I forgot I never really explained myself when I said that the refugee camp was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. In lieu of that, I'm sure I sounded like a psychopath again. At least a sociopath. Nevermind, this is why:
It's that the people there were some of the worst off people in the entire world, and here they were building a community out of nothing. More than that, it's as though entire communities had retransplanted themselves onto this beautiful landscape, renamed itself after names of the old villages, and went back to daily living. From what I understand, a new family arrives from their most recent massively traumatic experience, after hiking for a week in the jungle to get to safety, and they're helped in all ways by the experienced folk who'd been there for a few years now. Suddenly, they go from running in the jungle with a baby on their backs, dodging landmines to avoid the Burmese military who's chasing after them, to having a little shack with some fellow villagers they may have known in the past. They get food, water and shelter. Now all they do is wait.
In the meantime, the place has become infested with children under 10 years old. The camp's been there for almost 20 years, and waiting has turned into a way of life. But the kids don't know any better. They love it. There are giant soccer games, and children laughing and playing up and down the muddy banks of the hill.
I heard that yesterday the Americans came with 8 large trucks and took 320 people out of the camp for resettlement in the US. Now THAT's impressive, something I'd assumed was acompletely given up in the midst of all this recent anti-immigration furor. They promise to take 10,000 refugees per year, and other countries like Canada, England, and i think Australia are taking smaller amounts. On one hand, this is great considering there are only 150,000 refugees sitting in camps along the border. On the other hand, the Burmese are taking this as a "go ahead" to kick more natives down the mountain to the refugee camps on the Thai side. For every refugee that gets resettled, they say, two more come in.
Another side of the story is that we, as Americans, tend to take the best and the brightest from the world. Of course, it only makes sense for us to do, but this means that the medical clinics in these camps are consistently drained of their staff. The clinic in the camp I went to said they had 33 medics at the end of May. Now they have 28. By the end of the month, they'll have 23, and they'll be down to a dozen by the end of the rainy season. That's a dozen under-trained staff to handle about 60 beds (I wasn't counting very carefully), a pharmacy, and a complete outpatient department during the height of the rainy (disease) season in a refugee camp of 50,000! Understandably, they're rapidly training more staff with intensive, incomplete courses of 7 months instead of 18. The US has a policy of resettling refugees based on their relative "risk." Whatever that means officially, educated refugees are much more valued.
It turns out there's also a population of Indians and Bangladeshis who come to the camps in hopes of getting resettled as Burmese. Now there are members of the American resettling staff whose job it is to try to determine who's really Burmese and who's not.
There are also Muslims in the camps. As our guide told us, even though they make up only a few percent of the total population, when resources get scarce they're the ones who cross neighborhood boundaries to steal from the other side of town. This is the local opinion of Muslims who have absolutely nothing to do with the Muslims that make the headlines anywhere else in the world. I should probably also say that 60% of the camp is Christian.
That's enough for now.