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TONY NAUROTH The (Easton) Express-Times

BETHLEHEM — The Win family children sat in the den of Mark and Linda Atwood’s home, watching cartoons on a flat-screen TV with a great stone fireplace nearby.

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The Win family daughters (from left), Moe Moe, 11, La Dia, 7, Mi Su, 17, and Thi Da Aye, 13, gather in the home near Bethlehem, where they stayed for six months. For two years, the family lived in a three-room wooden shack in the Nu Po refugee camp along Thailand’s border with Myanmar, before two Lehigh Valley church groups helped resettle the family in the United States.

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The Win family parents, Kyi Win (left) and Khin Than Win, take part in an informal celebration in the home near Bethlehem.

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They were a long way from home.

Four girls — La Dia, 7, Moe Moe, 11, Thi Da Aye, 13, and Mi Su, 17 — said the Atwood house is filled with one luxury after another.

That’s understandable, considering where they and their parents, Kyi Win and Khin Than Win, lived for two years before coming to Pennsylvania.

In the Nu Po refugee camp of shacks hugging the Thailand side of its border with Myanmar, 9,000 refugees wait for a way out. The Wins had been just a few of them.

The girls’ mother sold fried potatoes; their father had no job but was handy with tools and fixed everything from fans to lights.

They slept on mats, cooked over an open fire and read by candlelight. Nine family members lived in a three-room wooden shack.

The Allentown Diocese Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement Project, along with Dryland United Church of Christ in Nazareth, found the Wins and brought them to the United States.

They flew from Thailand to Japan, then to New York City and were bused to Philadelphia, then Allentown. It was a 24-hour journey.

“We were very tired,” Mi Su said in broken English. She is learning the language.

About 30 church and charity representatives were there to greet them.

Through his daughter’s translation, her father said when he stepped off that bus, “What I saw in their faces was the grace of God.”

They first lived in a hotel room, then as guests in the Atwood home before they moved into their own apartment in Bethlehem, where the girls attend Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, Broughal Middle School and Freedom High School.

Mark Atwood said Kyi Win was hired as a mechanic by Cigars International of Bethlehem on the first day he arrived.

“They are very happy with him,” Atwood said.

JoAnn Altemose, of Catholic Charities, said, “They are becoming self-sufficient and independent.”

The family is from Myanmar, although they insist on calling their home by its traditional name, Burma.

Kyi Win and his family fled Myanmar when he could no longer bear army life under what had become an oppressive regime in his homeland.

He said they left behind one daughter, 24, her husband and their child because she wanted to remain in her country.

Another daughter, 19, along with her husband and child wanted to come to the United States, but there were problems with their paperwork.

“We are so sad,” Mi Su said of the sisters they had to leave behind.

They talk to them on the one telephone in Nu Po. The Dryland UCC congregation bought calling cards for them to use.

Altemose said they’re still working to bring them over.

As a point of interest, the girls do not share the last name of their parents. In Burma, Altemose explained, girls have no last name at all until they are married. Then they take the last name of their husbands.

About 20 people gathered March 12 at the Atwoods’ home for an informal celebration of the six-month anniversary of the Win family’s arrival.

Asked if there is one thing he dreams of, Kyi Win said, “More education for the girls.”