First Week Details

09/02/09 4:54pm

Today I learned some very interesting facts about refugee camps, refugee resettlement as well as the organization I am working for, Karen Women’s Organization (KWO)- http://www.karenwomen.org/ . In terms of the camps I learned that there are 9 refugee camps in Thailand, 7 that host Karen refugees. There are several minority groups that coexist in Burma but the Karen are one of the larger ones displaced creating a large percentage of the populations in the camps. These nine camps are located along the stretch of the Thai/Burma border and they can be quite massive in scale. The smallest camp hosts around 8,000 refugees while the largest one hosts around 30,000 refugees. How many total refugees there are in the camps depends on who you ask. If you ask United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), they only include those that are formally registered so the numbers will be lower, like 90,000-100,000, but if you ask the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), which is a collaboration of 11 International Non Government Organizations (INGO), they will say the number is much higher, more like 150,000-160,000, in the camps and this is due to the fact that many friends and family will arrive at the camps illegally, sneak in and stay. This can become a political issue since how many people are in the camps determines how many supplies to provide. I guess sneaking in isn’t as hard as it may seem since the border of the camps here are only barbed wire, but the trick is to make it down the long, open road which is where a lot of the illegal refugees are caught. If they are caught many are brought back across the border, where some find a way to quickly return but others can’t afford to sneak back financially, and often it will be days of travelling to reach the camps they were at to begin with.

When I asked today one of the KWO staff members if the office was a secret place, she said kind of but that the Thai police know of their location. In fact last year they came and arrested the whole staff one day but some of the staff were friends with the Thai police so all they had to do was call them to release them. The cost was 15,000 baht ($440 dollars) for 10 of them. Many times it is just about the money. She then said that if it happens again, don’t worry, someone will call me and let me know not to come to the office that day (?!) The staff, along with some of their friends and family, live in a building right behind and adjacent to the office building. Today I saw the housing and it is just simple square rooms which multiple people share, using mats for beds. There is a common, large kitchen space, a room to make their products they sell to generate income and a large meeting room. The office from the outside just looks like two garage doors and boarded windows on top, like an abandoned building. They are not allowed to leave a very small area surrounding the office and their housing location since very few of them have proper registration cards.

Focusing more on the organization itself, I learned that KWO was established in 1949 and they assist in women’s related issues in 7 of the 9 camps. I didn’t realize it was such a large operation but there are around 49,000 women who take part in some shape or another, and the main programs that they manage include ones such as the Special Education program, Safe House program, Dormitory program, Nursery School program and ones I still need to learn about. There also are several other projects running at the same time such as literacy projects and trainings. In each camp for KWO there is a committee to help with the success of the programs which include a chairwoman, secretary, treasurer, accountant, auditor and office manager. There are also program managers and program assistance in all the camps. There are 3 KWO offices outside the camps that focus on mainstreaming the programs throughout the camps as well as all the major administration requirements, such as grant writing, proposal writing, and progress reports. They look at the large picture and see where there can be areas for improvement after collecting information from all the camps. Since it can be dangerous as well as not totally financially feasible, many times communication among the camps is done through phone.

I am working at one of these 3 offices and my job right now is to help edit a lot of the documents that need to be submitted to the donors to ensure their funding is stable and since nearly all of the donors are in English speaking countries, this can be important. I also will be helping research new locations to market their goods, find new funding sources and any other general research. In addition they would like me to attend some of the monthly meetings where the surrounding INGOs meet to discuss the happenings in and round the camps as well as the best way to collaborate together. Organizations such as the UN and IRC attend and I will be interested to see how such large institutions work together. Today I was also told by one of the staff that since they travel to the camps frequently for meetings that I could accompany them one day to see what the camp is all about, I look forward to that day! I know there is a lot more to learn but this is a good start.