Burmese families are receiving lessons to help them cope with their new life in Ireland. They spoke to Ruadhán Mac Cormaic,Migration Correspondent.
At this time last month Loomay, his wife and four children were still in the cramped bamboo hut that passed for home for more than a decade.
The Ban Dong Yang camp was a dot in the vast jungle that straddles the Thai-Burmese border and their place a speck within it. Like most of the shacks, it was built on stilts to protect the family from the rains that used to sweep down from the hillside nearby.
The climate was tropical; they slept on the floor.
Now he sits in the top-floor seminar room at the Ballyhaunis Orientation Centre, among a dozen compatriots wrapped in their hats and coats from the December chill. They're listening intently as community dietician Mary Bourke guides them through the dubious pleasures of the Irish diet, with the aid of an interpreter and a table full of plastic replica eggs and biscuits. Everything in the room is labelled - the kettle, the toaster, the iron, the bed.
All are items unfamiliar not only in name - recently, one of the women sat watching the washing machine spin for an hour.
Across the hall, the teenage group is preparing for a visit to the local library by learning how to write their names.
Loomay and his family are among 52 Burmese refugees who arrived in Ireland earlier this month under a UN resettlement scheme; another group came in September and has now been settled in Castlebar.
All belong to the Karen tribe, inhabitants of a mountainous region in the east who fled persecution by Burma's military junta to settle in refugee camps on the Thai side of the border and ended staying for up to 15 years.
"The children seem to get used to things much quicker than us," says father-of-five Takyi Takyi, who came with the first group and is now finding his feet in Castlebar.
"They have made a lot of friends at school. We are the ones who are having problems - progress is slow."
With the help of some 20 agencies, the refugees have been guided through each bureaucratic step, from opening a bank account and finding homes to enrolling their children in school.
The adults attend English classes every morning and daily life has already assumed the rhythms of a routine.
The observations on local quirks roll easily off their tongues ("What struck me most was that Irish people drive a lot of cars - but there's hardly anyone in them most of the time," says Way Sui), but other changes are less tangible.
For Way Day, a 34-year-old mother, coming to Ireland has brought a sense of freedom, of the world unveiling itself.
"I realised I can travel anywhere I want to if I can afford it. In Burma we couldn't do that, even in Thailand we couldn't do that. This is a big thing for me."
"The most difficult thing about being in a refugee camp is that we were not allowed to go free," Takyi adds.
"We were there for 10 years so it became very desperate for us. The best thing would have been to go home but the situation in Burma doesn't seem to be improving so we had no choice."
No choice, perhaps, but all are agreed that coming to Ireland gives their children some of the chances that their parents had to forsake.
"In 10 years' time, I want to be here still because of my children's education. I want to see my children doing well in education.
"If possible, I wish they can become nurses or teachers like the Irish people," says Takyi.
"As for me, I have the same idea," adds Way Day, "but I hope one day my children will be able to help some people back home."