Families Who Fled Kuwait Find New Hardship in U.S. : Refugees: The pain of separation from husbands is magnified by the abandonment they feel here at home.

MILFORD, Conn. — Only two months ago, Diane Mihok had it all. Married with a young son, she had a house in Kuwait so big that at first she thought it was an apartment building. She and her husband belonged to a health spa, had a driver, $40,000 in the bank and their own cow for fresh milk.

That was before Iraq invaded the small Persian Gulf nation. “Now I have nothing,” said the 32-year-old refugee.

Forced to flee and leave her husband behind, Mihok and her son are now living with her mother in Connecticut. Like many other recent American refugees, she is just getting by.

Until this week, when the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington sent a $1,350 check, Mihok was on the state welfare roll.

“There’s been no one here to help,” she said. “And I don’t know where my husband is. We may never see him again. I’m really afraid.”

In addition to providing financial assistance to its own citizens, the Kuwait government in exile is assisting Americans married to Kuwaitis and American families who lived in Kuwait five years or more.

Despite the efforts of U.S. and Kuwaiti officials, many relatives of the largest group of American hostages in recent history are beginning to feel abandoned and encountering financial hardships while their husbands and fathers continue to be held overseas.

The nearly 2,000 women and children “have all been thrust into a sea of the unknown,” said Michael P. Saba, founder of the Coming Home Committee, a nonprofit private organization formed specifically to help the relatives and dependents.

Those who arrived on refugee airlifts in recent weeks, clutching small suitcases and teddy bears, have quickly dispersed across the country, piling into homes of friends and relatives, often beyond the easy reach of overworked governmental and voluntary agencies that could help them.

The large and diverse group “exceeds anything our consular officers have ever had to deal with since World War II,” a State Department official said.

Some are foreign-born spouses with no family here to help them and little knowledge of the United States. Others are American citizens who have lived abroad for so long that they no longer have roots here. Still others are dependents of U.S. oil workers, unsure how long their husbands’ paychecks will keep coming, with no end to the hostage situation in sight.

Nearly all of them feel increasingly isolated by President Bush’s unwavering insistence that the hostage issue will not affect U.S. actions in the Persian Gulf crisis.

The plight of the refugees will receive unprecedented attention in Washington today at an “emergency session” to mobilize national resources during the annual meeting of the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy.

“It’s sort of surprising, but basically the country has forgotten about them,” said Dorothea Morefield, whose husband was an American diplomat held hostage in Iran for 444 days a decade ago and who has been invited to speak at the conference.

To be sure, not all the hostage families are in desperate straits.

Some are living in relative luxury with well-to-do parents, like Claudia Ledesma in suburban San Diego, whose father is a clothing manufacturer. She keeps busy caring for four young boys--including twins born in Kuwait three weeks after the invasion.

Others, such as Bonnie Anderton in Colorado, whose husband is in hiding in Kuwait, are still receiving their husband’s paychecks. Still others, like Mihok, are finding themselves virtual strangers in a vastly changed America that they left years ago after marrying Kuwaiti men.

But regardless of individual circumstances, nearly every hostage family can use more help, whether it is to cut through bureaucratic red tape, to pay for long-distance telephone calls or simply for human contact, social workers say.

“A lot of them are destitute,” said John Stein, executive director of the National Organization for Victims Assistance.

“People feel cut off, and they are numb,” added Leslie H. Kern, a Columbus, Ohio, psychologist who has set up a nationwide network of therapists to provide free counseling. “There’s a tremendous amount of fear and uncertainty,” she said. Scores of dependents have called the network’s toll-free number (1-800-USA-GIVE).

According to Kern, Saba, Stein and others:

* Several families have become homeless. “They are Americans, but they’ve lived for so long in Kuwait that they don’t have a hometown or even relatives,” Stein said.

* One such woman was taken in by a stranger last month after a chance meeting at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

* Among those who have received counseling are two children who instinctively dropped to the ground for cover after hearing a loud noise and a woman who panicked after accidentally turning on the garbage disposal at her parents’ home.

But for the most part, the returned women and children are coping in less dramatic ways, often living from one news broadcast to another, following every diplomatic nuance and military maneuver with intense interest--and dread.

“Their lives are emotional highs and lows,” said Kern. “It’s like being on a roller coaster.”

For Anderton and her daughter, Jennifer, 10, such a moment of mixed emotions came when Jennifer easily won the “what-I-did-last-summer” contest at school. After school had let out last spring, she and her family moved to Kuwait, where her husband, Richard, had been transferred by a U.S. engineering firm. Six weeks later, the Iraqis invaded.

“All Jennifer brought to school was a bunch of newspaper clippings, and she won hands-down,” Anderton recalled.

Nearly all of the Andertons’ household goods were still in transit when the Iraqi invasion began. Also lost, Anderton said, is much of their summer mail, including many bills. And now she is being besieged by calls from creditors.

“One company called the other day and said, ‘We’d like to speak to Richard Anderton.’ And I told them I wish I could speak to him myself,” Anderton said.

In rural Tennessee, Denise Ali, 25, said she spends most of her time now “worrying and watching television news--hoping to see my husband reaching a refugee camp.” Like Mihok, she moved to Kuwait after marrying a Kuwaiti. She, too, has no source of income other than a check from the Kuwaiti Embassy.

“They said if the situation doesn’t resolve, we will get another check next month,” Mihok said.

Among the relatively few Kuwaiti men who managed to escape was Michelle Saud’s husband. She said she did not want his name to appear in print, however, because his many relatives may still be in Kuwait.

The couple and their three young children are living in East Lansing, Mich., with her parents.

“He’s trying to find work, but is having trouble because he can’t get a work visa or a green card--he doesn’t have the right documents,” Saud, 28, said. “We left with nothing.” Her husband has a Ph.D.

But not all the refugees have returned home to families. “A surprisingly large number went to the homes of friends,” said Saba, an international businessman based in Champaign, Ill., who also was stranded briefly in Baghdad.

“They either chose not to go home to parents or they had no relatives. We had women 40 to 45 years old, and their parents are either dead or elderly,” Saba said. “The government has no program for these people, except lending money. But $300 or $400 runs out very quickly.”

According to Elizabeth Tamposi, assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, the State Department’s 40-member Kuwait task force continues to work around the clock and tries to contact the hostage families at least once every 48 hours. The task force already has made more than 30,000 such calls.

The task force, Tamposi said, is now “in the process of establishing a system where each family will have its own special caseworker.”

According to Saba, a major complaint among the hostage families is that the task force has offered little help beyond making referrals.

“The task force people just ask: ‘Have you tried this? Have you tried that?’ ” Saba said.

He set up Coming Home after returning from Baghdad when, he said, he realized that most of the hostage families felt isolated and abandoned. The committee tries to provide callers with help and puts families in touch with others.

OTHER GULF STORIES, A8-13