Burmese Refugee Youth Prevent Addiction & Violence

While the Burmese Refugee Camps on the Thai/Burma Border enter their 3rd decade of existence, young people who were born in the camps are now facing a future of return to Burma.  This will likely be forced upon them in the next two or three years, despite the high talk of Voluntary Repatriation with Dignity, espoused by UNHCR.

These young people who whose only home has been a refugee camp are at a loss as to how to return to a home they have never known.  Their influences have all been from the Thailand side of the border, including Thai youth culture.  Their parents may either be looking forward to go home to a place they remember as children as beautiful and peaceful, until they were forced to run leaving behind the ones who fell to the Burmese Military, their villages burned and everything lost.  Or they be very fearful of returning, as the Burmese Military is still all over their precious land of Kawthoolei (Karen State).

The refugee camps are now a chaotic and unstable place, where rations have been cut and cut and cut again.  Where International donors and organizations have abandoned them and where life has become even more unbearable.  Young people are at higher risk for addiction and suicide as hopelessness and fear overide the events of daily life.

DARE Network continues as a local organization to be available to all refugees who ask for assistance for substance abuse.  Young people in particular continue to come for help with the trap of addiction, as more and stronger drugs enter the camps from Drug cartels in Burma.

Thanks to your support we can and will stay with the refugee youth through this tough transition and beyond.

This is Liz.  Every year since 2004, Liz has made her way from Bangkok to the Thai/Burma Border.  Sometimes this trip takes her 6 hours, sometimes 10 hours, just one way.

Among her many talents as a journalist, and a social welfare volunteer, in Bangkok, Liz is an Ultimate Frisbee player with the Bangkok Soi Dawgz.  This Ultimate team plays regularly in Bangkok and runs the Bangkok Ultimate Hat tournament, an International Ultimate Frisbee tournament that attracts players from all over the world.

Liz not only has come to the Thai/Burma Border to share her skills with the Refugee Youth of DARE Network, she has inspired many other players to do the same.  Over the last 13 years, once a year the Ultimate volunteers provide training, tournaments and prizes to the DARE Network Teens for Kids program.  As well, at the Soi Dawgz annual Bangkok Hat Tournament they collect donations of team shirts, shoes, hats, and frisbee discs for the young people participating in our program.  On top of that, they donate money and make DARE Network the charity of their Bangkok Hat Tournament.  How fantastic is that?

This February, Liz, Helen and Noot came to Mae La Refugee camp to train trainers in the Ultimate game.  They concentrated on understand the game strategically and how to improve and share the skills needed to play a successful game.

DARE brought young people from our DARE Network Addiction teams, whom we felt would be able to pass on this training to others in their camps.

In addition, for the first time, we brought Addiction Workers into Mae La Camp from our DARE Centre in Karen State to learn the game and take it back to our centre.  This will mark the first time Ultimate Frisbee has been played together by Karen people in Karen State and will be a great addition to our Addiction Prevention Education program in the villages there.

DARE appreciates their volunteers and donors.  We can't do it without you. And can't thank you enough.

Links:

• DARE Network Website