to the West. Economically, Vietnam is steadily improving,
allowing for many of its people to earn a comfortable living so they
wouldn't have to seek a better life elsewhere.
His and others' decision to remain in
Vietnam is also influenced by the many stories they have heard about
their compatriots who, having lost up to a dozen years in re-education
camps, now face problems adjusting to a new life in the US.
"I know from friends and family members
who have left that it is hard to make it as a migrant in America,
especially if you're old," says Tran Huu Tri, who was imprisoned five
years for having served as a captain in the South Vietnamese Army.
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Mr. Tri, who runs a small cafe with his
wife in a rural area outside of Ho Chi Minh City, adds: "It seems to me
- given what I've heard about the hardship of other Vietnamese in
America - we have the better life here."
The odyssey of Vietnamese refugees began
with the end of the Vietnam War, when close to 250,000 fled the country
on cargo planes and military ships, the start of their journey
chronicled by dramatic television footage of people dangling
precariously from helicopters.
The second wave of refugees, known as the
"boat people," began in the summer of 1978, when the Vietnamese
government expelled ethnic Chinese from the country after a dispute with
Beijing, forcing thousands to leave on rickety, make-shift boats. They
were joined by Vietnamese nationals who bought or forged papers
declaring themselves Chinese to allow their passage out of the country.
By the time the United Nations phased out its Southeast Asian refugee
camps programs last year, close to three-quarters of a million of the
boat people were resettled in other countries.
The "third wave" of refugees came in 1989
under the auspices of the US Department of States' Orderly Departure
Program (ODP). These refugees include the former political prisoners and
their families, those fleeing from religious and political persecution,
and Amerasians, or children of former American servicemen. By far, the
largest section of this group - about 468,500 people - is the political
prisoners and their dependents. Eventually, 159,400 would end up in the
US.
Today, more than 1 million of those of
Vietnamese descent live in the US, mainly in California and Texas. About
500,000 others have resettled in Australia, Canada, France, and other
countries in Europe.
Since 1990, more than 800,000 "Viet
kieu," or overseas Vietnamese living mainly in the US and France, have
returned home, sending or bringing back with them $600 million or $700
million annually to help friends and families start small businesses.
Little Saigon
Generally speaking, those from the "first
wave" were educated and business savvy. Within a few years of arrival,
they were able to establish business and cultural communities such as
southern California's Little Saigon.
The "boat people," many of whom were
uneducated and from the countryside, had more problems adjusting. Some
of their children, influenced by an unstructured refugee camp life, got
involved in gangs and crimes.
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But it is the former political prisoners
who faced the most daunting of financial and social obstacles. At an
average age of 58, most say they are too old and set in their ways to
adapt to a new land, to learn its language, and to find jobs. Unable to
cope, a few committed suicide, leaving behind notes detailing their
disillusionment with the reality of their "American dream."
US doormat pulled
The dream for a new life began in 1989
when the US program known as Humanitarian Operation began, allowing
those who were imprisoned for their work with either the South
Vietnamese or the American government to leave Vietnam.
Officially, it ended three years ago. But
in practice, it is still continuing, because of voluminous paperwork;
the Vietnamese government has been slow in issuing exit visas; and
because some who are qualified to be interviewed for immigration never
followed up on the process.
On June 1, US officials sent letters to
about 650 Vietnamese, informing them their eight-year-old files
requesting refugee status would be closed at the end of September if
case officers in the country didn't hear from them. But many did not
respond even as the deadline neared, says Dewey Pendergrass, the
Bangkok-based ODP director. Of the 650 letters sent out, 145 families
have responded and requested interviews. Of the remainder, 33 said they
were not interested in going and 472 did not answer at all, Bill
Fleming, chief of consulate.
Tran Van Tam is typical of those who now
do not want to go. If he could have left in 1989, he said, he definitely
would have. But in the five years it took for his application to be
accepted, "I've come a long way," Tam says. During his years in the
re-education camp, he had to feed himself by planting vegetables on
infertile soil and was usually hungry. After the cap, he was blacklisted
from getting non-manual-labor jobs.
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"To leave my country now would mean to
start over again, and I'm too old for it," he says.
Once, he wanted better opportunities for
his children who could not find jobs in the post-war era. Now, his two
sons - an architect and a builder - and daughter, who is a college
instructor, make good money to help support each other and their
parents. Further, Tam and his wife, Tran Thi Xuan Huong, operate an
after-school day-care center out of their home, bringing in about $300 a
month, a princely sum in a country whose per-capita annual average
income is about $200.
Children well-off
His children "have built a strong
foundation for their lives, their futures, so they don't need to go any
more," Tam said. "My wife and I are old, but we do OK."
To be sure, Vietnam, which is still one
of the poorest countries in the world, doesn't afford a reasonable
standard-of-living for most of its 75 million people, the majority of
whom live in far-flung villages. Some who are qualified to be
interviewed to come to the US say they chose to stay also because of
reasons unrelated to the economy.
Keeping families intact
Subtleties such as keeping the family
nucleus intact is one reason. A few say they are staying out of pride in
themselves - specifically, for having survived re-education camp - and
pride in Vietnam.
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Ultimately, many say, their reason for
staying is simple enough: They don't want to leave their homeland, their
families, friends, and neighbors.
"Everyone around here knows me and my
wife, and we are at peace with the simple life we have made for
ourselves," says Tri. "I'm not sure I could say the same thing if we
went to America."
