When a refugee camp is forever
By Julia Lyon | October 13, 2009 | Thailand
A second-grade boy at Mae La Refugee Camp in Thailand looks over the bamboo wall enclosing his classroom.
Mae Sot, Thailand - It's the kids who get tricked. When they grow up in fenced refugee camps, playing on the hard-packed dirt, but never being able to visit another town. When they live next to the town dump playing in trash as toddlers. (That was my disturbing Monday morning.)
Surely those kids, the children of illegal Burmese immigrants, who wade through nasty trash at the Mae Sot city dump don't think this is normal?
I spent my third day at Mae La refugee camp today. The largest in Thailand, it's also one where people have lived for decades. In some cases, they grew up in another camp, which was lit on fire, moved to Mae La, married and had kids. The newest generation doesn't know any other life. And, as some teenage girls told me today, they're happy.
Yet kids do break free here in some cases coming from inside Burma or another camp to go to school at Mae La Camp (costs less, better education). Once they've finished high school, they may go (illegally) to a town in Thailand and continue their studies at a school for migrants.
In this network of handoffs, being a refugee may be the only way out - a real escape to another country. Which would explain why I've encountered so many stories of people buying refugee documents, buying a home in the camps, swapping out family members and impersonating someone else. The issues are so widespread the UN has been documenting and investigating cases. It's believed some of these folks may have already made it to the United States.
You have to wonder if it's the kids who lose all over again.
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What am I doing in Thailand? As part of The Salt Lake Tribune's commitment to refugee coverage, I am on my way to the northern border between Burma and Thailand thanks to the funding of the the International Reporting Project. I hope to understand what the thousands of refugees lived through before they resettled to the United States. Hundreds of Burmese have arrived in Utah over the last few years as a result of a longstanding conflict between the military government in Burma and its minority ethnic groups. Their story came to light when little Hser Ner Moo, 7, was allegedly murdered by another refugee in Salt Lake City in 2008. I will be going to the camp where she was born.
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