Day 1--or Thereabouts

It's Monday Feb 11 where I am. I don't think it's quite gotten to be Monday Feb 11 back home yet--or, at least, people haven't waken up to Monday yet. It's around 3:15p here and we're done with our agenda for the day so some folks have wandered back to their rooms for a rest--I and my roommate, Belinda Jeung, have decided we're much better off if we ... just ... keep ... moving. So we're going to head out to do some sightseeing in a little bit. But I wanted to update you on what occupied our time today. What an incredibly informative day this has been!

Our first meeting was with Sally Thompson of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, or TBBC. Sally gave us an excellent overview of the history of the refugee situation in Burma, as well as statistics and some predictions for the future. When she first started with TBBC they were working with about 10,000 refugees; now there are 145,000 refugees in 9 camps along the Thai/Burma border. There are many cases of families with four generations living in the camps; whole villages are displaced at one time and move into the camps as a whole.

Between 1996 and 2007, 3,077 villages were destroyed, forcibly relocated or abandoned because of pressures from the Burmese army. In 2007, a further 167 villages were displaced last year. In most cases, the army moves in and tells the villagers they have three or four days to relocate.

Over half of the Karen in the camps have been there over 10 years, some have lived there 25 years or more. (I vividly recall one of the Karen men who has relocated to Rochester telling us that he'd been in the camps for over 15 years, and all of his children were born there.) There are whole generations of Karen growing up knowing nothing but life in the camps.

The numbers are staggering: there are 145,000 residents in the nine refugee camps. But added to that are 503,000 (estimated) displaced persons still living in Burma--many in hiding or temporarily relocating to other villages; and there are about 2 million "migrant" workers--or those that move into Thailand seasonally to work and escape political pressures and come back when they deem it safe again.

I asked Sally about whether there were any statistics on the incidence of refugee women and girls (or men and boys, for that matter) ending up victims of sexual trafficking. She confirmed that it is a very real problem, and the numbers would be quite high, but she didn't have any specific statistics. As can be imagined, it's difficult to get numbers for those kinds of things. But tomorrow we meet with Annie Dieselberg at Night Light Ministries, and later in the trip we'll be visiting the New Life Center and meeting with Karen Smith and Kit Ripley, so I'll definitely be getting a clearer picture of how the Karen refugees are victimized through sexual trafficking.

Our second meeting was with Genevieve Juli (although I'm not sure I'm getting her name right--sorry) of the International Organization for Migration. She explained to us the work of IOM and how it relates to the UN and the United States. I'm still not entirely clear on the flow chart--I will need to do more studying up on that. But the key pieces of information I received from this conversation was that Thailand is beginning to get more restrictive on whether they're allowing as many refugees to depart. They're concerned about the "pull factor"--the more refugees that are successfully relocated, the more refugees that tend to show up to fill their places in the camps. For example, Tampien camp (and no, I'm probably not spelling that correctly), was one of the first to be "emptied" because the Thai government hoped to close down the camp and use the land for other things. However, the camp originally had 9,000 residents--the vast majority of those refugees were relocated...and now the camp is back up to having 9,000 residents again.

For those of us who have Karen and Chin in our communities who are waiting for family members and friends to be released for relocation, it was eye-opening to learn where the bottlenecks occur, and it's not always where one would expect. In many cases, provincial Thai governors have the last say...in other cases, it's higher up the political food chain. And there often is little rhyme nor reason.

Mae La camp, the one we'll be visiting later in the trip, has over 40,000 registered residents--and not all of the residents are registered ("registration" being another step in the process controlled by the Thai government). That's the size of a small city!

We also learned quite a bit about the cultural orientation and other preparation that refugees go through prior to heading to their relocation country, and basics about the resettlement process itself.

Our final meeting of the day was at the International Rescue Overseas Processing Entity. We had more conversation about the refugee resettlement process (as you can imagine, it involves a lot of paperwork). This is where I learned more about the registration process itself and, again, how subject it can be to political whim. Indeed, the Karen especially, although all the refugee populations of Burma deal with similar issues, are completely at the whim of various governments and people in authority. They simply want to have a home, to work, and to raise their families, and often every roadblock is put in their way.

I am spending my time praying for each and every nameless person that is living in those camps. May God clear a path for every one of them to a better life.