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"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.
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