Daniel Pedersen

Part of the relief effort to refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border includes boxes of food and educational material from students at Howell Middle School, New Jersey, USA.

The delivery of the boxes to Primary School No. 14 at Mae La Refugee Camp in Tak Province, northern Thailand, has been greatly appreciated by students at the recently established school.

All the students are new arrivals at the camp.

The principal’s name is Glad S. Htoo and the school only opened this year (2009).

Donations include monthly rice, cooking oil, chilli and fish paste rations and that is all they have to eat, or 7.5 kilograms of rice a month each.

Fish paste can be pretty foul to the uninitiated, but the Karens love it. The paste is a sort of decomposing fish whipped into a dribbly paste that’s mixed through rice to give it a local flavour. Chillies are mixed in to make it a fiery dish.

Students at the school are survivors of systematic attacks by Burma’s ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council, who has murdered and raped the Karen and raised their property to the ground in an attempt to destroy the Karen’s resistance to Rangoon rule.

The children have had to flee their homes with other family members into Thailand.

The SPDC’s final solution to “the Karen problem” and their fight for indepedence is extermination so business interests can claim resource-rich Karen land.

Mae La refugee camp is officially home to about 50,000 people, but unofficially there are a lot more living in this overcrowded camp.

It’s the largest of nine camps stretched out along the border.

These donations by the Howell Middle School will really make a difference.

“Be aware, donate to the relief and support efforts for the Karen.”