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GREENSBORO — By 4:45 a.m. Thursday, the lights came on in one kitchen after another at LeMans Apartments on Lawndale Drive, where Twa Har prepared for his 90-minute carpool to a Perdue Farms chicken plant.

Carrying his lunchbox, hunching his shoulders against the cold, he and his neighbors piled into the silver Nissan Quest his brother-in-law had warmed up for eight passengers, taking to the empty road by 5:15.

Har is one of hundreds of Burmese refugees from Greensboro and High Point recruited to work this year on the processing line at the Rockingham plant on U.S. 220 in Richmond County, replacing the Latinos leaving amid tighter immigration enforcement.

And at age 20, Har is the sole breadwinner for his family: his ailing father, a retired Burmese boxer; his mother; and a brother in ninth grade at Page High School.

His is one face of Guilford County’s new wave of refugees. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, brought resettlements to a screeching halt, local agencies project that as of this month, Guilford County will return to the pre-2001 levels that created a robust Asian and African influx here in the 1990s.

But in contrast to previous arrivals, refugees now are greeted with scant resources in a battered Triad economy. And after their long wait for the Golden Door to reopen, they must draw upon raw survival skills to prevail.

“There was a saying in the refugee camps,” said interpreter Joyce Niang, a schoolteacher and former refugee. “Praying can get you into heaven. But it can’t get you into the United States.”

On a recent Sunday afternoon, a rare day together in the Har family’s apartment, the patriarch of the house sat barefoot and cross-legged on a mat, ready to tell the story.

At 80, Ar Jon still has the physique of a boxer but is wracked with joint and back pain that renders him weak and unable to work. This pales next to the pain of regret: A stroke of bad luck forced the parents to leave three sons behind in the refugee camp where the family was trapped in limbo for more than two decades.

Bordered by India, China and Thailand, Myanmar (formerly Burma) is a hot spot that observers increasingly compare to North Korea and Vietnam in human rights abuses and to Darfur in sheer numbers of people displaced.

The impoverished and repressive country, in the hands of a military junta calling itself the State Peace and Development Council, is known for anything but. It is notorious for human trafficking, forced conscription of young boys into the army and imprisonment without due process of everyone from ordinary citizens to opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest.

When Ar Jon’s family was at last about to end a 22-year stay in a Thai refugee camp with the arrival of U.N. interviewers, disaster struck: Three of Ar Jon’s sons happened to miss the interview, having stolen away from the camp that day to work as carpenters.

The parents faced an agonizing choice. Should the whole family stay behind in the camp? Or should those with papers leave for freedom in the U.S.?

“They said, 'Please, go ahead without us,’ ” said the father, who wept as he told the story through an interpreter. “Now, I have to rely on my one son. He is young, and he has to work all the time. I worry about him.”

* * *

The cutting room at the Perdue plant is too loud for conversation. Then again, there is little time to talk.

One after another under the fluorescent lights, cold, wet, bluish-white chickens are jerked along a conveyor belt. Mounted upright like naked mannequins, they stop at increments in front of workers in rubber boots, white coats and surgical masks. The workers keep their eyes and their sharp knives on the target.

Each employee has a single task, rotated hourly. Snip off the right wing or the left, the leg, the tenders — a disassembly line for chickens. Boneless breast cutters are considered most skilled at $10.60 per hour, about $1 more than the rest.

As bells and buzzers sound above the churn of machinery, back-lit signs overhead display production goals and actual output next to the name of each employee, many of them Burmese. Of 1,200 workers, 208 are Burmese, and Perdue is recruiting more.

Any pieces of bone left in the fillets can be traced back to the employee; conversely, so can too much meat left on the bone going to waste. This is the reason the plant still does the operation by hand, instead of more cheaply by machine.

It is a labor-intensive business that operates on a slim profit margin in a warehouse that is roughly the temperature and feel of melting snow.

“It’s cold and it’s wet and most people just don’t like it,” said human resources manager Jim Brown. “The Burmese are hard workers with a strong work ethic. They’re here every day. We have no clue what these people have been through.”

Above on a platform, Brown points to young Har’s upstairs neighbor from Greensboro, Htin Lwai, a man he calls “the fastest 61-year-old I know.” Lwai rapidly moves chicken breasts from a conveyor to a tray as an employee below shovels crushed ice, as if stoking a frozen furnace.

In his native Rangoon (now called Yangon), the old seaside capital before the junta renamed everything, the slender, bearded Lwai was a sugar cane farmer living peacefully, with plenty to eat. When the government took over the fields, he was forced into “portering” for the army — carrying materiel through mine fields without pay.

Coming from a country where one in three children is malnourished and the per-capita income is 80 cents a day, a job starting at $9.70 an hour would presumably represent a boon.

Still, Lwai hesitates to move his wife and four children, ages 4 to 13, from Greensboro to Rockingham, as Perdue managers encourage workers to do.

His children are doing better in school than they had at first, and in Greensboro, he has the beginnings of a network in the emerging Burmese community: ESL teachers such as Joyce Niang and her husband, David Pau, along with Burmese neighbors, a place to worship, a place to shop for familiar foods.

So far, said Perdue’s Brown, about 60 Burmese have moved for work. The phenomenon, not unique to the Rockingham plant, is changing refugee migration patterns across the country, said Sarah Ivory of Church World Services in Greensboro:

“It’s not something we’re pushing people toward,” said Ivory, who prefers to place refugees in jobs closer to home, without long commutes and time away from family. “But refugees are survivors. If they’re hearing, 'We can get a job at this place next week,’ they may not want to wait.”

Part of this desperate desire to work — for many Burmese, in particular — is the fact that they spent 15 to 25 years in refugee camps merely existing, with no opportunity to work, Ivory said.

Usually, the decision to give up on one’s homeland and register as an international refugee is a recognition that there is no other hope for the future, she said.

“What everybody really wants is to be home,” said Ivory, who traveled to refugee camps on the Myanmar-Thai border. “They’re not looking to be dropped on the other side of the Earth in a place where they don’t understand. They want to be home.”

For Manlam Niang, 40, home is a damp cinder-block flat at on the back end of Avalon Trace apartments in east Greensboro, where she takes care of her 2-year-old daughter all week and waits for her husband to get home.

Thang Haulian, 35, has found a way around the daily commute to Perdue: He rents a second place in Rockingham with three other workers and stays there during the week.

That leaves his wife home alone all week in a high-crime neighborhood, unable to speak the language and with no backup recently when their child got the flu.

On the other hand, they’ve been through worse. Haulian rolls up his pant leg to reveal the scar where he says soldiers beat him with a rifle butt after his arrest on suspicion of supporting dissidents.

His aunt bribed a guard with alcohol and swiped the keys to the jail while the soldiers slept.

“Don’t tell every detail,” Haulian’s wife advises an interpreter. “We’ll take all day.”

So it was that he escaped from Myanmar across the Indian border, and they met up in Malaysia, where refugees do not have legal status. Soldiers confiscated their money, jewelry and good clothing.

Fearful of being sent back to Myanmar, wary of the threat of human trafficking, they finally made it to their U.N. interview and the chance for deliverance to the U.S.

But looking out on the bleak dirt yard at Avalon Trace, as a wet Sunday afternoon wanes and the hour nears to leave for the work week in Rockingham, Thang Haulian still feels like a displaced person.

Far from his tropical home in Asia, he is in transit, a number on someone’s screen, marking time before he settles his family in a real home.

“Things are not what we thought. We still struggle with our daily life,” he said. “We’re very careful, afraid of making a mistake, sweating every day, even though it’s cold.”

His wife has had two miscarriages since they got to the U.S. When he is gone, which is most of the time, she is sleepless, isolated, afraid to answer a knock at the door.

“All this time we have been praying a lot for God to give strength to us,” she said. “And to send us to the place where you want us to be.”

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com