Escape From Burma

The world's longest-running civil war has forced 400,000 refugees into neighboring Thailand. But Thailand has had enough. Now 80,000 Burmese -- including two girls who've endured the unimaginable -- are headed for the U.S.

Memories of Her Mother

Moo Nay Paw has only fleeting memories of her mother. She remembers her long, dark hair and the faint outline of her beauty, unblemished by the labor of raising three children in the rugged jungles of Burma. She remembers the sweet treats her mother prepared from yellow pumpkins and roots, steamed and sugared to become a young girl's treasure. And Moo Nay Paw remembers the night when she was seven and her fingers felt the bullet hole in her mother's back.

Of the years before and since, she has other memories. She remembers brutality-at the hands of Burmese soldiers during their periodic sweeps of the mountain villages along the country's border with Thailand. And death -- of her brother and others from fever. And still more murders -- of her father, her family's friends, and countless others by the junta's soldiers. But amid all this, as clear as yesterday, is the memory of the night ten years ago that set in motion the destruction of her family.

It began with a journey. Moo Nay Paw belongs to the Karen, a tribe whose desire for an autonomous homeland has triggered relentless and brutal attacks by the government's military (which changed the country's name to Myanmar in 1989). To escape the danger, her parents gathered their children and belongings and forded the Moei River to Thailand, settling with other refugees in a small fishing village where they thought they'd be safe. But an international boundary proved as inconsequential to the Burmese army as it had to the fleeing Karen; from a hilltop across the river, troops shelled the village. Moo Nay Paw's family and two friends set out again, this time back across the river to her father's childhood village, Hta Oak, in Burma's misty mountains.

The trek took the family through dangerous territory, but her father and his friends were careful. They stuck to well-worn paths cleared of land mines, and when they came to one of the handful of roads the regime had built for troop deployment, the men strained to detect signs of soldiers nearby. Resting high against the side of a hill, they were sure they were safe. "But the Burmese army was on the other side of the hill," recalls Moo Nay Paw. "They heard all, they were so close." As the group came upon a telltale boot print on the trail, the soldiers opened fire.

Now 17, Moo Nay Paw speaks softly in the cautious English she learned in a Thai refugee camp. Her features-dark olive skin, a wide, round face, and black hair-are unmistakably Karen. She has large, serious eyes that suddenly melt into liquid when she smiles, often at the oddest moments in a conversation. She speaks of death, heartache, and misery with almost clinical detachment, as if this weren't her story at all. And in a way it isn't; it's a communal story among the Karen, in which only details differ.

Moo Nay Paw's family was caught in the world's longest-running civil war. For almost 60 years, the Karen -- one of Burma's largest ethnic minorities, totaling some 7 percent of the population -- and a handful of other tribes have struggled for freedom from the Burmese majority. That freedom once seemed within their grasp. The Karen helped the British administer their colonies starting in the late 19th century and fought with the Allies in World War II against the Japanese, with whom the Burmese sided. In return for their loyalty, the Karen were led to believe the British would grant them autonomy. But when Burmese independence came in 1948, Britain forgot its promise. The commander of the Burmese army, Ne Win, launched an offensive to bring the tribes under central rule, an effort that only intensified when, in 1962, he staged a military coup and became the country's dictator. He died in 2002, but dictatorial rule continues today.

The Karen National Liberation Army insists its soldiers are holding their ground. But with just 4,000 fighters and weapons from the Vietnam War era and earlier, the guerrillas are outgunned and outmanned. The junta's strategy, meanwhile, is simple: to force submission by attacking villages and cutting off the food and supply lines that feed the resistance. Its tactics: enslavement, torture, rape, execution.

"Where is Your Mother?"

When the gunfire erupted on the hill, Moo Nay Paw's family scattered. She and her mother dove off the path and hid behind a tree. They heard shouts and more shots, and then her mother slumped beside her. "I reached for her and I was calling, 'Mommy, Mommy,'" Moo Nay Paw remembers. "There was no answer." The girl's hands found her mother in the dark and felt the warm blood on her chest. "I could feel the hole in my mother's back," she says flatly. "I knew she was dead, but I couldn't move. I was very afraid. I cried a lot, but not too loud." Moo Nay Paw curled up against her mother's body, hugging it tightly and quietly sobbing.

When the shooting stopped, a soldier pulled Moo Nay Paw from her mother's body and delivered her to what remained of her family -- her brother and sister and her father, who had been treated roughly. "My father said, 'Where is your mother?'" Moo Nay Paw recalls. "I told him she was dead." His hands bound, he begged the soldiers to let him see her body, to bury her. They refused, then relented. In the dark of night by the side of the trail, he buried his wife and pleaded to be shot. But the junta had other plans for him.

At daybreak, the soldiers marched him and his children to a nearby encampment, where they joined other prisoners, all waiting for the day when the squadron would move on and they would be used as porters. In the regime's efforts to bring the country under its control, indigenous tribesmen are forcibly recruited to haul materials as pack mules, often going without food and water for days and being left for dead when they can no longer work. Moo Nay Paw's father plotted his family's escape, and late one night, they slipped out of the camp and fled to Hta Oak.

Moo Nay Paw and her family lived there with her grandparents for about a year. Her father worked as an itinerant farmer to support them, leaving at dawn and returning after dark.

Before long, however, her brother died, and caring for the two girls became too much for her grandmother. Moo Nay Paw's sister, P'Zaw Paw, a quiet girl three years younger with a deformed foot, was sent to stay with relatives in the Mae La refugee camp in Thailand. Moo Nay Paw herself went to another Burmese village to live with her maternal grandmother. Her father said to her, "Don't worry. Stay with your grandmother. I will come back."

But he never did. A week after Moo Nay Paw went to her grandmother's, her father went hunting with a fellow Karen. A troop of soldiers spotted them. The hunting partner escaped, but Moo Nay Paw's father did not. "The Burmese soldiers hit and kicked him," she recalls her father's friend telling her. "For 30 minutes, they hurt him, and then they shot him."

Moo Nay Paw's grandmother sent her to join P'Zaw Paw at Mae La two years later. The sisters are very close and were happy to be reunited -- but like her sister before her, Moo Nay Paw found that the relative she was to stay with already had too many mouths to feed. With their parents dead and their surviving family unable or unwilling to take care of them, the pair were facing dead-end lives before becoming teenagers.

The war has displaced as many as two million people, some 400,000 of whom have fled to Thailand. At least 150,000 now live in nine refugee camps along the border.

Mae La, the largest, is a collection of bamboo huts on stilts crowded onto small hills. For its 40,000 residents, opportunities for education are limited, and the height of prosperity is to own a small stall or a few pigs. "The Thai have labeled these camps a temporary shelter, but the fact is you have people who were born in the camps, raised in the camps, and now have kids in these camps," says Eldon Hager, a resettlement officer in Thailand with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The Thai government is fed up, partly because of the security risks posed by the military's raids. The United Nations has agreed to resettle willing refugees in other countries, including Australia, Canada, and Norway. The majority-an expected 80,000 -- will come to the United States. Almost 14,000 arrived in 2007, settling in San Francisco, New York, Dallas, and other communities; 17,000 more are expected this year.

Driving Forces

One of the driving forces behind the resettlement is Jim Jacobson, director of a small Michigan-based charity called Christian Freedom International (CFI). For the past decade, he's championed the Karen's cause and trained backpack medic teams to care for the sick and injured inside Burma while establishing schools in the refugee camps.

The best students, including Moo Nay Paw and P'Zaw Paw, matriculate to another CFI school, which teaches English, math, and computer skills with a goal of training future Karen leaders. In addition to hiring full-time staff, Jacobson recruits visiting teachers from the United States.

Among them was Melissa Behrens, a Microsoft manager in her early 30s. Behrens and Microsoft donated ten new computers to the camps, and in September 2003 she took a leave from her job and traveled to Thailand to teach the students basic computer skills. "These kids had never seen electronics like this before," she says. "I showed them how to turn the computer on and off, and I helped them create identification cards with their date of birth, name, and picture."

On her first day in Mae La, Behrens met P'Zaw Paw. "I could not stop staring at her," she says of the frail girl with wavy hair. "We just had this very special connection." During her seven-week stay, Behrens and the girls grew close.

"She makes jokes and makes us feel happy," Moo Nay Paw says of their relationship. Behrens was concerned about P'Zaw Paw's foot: "I asked what I could do about it-in my naive American way, I thought if there's something broken, you see what can be done about it. And of course, over there you just make do and live with it." She paid for P'Zaw Paw to have surgery in Thailand and stayed in touch with the girls via e-mail and letters after returning home to Charlotte, North Carolina.

"When I heard from CFI that the girls might be up for resettlement, I was just beside myself," says Behrens. "I couldn't stop thinking about this." She and her husband, Mark, sought to become the girls' foster caregivers; Moo Nay Paw and P'Zaw Paw shared their enthusiasm.

But more than a year has passed, and the girls remain in Thailand. For single adults and intact families, resettlement can happen quickly and easily. For orphaned children, it's a complex process. The girls' relatives in the Mae La camp have made it clear that they do not want the girls back, but the United Nations is loath to break up even tenuous family connections. The Behrenses faced bureaucratic difficulties in the United States too: They were initially rejected as foster parents in the federal Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program, which is overseeing the resettlement, because they do not live near a URM office.

Even so, they began intensive training in foster care. "We had home inspections, background checks, health exams, CPR training-everything. And I was also writing letters to my Congresswoman," Behrens says. "It's just been so hard to get this done, and it's broken our hearts because what should have taken six months has taken twice as long." The girls are close to being approved for the program. While the couple may be their foster parents, "it's not a guarantee," Behrens says.

She's aware of the huge task in front of her if things work out as she hopes: "It's an unusual thing to want to take in grown teenagers who have been through so much trauma," she says. "But our hearts ache so much for them, and we so want them to have a chance in life, to be loved."

For the girls, too, the issue of resettlement is more personal than political. They understand what's happening in Burma and have said they want their people to be free, but they also have simpler wishes. "I want to go and live with your family," Moo Nay Paw wrote in a recent letter to Behrens. "I can't wait. I want to go this year. I miss you." She signed her letter "With love, from your daughter."

Want to help?

These three charities are making a difference in Burma and Thailand.

--Christian Freedom International runs 12 schools in the country's most remote areas, operates six field clinics that provide medical care, and distributes medicine, food, clothes, and other supplies throughout the country.

--Free Burma Rangers trains relief teams to go into Burma's war zones to provide medical care and supplies and document atrocities (freeburmarangers.org).

--Mae Tao Clinic provides free health care and social services to Burmese refugees and migrant workers on the Thai-Burmese border.

By Neena Samuel

Find information about the relief efforts.