legal clinic

We were fortunate enough last week to receive a visit from the Migrant Assistance Program in Chiang Mai. They provided a clearly articulated, well-organized overview of the migrants' rights to social and welfare services in Thailand, their process of potentially attaining Thai ID cards and nationality, and the different laws affecting their status in Thailand. The MAP folks also patiently answered many questions about specific legal cases and scenarios presented by our community members, taking notes so that they could follow up in the future. We are grateful that they were able to travel rather far and send several Thai- and Shan-speaking workers, all quite knowledgeable, to conduct the workshop/ legal clinic in our community-- after the refugees came home from work, at dusk, on a dirt path amidst the refugees' thatch-roof huts, by the light of single lightbulb on a string!

Clinton's Visit to Burma

US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton visited Burma this week, marking the first high-level visit to Myanmar in half a century. She met with the country's new president, Thein Sein, as well as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Partly because the military government has recently launched a series of reforms (including a promise to release 6,300 prisoners, including political prisoners, in October), Suu Kyi will participate in next year's elections, after her party boycotted last year's. Her National League for Democracy (NLD), will compete for 48 vacant parliamentary seats in the election.

Critics, however, remain wary of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and its election tactics, and urge foreign governments to pay close attention to Burmese politics for the next critical year before rewarding the military junta for its new political and economic policies.

Our refugee community's educational aspirations

Our BRP social workers and a Master's student at NYU recently completed a series of conversations with the refugee families on their educational aspirations and perceptions of the Thai school system. Their findings suggest that our community's children place a high value on education overall, but that they are uncertain of their ability to finish high school and go on to college-- because of financial reasons, discrimination, and lack of know-how.

Some highlights:

. 82% of those surveyed hope to finish university level studies.

. When asked “I don’t understand why I have to go to school when I won’t be able
to get a job after that,” 84% DISAGREED with this statement. When the NGO ZOA Refugee Care administered the same survey in refugee camps, only 69% of students DISAGREED with this statement.

. 58% of the refugee children answered "true" or "somewhat true" to the statement that they were "slow learners.

. 78.9% strongly agreed with the statement, "I feel comfortable in school," but only 42% did so when asked if they felt comfortable with their fellow classmates.

. Finally, the students take pride in their educational activities, but they are apprehensive about their parents (many of whom do not speak Thai and have never attended school) interacting with school officials. Thus, almost 70% wanted their parents to attend a graduation ceremony, but only 11% expected their parents to meet their teachers or help with homework.

These results suggest that the BRP has largely succeeded in relaying the importance of education to the refugee families, many of whom were resistant or felt uncomfortable sending their children to school at first. However, the results also suggest that the BRP staff continue to have their work cut out for them-- in terms of acting as cultural translators and institutional liaisons for families unfamiliar with what any schooling might be like, and helping the students to socialize, cope with stress and marginalization, excel and thrive in school.

Our community and their hopes of return to Burma

As mentioned in our July post, two master's students from England spent time systematically asking the refugees in-depth questions about their hopes for return to Burma, their liminal status in Thailand, and their best chances for a good livelihood along the Thai-Burmese border. We have been using the information they collected in our latest needs assessments for new services.

Among their findings are that many of the younger refugees stated that Shan State in Burma represented "home" to them, even though they were born in Thailand. More pragmatic factors, such as employment and Thai citizenship, tend to influence their place of residency but not their sense of home:

“I don’t want to go back because I have this house but of course Shan state is
always in my heart, my motherland (laughs).”

Still, for many, the political instability at home looms as large (or larger) as a "push" factor than the "pull" factor of economic prosperity in Thailand.

“I sometimes think about Shan state and I want to go back but I know it is too
dangerous. If Burma was peaceful and had no military [rule] like Thailand of course I
would go back.”

“I miss Shan state, but I don’t miss that people were so poor, and we could only just eat, and had to wear many old clothes stitched together. But in Thailand... it is easier to live and make money and even second hand clothes are so much better than in Shan state."

As the refugees have described to BRP staff before, Shan migrants in Thailand both feel like "caged animals" and second-rate citizens "below" Thai nationals:

“I am still scared to live in Thailand because they can still kill, arrest, do anything, although it is still safer than in Shan state.”

“If Burma is a peaceful and developed country I would go back because we have
land and garden there and in Thailand we have no human rights.”

At the same time, some also expressed a counternarrative, that the Shan performed essential tasks that Thais no longer desired.

Caught between such push and pull factors, the refugees' temporary residence is their only means of being-- As one woman described her guest worker visa, "This passport is my life."

Still a precarious situation for Burmese migrant workers in Thailand

The Thai government has just attempted yet another registration round for Burmese migrant workers. Most of the refugees served in the BRP community hold migrant worker visas that cost 3,800 baht a year (approximately $120, quite a hefty sum for day laborers) that tie them to specific occupations (i.e., sharecropping farmer, rock hauler, etc.) AND specific bosses. These bosses hold quite a bit of power over the migrants.

The new Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, has announced a new minimum wage in the country, and it remains unclear how these new wages will affect refugee workers, or even apply to them.

According to the Thailand section of the latest U.S. State Department survey of global trafficking trends, "Observers remained concerned that the process to legalize migrant workers with its associated fees, as well as costs imposed by poorly regulated and unlicensed labor brokers, increased the vulnerability of migrant workers to trafficking and debt bondage."

See the full article here: http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/3796.cfm

Intern check-in

We are currently hosting three interns: Two master's students from England researching shifting identities and notions of nationhood among the refugees, and an undergraduate student from Singapore continuing the arts therapy program we began a year ago. The latest iteration of the arts program focuses on photography.

Here is a quick update from one of the master's students:

All of them are a joy to teach and are always happy to learn! The children... especially the older girls... already know a lot of basic English so we have been refreshing their memories going over themes such as animals, family, introductions, weather and the body. We try to make this as fun as possible with lots of games and drawing! Twice a week we bicycle to [the other community], one day is spent focussing on photography/crafts and the other teaching English. We have started at the beginning with them as they know less English but they are catching on very quickly! Both communites are really enjoying the photography and craft sessions too!

Development Intern position

We have posted a listing for a paid development intern at Idealist.org-- You can find it here.

We are growing as an organization, and we have been doing lots of institution-building-- becoming a trusted partner on GuideStar, collaborating more closely with our board members, working with more on-the-ground interns, etc.-- to make sure our work is sustainable. To these ends, and because we are currently starting a new capital campaign for a new school for Burmese refugees in northwestern Thailand, we are looking for a development, fundraising, and possibly grant-writing intern to help. Our full-time social workers are on the ground in Thailand, but we can provide intensive guidance and supervision in New York.

If you are interested in a specific component of our work (youth education with refugees, public health, etc.), we can also work with you on developing a project that speaks to your particular interests as well. The main purposes of this internship, however, would be to give you hands-on experience in development for a small nonprofit and to help us with our capital campaign.

2011 Annual Report

Our Annual Report is out! It covers everything we've been up to in the past year-- including making a new permanent social worker hire, working with some incredibly resourceful and generous interns, continuing to increase refugee access to educational and health services and greatly expanding our after-school program. It also contains community and political updates, a profile of one of our neediest cases, as well as a breakdown of our 2010 budget.

The report is available here, in PDF form. Do check it out.

spruced-up website

Welcome! We always thought that a very basic website let folks know that we were focusing our efforts on on-the-ground work, but lately, our very basic website was looking a bit sad... even to us. So, here’s our slightly spruced-up website, with lots more photos, a page for our new Banyan School initiative, and a blog, so that you hear from us between our official reports. We hope you like it!