A trip to the Border

I had a great experience last week, traveling up to the Thai Burma boarder at Mae Sot to visit a refugee camp and some projects that the Church we go to in Bangkok supports.

We set off in the mini bus on Wednesday morning and arrived in Mae Sot 7 hours later, a long, hot journey! Mae Sot is part of an area home to the Karen people group, a group whose homeland (Karen state) spans across the Thai, Burner border, with the larger proportion in Burma. However this people group are under persecution by the Burmese military regime.

We visited Mae La refugee camp, which is a mass of bamboo huts climbing the side of a mountain (the mountain protects them from shelling by the Burmese). It is home to 49,000 registered refugees, but there is thought to be around 60,000 people actually living in the camp. We were greeted by the women who run the nursery schools and orphanage that the church support, these women were so warm and welcoming. They lead us through the camp to one of their nurseries where the children sang for us in Karen and English, we also had some time to play, which was great fun. The children were beautiful, full of mischief and confidence.





We had been invited to the closing ceremony of Nohbo Academy school, which the Church funds and is in a village close to the camp. The young people were amazing, the speeches were translated into English buy 13/14 year old students, I was so impressed. One boy I spoke to as he was leaving told me that he now had to cross the river into Burma and walk for 3 days through the jungle (which is heavily mined) to get home to his family. Many of the other students were heading back to the camp for their holiday - puts everything into perspective!