In June, Executive Director of the Bowling Green International Center, James Robinson, traveled to Thailand to visit Burmese refugee camps.

Many of the people living in these camps have been migrating to Bowling Green and Warren County.

For Robinson, the trip and its ties to Bowling Green were an eye-opening experience.

"We are re-settling people... refugees from Burma for the past 3 years," says Robinson.

"If you want to do this job and know it well then you need to go wherever your population is coming from," he continues.

So Robinson took a trip to the "Mae Lae" and "Umpeian" camps in northern Thailand.

The "Mae Lae" camp holds between 50,000 and 80,000 people.

Many of them starving and impoverished.

"As we talked to them on the side of the road they were just begging "please, please, please". I'll do anything and work my job, I will do anything I can to go and live somewhere else so I can take care of my family," recalls Robinson.

The "Umpeian" camp isn't much different with only "one" source of water and limited utilities for its nearly 50,000 residents.

In the past 3 years, more than 600 Burmese have been brought through a government program to Bowling Green.

Robinson says they are thriving and adjusting well to our community.

"90% of them have received employment within 90 days of arrival and are self-sufficient. They are buying cars and they are buying homes," says Robinson.

Which has contributed greatly to the local economy.

"One figure that I have received is an estimate that over the past 10 years, refugees have bought around 1000 homes in the Bowling Green- Warren County area which was estimated at $13 million to the county."

Robinson concluded through his trip the camps in Thailand and the community of Bowling Green are as different as night and day.

But he says the immigrants who have been transplanted from one to the other are breaking the cycle of their homeland.

"They are the defining person in that family line that's going to make a difference of living a life of poverty and of scorn and of war."

In addition to 600 Burmese refugees, Bowling Green and Warren County is also home to 100 Iraqis, a couple hundred Cubans and Africans and Butanese.