Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 29, 1990 TAG: 9007260346
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"The teen-age girl was crying, looking so sad. They looked lost," Hall recalls. "They didn't have anything . . . I was so sorry for them."
Hall was one of several people who waited that night to welcome Tho Mai and her five daughters to Roanoke. He helped take them to Hope House, a refugee transition home on Fourth Street in Old Southwest.
It was his first act as a volunteer sponsor for Roanoke's Refugee Resettlement Office.
He was supposed to share the responsibility with the pastor of his Northeast Roanoke church, Parkway Wesleyan, and another church member.
The idea was the pastor's. He had heard that volunteers were needed to help resettle Amerasian children and their families. It seemed like a good church project. Several church members could share the duties of helping the refugee parents find a house, get jobs and enroll children in school.
But Hall, good-hearted and easygoing, soon found himself alone. His pastor moved to a church in Martinsville, and the other church member dropped out because of pregnancy.
No one else at the church volunteered to step in, so Hall, 73 and recovered from heart surgery, decided to do it himself.
"I saw the needs. I didn't see how they could get by without help."
The biggest problem was communication, Hall says. Tho Mai, then 37, knew only a few words of English. Her children knew next to none. "We got by with smiles and hand signals," Hall says.
"People up at the refugee center didn't think I could handle it alone. They said I'd need help."
Refugee office officials say two of their biggest problems are recruiting volunteer sponsors and preventing them from dropping out once they take on a family.
"Many people mean well. They think being a sponsor of a refugee family sounds fun and interesting, and like it's a nice thing to do," Barbara Smith, director of the refugee center, says.
"No matter how much you tell them, they don't realize that it's going to be as much work as it is," Smith says. "These families latch on to their sponsors. They call in the middle of the night."
After a while, Hall did get help: He enlisted his wife, Sylvia, 70.
"In the last year I've put in a lot of miles, and I've learned a lot," Hall says. "I had no idea what I was getting into."
Hall, who plays a violin and an electric guitar and sings for his church, initially saw sponsorship as "kind of like a missionary thing right here at home." But as he got to know Tho Mai, her five daughters and, later, her newborn son, Hall and his wife began to feel more like they got the family they never had - complete with grandchildren.
"We just love those children," Hall says. "I'd be tickled to death to have children like that."
Elmer and Sylvia were married shortly before he left rural Wytheville for the European front in World War II. By the time he got back and managed to get a stable job in Roanoke as a paint-color technician with Reliance Universal, he and Sylvia were past wanting a family.
Now that they've retired to a quiet life in a tidy Garden City subdivision, they're finding out what a family is like.
"I don't know what Mai would do if it wasn't for me," Hall says. "I take them shopping. I take them to the doctor, the dentist, to apply for food stamps, health programs. She calls me to read her mail. She calls me in the middle of the night when the kids are sick. She calls me when she gets scared."
He's helped enroll the kids in school. He's taken them to see Santa and on Easter egg hunts. He's been though a pregnancy, a baby shower and a birth.
It takes a lot of time, he says. Just grocery shopping can take hours because Mai carefully checks prices to get the best deals. And, he says, it took months for Mai to get used to buying in bulk. In Vietnam she practically shopped daily in order to get fresh food.
Mai was almost seven months pregnant when she flew into Roanoke. She says she didn't realize she was pregnant when she left her husband behind in Vietnam. She found out shortly after arriving in the Philippines, where she spent about six months in a refugee transition camp.
When the baby was born July 31, Mai was so grateful for Hall's help that she named the baby - her first son - Houng Elmer Mai. "I want him have American name," she said.
Hall says Mai's children remind him of American youth from bygone generations.
"It's amazing how they help their mother. She doesn't have to ask them to do a thing. They get to it without a word. The older ones take care of the younger."
They're also more sharing and accepting of their fate. "If you take away something from one of the chldren, they don't cry. They just go on to something else."
Despite his efforts, Hall is worried that Mai and her children may be destined to years on welfare.
Mai hopes her husband may soon be able to join her from Vietnam, but refugee officials say it could take years for him to get permission to leave.
In the meantime, Mai has little chance of getting a job soon. She wants to work, but hasn't been able to because of the baby. Now that she's ready to work, it's hard for her to find affordable day care for the baby and her four youngest daughters.
The only family income other than welfare comes from her oldest daughter Trinh, 17, who works part time at the Hardees Restaurant on Ninth Street Southeast.
"She wants to work. I know that. And she's a hard worker. She will work," Hall says of Mai. But, he says, "There isn't any way soon for them to get on their feet. I don't see any relief soon."
by CNB