Middle passage

Persecution | Vietnamese refugees testify to safety in America and need for Obama administration—its first international religious freedom report due this month—to stand by those who remain behind | Jamie Dean

Handout/Montagnard Human Rights Organization

On a Sunday morning at the First Montagnard Church of Raleigh, some 250 people from the Central Highlands of Vietnam read in unison a New Testament passage translated into Jarai, their native tongue: "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going."

It's a passage that resonates with this group. Over the last 23 years, thousands of Montagnards—an ethnic minority from Vietnam's Central Highlands—have fled their homeland, usually not knowing where they were going. Most have ended up in North Carolina with the help of refugee resettlement groups, struggling to adjust to a new way of life and worrying about those they left behind.