Rebecca Blu, the second of four sisters, remembers running back to the little village in Myanmar where her family had first fled, to check for food. She remembers the bombs dropping around her and the bullets flashing past as she followed her older sister Julia, and the Burmese army closed in on Karen State.

The girls would spend the first six years of their lives running and hiding from soldiers in the forests of their homeland. Then in 1994, they crossed the Thailand border with their parents and brother to the Mae La refugee camp, where they would live for another 15 years.

It was dirty and dangerous in the camp, food was scarce, and in summer sometimes the Myanmar army would attack, sister Lah says. Thousands of Karen people were killed in the civil war that raged for 68 years, about 140,000 made it across the border to the Thai camps.

There Rebecca met Karen man Moo K'Lue Di Gay, who had seen his own village burnt as a boy. Anyone who could not run away was rounded up in the church, and then the church was set alight, Moo K'lue says.

In the panic, he and his 11 siblings ran in different directions. It was only many years later, at refugee camps and through social media, that they all finally found each other again.

Together with their own young children, Rebecca and Moo K'lue (or Eagle as he is known these days) finally got the chance to come to Canberra in 2008 through Australia's refugee intake. Six months later the rest of Rebecca's family followed.

"We love Canberra," Rebecca says.

"We've been to the other cities too, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane ... people always say Canberra is too cold, but for me, it's beautiful, it's the best city."

Eagle works at the Multicultural Employment Service in the ACT, which helped all four sisters improve their English and find work in the aged care and disability sector. Youngest sister Hser is finishing a nursing degree at the University of Canberra, and already eyeing off medical science.

Service director and former diplomat John Gunn said, "They're all doing so well, and Eagle's a bit of a legend.

"He's sort of our gatekeeper, a lot of [refugees] who have been through so much stress and trauma ... their level of trust is very low, but [Eagle] has brought whole communities to us, not just his own."

Last financial year, despite shrinking under budget constraints, the service still found more than 100 refugees and mirgants jobs. This year Mr Gunn expects that number will surge, thanks to a $307,000 funding hit from the ACT government.

"We had a great language program going using phonetics to teach people not just the words but the jargon, because for a lot of our refugees they've never been in a business before," Mr Gunn said.

"We'd see results from that in just a matter of weeks, they were job-ready, and that had such a big impact on people with say 500 hours of English under their belt who still couldn't be understood. But we had to shut it down the last six months of last year [due to] funding. Now we can ramp that up again.

"For a lot of people, it's about building confidence as well."

The money comes as wait times for national refugee employment services blow out to six months under this year's federal budget, and many families struggle with homelessness.

In their first years in the capital, Eagle recalls setting up a tent for the family to sleep through a freezing Canberra winter, before a case worker stepped in and handed them the keys to a home.

This year, a new specialist homelessness service for migrant families will be developed in the ACT, while last year's budget awarded the Migrant and Refugee Settlement Service an extra $40,000 a year to beef up its English language teaching. The government has also expanded its own work placement program, which combines formal training at the Canberra Institute of Technology with work experience in the ACT public service, from 20 to 25 places.

In the refugee camps, the Blu sisters said their mother had always been sick but here she was healthy again - though that didn't stop her seeing her GP religiously.

"She’s always going to the hospital to get scans, just in case,” Lah laughs."We're happy here."

On Sunday, to mark the end of World Refugee Week and the FIFA World Cup, more than a dozen refugee teams from Canberra and Sydney met for a soccer match at Hawker football centre.