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SALT LAKE CITY — The restaurant business is a challenging one. It's even more challenging if you're Haymar Janumonya, a refugee eight thousand miles from home.
She grew up in Burma, now Myanmar, a country plagued by civil war and oppression by a military dictatorship. When she was a teenager she literally walked away from her country. She walked 19 days and sneaked across the border to Thailand.
"Yeah, we (were) really scared," she said.
Resettled in Utah, she struggles with a new language and a foreign way of doing business. Until recently, she and her husband, Banyar, both worked two jobs.
That's why the International Rescue Committee and Salt Lake County are giving Janumonya a little help through the Spice Kitchen Incubator. The program assists refugees, immigrants and others trying to start food businesses.
Janumonya has a catering business and hopes to eventually open her own restaurant. Spice Kitchen employees helped her get permitted and licensed, worked with her on a menu plan, and gave her access to their 5,000 square feet of kitchen and warehouse space.
"Many of them (immigrants and refugees) are going through a transition where they're figuring out how to integrate the things that they know, their traditions and skills, into their new lives here in the United States," said program manager Grace Henley. "And so I think that gives them a sense that they're providing something in the community that's of value to them and also of value to the place that they're moving into."
Recently Janumonya and her husband opened the Sonjhae Asian Market, named after their 1-year-old daughter, Sonjhae. There they stock the shelves with tastes of Thailand and Burma — tea leaf salad, noodles, dried fish.
For Janumonya, the food is more than a business and a taste of her homeland; it's a connection to family.
When she eats Burmese food, she remembers her mother, she said.
"This is food my mom she cook for me," she said with a tear in her eye. "We miss her is feel sad, you know, because we stay far. She cook really good. When we see (the food) we miss, I miss her."
