Building 752, Maye Saephanh's former home in Sacramento's projects, is just as she remembers it.
Squat. Spare. Sometimes dangerous. But palatial compared with the refugee camp in Thailand where she was born 30 years ago.
"It's strange," Saephanh says, stirring memories as she walks past the identical brick structures of the sprawling New Helvetia public housing complex. "I feel as though my life has come full circle."
At age 30, Saephanh makes her living traveling the globe as a project manager with the Christian relief group World Vision, helping people who suffer because of political injustices and abject poverty.
Once, she points out, she was one of them.
Within Sacramento's Mien population, who came here from Southeast Asia as refugees from communism and struggled to carve out lives in a strange new culture, Saephanh stands out. As a young girl in America, she dealt with poverty, an intense culture clash and the pressures of acting as chief interpreter and problem solver for her parents. Despite those obstacles and others, she became the first in her family to graduate from high school and won a full scholarship to college.
After graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2000, she began ful- filling her dream of helping the world's poor and downtrodden. Her job has taken her to Indonesia, Jordan, and soon to the desperately poor and politically ravaged country of East Timor, where she will spend the next two years working on health, sanitation and employment projects.
"Maye is a wonderful success story," says Sister Catherine Connell, a Catholic nun who became a force in Saephanh's life after her family moved to Sacramento.
From the refugee camp to the projects, and back again.
Saephanh can remember the hot, cramped camps of Thailand, where people stood in long lines for food and vaccinations, and slept shoulder to shoulder inside long, metal buildings. She can remember hearing the roar of commercial airplanes, and listening to her parents talk of one day flying off to a new life in the United States.
As it turned out, life in America was anything but idyllic.
Saephanh's father, a silversmith, had trouble earning enough money to support his family. They moved frequently, to neighborhoods where gunshots erupted in the night and gangs roamed the streets. Maye, the oldest of four children, attended school and learned English, and soon was burdened with many adult responsibilities, from acting as a translator for relatives when they visited the doctor to interpreting bills and other mail.
A fire beneath the calm
When she was 9 years old, she met Connell, who at the time was running Wellspring Women's Center in Oak Park. Wellspring had become a gathering place for neighborhood women, especially the Mien, and their children.
"Maye was so darling. So pleasant, and so helpful to her family," Connell says. "She became like a daughter to me."
Saephanh credits Connell with helping forge her career path by helping her get into Loretto High School, a private, Catholic, college-preparatory school for girls. Knowing that her parents would never be able to afford the tuition, Connell raised a few hundred dollars, then appealed to the school to take Maye as a student.
"I slapped down $500 or so and said, 'This is all I have. Will you accept her?' " Connell recalls. Loretto welcomed her and placed her on scholarship. But as a girl from the projects, Maye felt like the ultimate out-sider.
"I was driving my dad's construction truck to school, and all of the other girls were driving new BMWs," Saephanh recalls. "I was ashamed of where I lived. I didn't have any friends. It was pretty hard."
By that time, Saephanh and her family were on public assistance and living at New Helvetia, their home for six years. She had become a Christian, and her life outside of school revolved around activities at her American Baptist church.
"That was my sanctuary," she says.
At school, counselor Eileen Thomas saw something special in the quiet, serious girl with long, dark hair.
Call the Bee's Cynthia Hubert, (916) 321-1082.
