Anyone heard about the Refugee crisis in Burma?

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Anyone heard about the Refugee crisis in Burma?

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The family has been here, an overflow area beyond the main camp’s borders, for 20 days. All six of them live in a tent built from tarps purchased in the nearby village of Moria, bought for 100 euros. It’s still warm in the sun, reaching as high as 60 degrees, but at night temperatures plummet — and the camp’s atmosphere assumes a sinister presence as women and children huddle inside their tents. Meervat was last able to wash with her mother inside the camp four days ago, but only with cold water. The water is turned on sporadically, so there are always queues. If you want hot water then you get up before 5 a.m. “We cannot go then because the sun is not up,” she said, it is “too dangerous.” When she has her period it is even worse: She has to be with her mother all the time. “We have to go to the toilet more and it is very, very dirty,” she said. It was difficult to find pads, and her mother, Reem, says they have to send Mustafa into the local shop to buy them, or else try to use rags littering the camp. They fled the city of Deir ez-Zor three months ago, after government troops assumed control, having endured three years of ISIS’s reign. “I know the sounds of all the bombs,” she noted. But she was the “most afraid” of ISIS, not the bombs. “ISIS wouldn’t let my parents let me outside,” she said. She doesn’t know what happened to her friends back home — they haven’t spoken in a year. “The last time we talked, all we spoke about [was how] ISIS had surrounded everything and they could not get out. Since then, we haven’t been able to speak at all.” The family left Syria and walked through the mountains. “I had to walk for hours and hours barefoot, and stones cut my feet.” A smuggler took them, and 80 other people, over the sea in a rubber dingy. “It was my first time and the last time on a boat,” Meervat stated very firmly. “When my mother got on the boat, I saw all the other women sit on her, all over her. I couldn’t move on the boat: I was stuck between lots of people, all stuck together.” When they got to the camp, it wasn’t what she expected. “I thought it would be like paradise, but here I feel like a hostage.” “I don’t know any other girls [here], but I sometimes see other girls — but I cannot speak to them, because I have to stay all the time in the tent. I don’t know anyone: I can’t get away from my parents. [But] I prefer staying with them, because it is too scary to try and make friends.” Meervat misses her TV. Although she hadn’t been able to watch TV since ISIS occupied the city, the “Syrian channel is my favorite, because it has all my favorite actors.” Behind her — as the translator listens to her answer — Reem laughs for the first time, amused at what her eldest daughter misses from home. But Meervat has exchanged one trap for another, “All the time I have to be covered up,” she said, tugging on her leopard-print hijab. Later, 39-year-old Mustafa speaks quietly and explains the family was previously living inside the camp. “My daughter is 15 years old,” he said again, looking at her smiling in the sunlight, playing with her 7-year-old sister, Meisam, and 5-year-old brother, Toka. “It is a bad situation.” “When I take her inside, the men look at her, and try … to touch her. A lot of men came around our daughter and wanted to take her away.”

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Burma is just another country that got fricked by decades of British colonialism.

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I'd say Burma's decades-long single-party military authoritarian rulers had more to do with their problems...

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these are reasons why you should be thankful you live in America

not because of Christmas and tax breaks

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