Yani Rose Keo - A Refugee Who Have Made a Difference

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c74-page7.html

• Profession: Social worker, Volunteer & Resource Development Co-ordinator
• Country of Origin: Cambodia
• Country of Asylum: United States of America
• Date of birth: 10 April 1939

In 1973, when Cambodia descended into civil war, Yani Keo became a volunteer with International Aid and Assistance for Refugees. In the years that followed, she became a refugee herself.

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge started attacking at the border, bombing small villages first, then moving toward the centre of the country. In 1975, Khmer Rouge declared "Year Zero", sealing off the country from the rest of the world. The cities were turned inside out and their inhabitants sent to the countryside for "re-education." More than two million people starved to death or were executed. Yani Keo was the educated wife of a high-ranking official. She helped organise volunteers to help refugees who fled the fighting, but soon, she and her husband themselves had to escape.

Yani Keo left Cambodia with her four children before the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, when the US military evacuated the region. She first went to Thailand, then to France. There, she worked as a paediatric nurse. "Before the war, I had never worked for anyone and when I went to France, I had to take care of my four children alone," she remembers. "This was a scary experience, but it made me a stronger person and pushed me to help others in need," she says.

After seven months in Paris, she was reunited with her husband, who was in Houston, Texas. She began working with refugees again, finding them housing, jobs, enrolling them in school and trying to help them overcome culture shock. In the early 1980s, she found a cluster of 15 unoccupied homes in the north-eastern end of town and managed to place 15 families in them. "A little Cambodian village," she called it. In 1985, Yani Keo and a refugee from Ethiopia set up their own non-profit agency, The Refugee Service Alliance. Now called the Alliance for Multicultural Community Service, it employs 48 people to assist both refugees and immigrants.

In all the years Yani Keo has cared for others, she had no news of the family she left behind in Cambodia - her mother, three brothers, a sister, nieces and nephews. Some years later, she discovered they had all been killed. Yet she seems to be too busy for anger. "You only have one life to live," she says, '"Why do you need to hate each other?"