Mee Tee, a Karenni native who today works as a success coach for Austin Public Schools, said Austin “is home.”

“Austin is a small town, a nice place, a safe place,” said Tee, 26. He spent his early years in the refugee camps in Thailand, where thousands of Karenni escaped in the midst of Burma’s ethnic civil war.

“My mother told me that we grabbed what we could and ran,” he said. There is nothing left of his village today. He attended school in the camps, he said, but his English was almost non-existent when his family arrived in the U.S.

The family first moved to St. Paul, where they stayed for a few months, and then moved to Worthington, Minnesota, where his father found work in a packing plant. He graduated from the high school there, but it was difficult, he said. The language barrier was tough, and “I worked hard to succeed … I worked hard to earn the credits” to graduate, even attending night classes. He was 21 years old when he received his diploma.

The family came to Austin, where both his parents landed jobs at Hormel Foods Corp. He said it was like coming home, finally.  Although he tried at first to study to become an auto mechanic, he had to let it go due to both language and family needs.

He worked at a few factory jobs before his brother, Taw, suggested he offer interpretive services. Taw, then a student at Riverland Community College, was helping as an interpreter, too. That led to Tee’s position as success coach, which he began almost three years ago and has worked with all school ages.

Learning English, with its imperfect verbs, is not easy, he said. In Karenni, for instance, “there are no past or future tenses” and conjugating verbs in English is hard. He watches TV, which is also a good learning and cultural tool.

But he knows, he said, that with hard work, he will continue to succeed. He loves being a success coach, he said, because it is also a way to give back to his people.

Tee became a U.S. citizen last year, and he said that “it felt good” when he could take the oath. It was one more chapter opened. He and his wife, Shar, the parents of two children, met in the camps. It is no accident that his youngest son is named “Austin.”

“America is friendlier to me; here, you have freedom. It’s good for you,” he said.

An identity in Austin

Gemma Alvarado-Guerrero recalled the first time she entered an American classroom in Albert Lea, Minnesota.

“I can remember being really intimidated; I would look to see what the others were doing, and that’s what I would do,” said Alvarado-Guerrero, who is today executive director of Parenting Resource Center Inc. in Austin.

She well understands the challenges of not knowing English — and she does what she can to help other Spanish-speaking neighbors who struggle with the language. She is often tapped for her interpretive skills.

Alvarado-Guerrero, 25, was born in California, following a move by her parents from the Guadalajara region in Mexico. When they heard of meat-packing jobs in Minnesota, they moved to Albert Lea in 1997 and then to Austin in 1999. Her father worked for Quality Pork Processors.

Despite her birth in the U.S., Spanish was always spoken in her home. When she entered school, she qualified for English Language services.

It wasn’t until the second grade that she felt comfortable speaking English. That came, she said, with a new circle of English-speaking friends, “and, I think a more stable home life,” she said.

She was 9 years old when her father died unexpectedly. While the family faced another tough challenge, Alvarado-Guerrero turned to books for comfort.

“I don’t know if it was a coping skill, but I began to read a lot,” she said, recalling her love of the Harry Potter and Junie B. Jones series of books. That fortified her language skills in a big way, she said.

She also found out about the impact of educators. Sherri Pike, who retired earlier this year, was her second grade teacher in Austin.

“She not only supported me in my learning, but socially and emotionally as well — she even came to my dad’s funeral,” she said. “If I contribute anything, it will be because of her.”

Although she sometimes struggled with idiomatic expressions — “feeling blue” or “hold your tongue” are a few examples — she eventually secured a pretty good feel for the language. Enough, in fact, that she sometimes felt she had a foot in two cultural worlds.

“Sometimes, finding my own identity was difficult,” she said.

But even after her mother suggested they move back to Mexico after her father’s death, Alvarado-Guerrero said she wanted to stay in Austin, the only real life she had known. Today, she and her husband, Erick, who works at Hormel Foods, have their own family to guide. They are the parents of Ezra, 9, and Zarek, 6.

As Alvarado-Guerrero grew older, she found she wanted to give back to help others who were struggling with language and settling into a new home.

After she earned a degree, she offered her services as an on-call interpreter to schools and other agencies, something she has done for the past six years. She also served as a success coach at Banfield Elementary School — success coaches also serve as interpreters — a position she enjoyed. She left after earning the directorship at Parenting Resource Center. Still, she continues to offer herself as an interpreter; she recently subbed at I.J. Holton during parent-teacher conferences.

She has also traveled to Latin America during two trips with University of Minnesota health students who were working in medicine, dentistry and public health. One trip was to Nicaragua and another to El Salvador. She was surprised, in both cases, to be told she “talked funny,” even when she was speaking Spanish.

“They would say, ‘You’re not from here,’ or ‘You’re not from Nicaragua,’” she said with a laugh, for the first time understanding that language that you thought was yours might vary in dialect and idiom.

And that, she said, is fascinating.

“I find I want to travel more, to learn more about new cultures,” she said.