Life in Mae Ra Moe Refugee Camp

Mae Ra Moe (Mae Ra Ma Luang in Thai) is a refugee camp of 16,000 residents, most who are of Karen ethnicity. The Karen have been persecuted for decades by the Burmese military government, known by residents as the SPDC. Mae Ra Moe opened in 1995 and is the third largest camp of 9 Karen refugee camps. What's life like in a refugee camp? First, you can imagine one of those nights when a storm would blow through your town and knock out the electrical power. Imagine shuffling for a flashlight or that drawer in the kitchen where some candles are hidden. For a moment you might need to rely on those lights in the darkness. But imagine further that, for some reason, the lights never came back on. What would any of us do? And, imagine that no one had an answer as to why the electricity wasn't working after a couple of weeks. I know how I might react: tremendous frustration. The fridge would keep nothing cold. The food would spoil. I'd have to learn to drink everything from the tap of room temperature. Imagine that there wasn't any gas for cooking and you'd find a way to build a fire and cook. And, without a hot water heater working, the showers would be refreshingly, and maybe annoyingly, cold. Imagine you could use your car, but there wouldn't be any gas for SOME REASON either. Maybe only gas generators would be only used to give power to hospitals and left to help bring comfort to the most vulnerable, especially the elderly and the sick. What would we do without our cars, televisions, computers, and phones once the electricity ran out, once the gas and the batteries ran out, once the conveniences we knew so well seemed to run out? I'd like to think that we Americans might react in a similar way that the Karen who live in Mae Ra Moe Camp have reacted. What would happen is that people would come outside. They would open their windows. In the street they would meet and talk and even discover their neighbors. Maybe for the first time, they would discover how to share the bread of vulnerability for the first time, play cards by candlelight, and maybe too someone would start playing a guitar. And there'd be singing. And, if the lights suddenly came on again, what would we remember of our ordeal? What names, what "I-know-who-lives-here" would be indelible on our memories? And, what passover, what seder moment would we, if we did, commemorate for future generations to recall, and announce to the youngest a hundred years later - "you too also went through the desert of freedom for 40 years in one pair of shoes, showered with cold water, and depended on the hospitality of strangers for your daily bread"? What foliage of kindness would we each recall and taste as "if it were yesterday"? And remember how much we are meant to be connected. When God took on flesh, He moved into our neighborhood. - Eugene Robinson