Hussain and his Fulbright fellows from all around the world visit a high school in Phoenix, Arizona, in February.

Hussain, like many of his compatriots, uses only his first name because he fears violence directed at himself or his family. For the same reason, he decided to stay at his university campus in Arkansas last January when the State Department invited him to meet President George W. Bush in Washington D.C. to mark Iraq’s first democratic election. “I don’t want to submit myself to death,” he says. “I am very recognizable in photos.” Hussain has heard enough about terrorists simply opening fire at people whom they identify as having gone to the United States or the United Kingdom.

Compared with the first group of Iraqis who were granted Fulbright scholarships in 2004 to study in the U.S. after 14 years of interruption — all met President Bush and Colin Powell at a White House reception their first year — only a handful of people in the second group showed up to the latest meeting with the president last January. Hussain said most of them come from southern and northern Iraq, where it is safer.  

The State Department blamed limited attendance on short notice and said that not all current Iraqi Fulbright recipients — 34 of them — were invited to the informal event.  However, according to some of the Iraqi intellectuals, many stayed home either in fear for their lives or to avoid the tormenting questions about the conflict taking place in their motherland.

The Fulbright scholarship is a cornerstone of U.S. public diplomacy, credited with forming a network of leaders around the world that are knowledgeable about, and sympathetic to, the U.S. government. But for many current Iraqi students — men and women ranging in age from their mid-20s to their late-40s — studying subjects such as public health, journalism, international affairs, and English at top American universities, the award is also a bit of a curse. Years of embargo make studying in an American university a lifetime opportunity for ambitious young Iraqis looking to obtain the education they need to help rebuild their country (Fulbright requires grantees to leave the U.S. after studying). But an association with the U.S. could also mean death for them and members of their family.

Although all of them seem uniformly happy that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, they are painfully watching the news from home for signs of civil war. And many blame unfair, insensitive, and poorly designed American policies for the clashes among Sunnis and Shiites and the way post-dictatorship democracy in Iraq seems to be going awry.

Worry and wait

It was hard for Dr. Ali Fadhil, a 29-year-old medical doctor turned filmmaker who is studying journalism at New York University, to shake his mind of the image of American soldiers after he arrived in New York City in January. His three-year-old daughter runs to grab him in fear whenever a garbage truck stops outside their apartment in Brooklyn. The sound from the truck is similar to that of the explosives that U.S. troops used to shatter the door to his Baghdad house in January. Soldiers mistakenly suspected the award-winning filmmaker was involved in the abduction of the American journalist Jill Carroll. “I know that people on the streets here are different from the U.S. army in Baghdad,” he says. But it seems he has to keep reminding himself of that fact.

Tucked away in America’s most elite campuses, Iraqi scholars remain safe for now. But with grim thoughts and the shadow of omnipresent danger looming larger in their lives, the biggest group of Iraqi Fulbright students still call each other to share feelings of warmth and worry. They place phone calls from New York to Philadelphia, Kansas to Ohio, anytime they hear about a bombing at home to make sure their families are safe. Last year, a brother of a Fulbrighter was killed by insurgents.

Mohamed, a Fulbright scholar from Baghdad who is studying in Kansas, is worried because his elder brother wants to continue working as a policeman, even though he was shot and seriously wounded by insurgents last November. “He wants to show them that he is not afraid. But I don’t want him to do that. The situation is too dangerous now.”

With three of his children in Baghdad, another student, Hussain, feels sad when he imagines them seeing corpses on the sidewalks on their way to school. He observes that many Iraqi women now wear a veil because of threats made by fanatical groups, a precaution that they never had to take during Saddam’s regime. Friends at home tell him that the number of flies and sandstorms have increased rapidly in Baghdad due to the deteriorating environment.

However, Hussain doesn’t have any hatred toward the U.S. “I feel sad, the same way when I hear either Iraqi people or American[s] die,” says the 46-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard. His sunburnt face has a look of calmness and wisdom. “I hate violence. I hate war. I love all people to live, not to die. I understand the American army as a tool to manipulate the policies designed by politicians here in the White House.”

Questions for the president

Hussain doesn’t hate Bush. “Bush is good [for his country]. He attracts terrorists from all over the world to Iraq in order to make them forget about attacking America. Iraq becomes a battlefield for terrorists.” The master’s degree candidate in comparative literature at the University of Arkansas says Iraq is a laboratory for the Americans to study terrorism. He expects the war to end in six to eight years. “The U.S. opens Iraq’s borders intentionally. All extremists in the world can go to Iraq to join terrorist cells without any papers.” He said the American army is well shielded, so few of them have been killed. But the Iraqi people are not shielded and Iraq is bleeding. “About 15 Iraqis die every day. Why should war exist in Iraq?”

Dr. Fadhil says he would love to meet the president. “I would thank Mr. Bush for removing Saddam; at the end this is the only major achievement that all Iraqis agree on,” said the filmmaker, who became a journalist by chance when a Guardian reporter asked him to work as a translator in 2003. “But it is not worth it for hundred[s of] thousands of Iraqis to die. We got nothing after Saddam — no jobs, no security, and no better life.”

Fadhil was chosen the U.K. Foreign Press Association’s Young Journalist of the Year in 2005 for his coverage of the Fallujah aftermath on Channel 4 news, which the association said “was the first independent witness account of the battle and questioned the U.S. military’s claim that the city was getting back to normal by confirming that no aid agencies were operating inside the city. His footage shows images of bodies rotting in the streets, open sewers, and refugees living in tents.” He would like to ask President Bush ten questions from “ordinary Iraqis who had their homes destroyed by the U.S. troops, and people who lost their beloved ones for the sake of the so-called democracy that is not there in Iraq now.” He would like to ask what President Bush thinks about the fact that human lives in the “shredded” Iraq are so cheap, except those of Americans and top officials.

Another Fulbrighter from Baghdad, who declines to be named, says, “I hate when the Americans say that they are shifting the anti-terrorism battlefield to Iraq. It really pisses me off. This is the city where I live. Why is there terrorism in my city? They didn’t think about me or about my people when they declared that. Who gave them this authority?” He laments, “Don’t they think of [the] 25 millions people living there, who are killed and being killed everyday? Nobody cares for Iraqi civilians.”  

Open borders

Hussain and Mohamed believe that fanatic Islamism has come through the borders, brought in by foreign fighters. They say that border security is miserable and that people can easily transport money and weapons to support terrorists into or out of Iraq.

Hussain said that Iraqis would not plan suicide bombings or kill their neighbors, and cites the fact that terrorism was brought to Iraq after the war, not under Saddam Hussein. More proof is that three months after the war, Iraq was stable, apart from theft, robbery, and kidnapping “which have nothing to do with terrorism,” before the terrorists infiltrated Iraq.  

He said that some Iraqi people — most of them former Baath and intelligence members who lost the benefits they had under Saddam — are helping the foreign fighters. Hussain blames it on the American decision to dissolve the former Iraqi army. “This is one of the biggest mistakes made by the U.S. in Iraq,” he says, “These people are well-trained to protect Iraq and guard the borders. They lost their job[s] but need to feed their families. Foreign terrorists are clever enough to pay them good salaries and make use of them.”

Sectarian division strategy

Most Fulbrighters interviewed tend to think that the Americans trust people according to how much they endured under Saddam’s regime and that this creates further divisions between ethnic groups and sectarians.

“When the Americans first came to Iraq in 2003, most translators, subcontractors, or anyone closest to the Americans was Kurdish. They took the people who Saddam tortured most as their best allies. They did not trust all people. They did not know enough about Iraq,” said an Iraqi Fulbrighter from Baghdad who declined to be named.

“The U.S. is creating enemies day by day, not friends,” says Hussain. He and Ali believe that the malicious divisions in Iraq now are the result of the Americans’ sectarian division strategy. Ali describes the sight of many Sunnis waiting along the international highway to welcome American troops. But according to him, their attitude toward the U.S. cooled down after the Americans gave their support to the Shiites who held government power. “The Sunnis were close to the U.S., but now they are enemies because the U.S. supports the Shiites and the Kurds at the expense of the Sunnis. They consider Sunnis as supporters of Saddam,” says Hussain, “The Americans don’t know our country enough. They treated the sects of Iraq unfairly and wrongly.”

Dr. Fadhil suggests another reason for the chaotic situation in Iraq: 30 years of powerlessness and isolation from the outside world. “Iraqi people live[d] inside Saddam’s prison for many years and the Americans freed them, like opening a cage for the criminals,” said Fadhil. “Everyone wants to be on top of each other. Everyone is Saddam now.”

There is no consensus among Iraqi Fulbrighters on the subject of American troop withdrawal. Mohamed believes that American troops should stay. “If the U.S. troops pull out, the country will be controlled by fanatics and extremists. There is already a small-scale ‘civil war’ carried on by some armed groups against civilians from both sects,” he said.  

But Dr. Fadhil thinks things will only improve after U.S. troops are gone. He sees the deadly drift of Iraq into a civil war as having already begun. “But yet it will cure Iraq afterward,” says Fadhil. With a Sunni father and a Shiite mother, Fadhil doesn’t believe that people from the two sects can continue to hate each other because they have been living with each other for thousands of years. “The civil war will upscale when the troops pull out. But the American cannot solve this malicious legacy. The only way to solve it is to let the Iraqi find [his] own way to get out of the manipulation.”  

Understanding Iraq’s “own way” — its culture and history — is a problem for the American troops in Iraq, some of the Fulbrighters contend. Hussain says that Iraqis find it offensive when U.S. soldiers say “hey” to them, a greeting that in Iraq is used only to call animals. “More seriously is the way the U.S. army seems to have little regard for the life of Iraqi civilians. They kill civilians on the street,” he asserts, as a result of overreaction and fear of insurgency. “[America’s] tanks sometimes tread on civilian cars in traffic jams and the like,” says Hussain.

“Do you think Iraq is a primitive country?”

The sadness and tension in Hussain’s face temporarily disappears as he sips a glass of California red wine at a reception in Phoenix, organized by the U.S. State Department to introduce Iraqi scholars to America last February. The sky is clear, lighted by a full moon. The desert air is warm and comfortable, although the area hasn’t had a drop of rain for four months.

“What do you think of America?” asks his host, an American woman who is a member of Phoenix’s City Council. “I should not say anything because my judgments may be wrong now. I cannot judge other culture from my own cultural background. I should live more with American people before I can say anything,” Hussain replies. His face has a look of experience. “Do you think Iraq is a primitive country?” he asks. “No, no,” the woman responds in a hesitant, almost nervous, voice.

Hussain’s wide eyes present an expression of pain. “We are a civilized country. We have 500 registered scientists. One of them is working for NASA. We can build two-storey bridges, construct refineries and chemical plants, and the like.”

Hussain is angry about how the Western media portrays Iraq. “They do that to show the world that Iraq desperately needs the American help. But Iraq is full of energy. It can restructure the country on its own in a secure atmosphere.”

The feeling that American people are ignorant about Iraq motivates him to study translation. “Translation is a problem between cultures. I would like to learn how to convey meaning in all senses, helping [to] remove all cultural problems that stand between countries. I am happy to understand people from the other side and make my people understand them, too.”  

After going home in 2007, he plans to work as an interpreter to help reduce misunderstandings between the Iraqis and Americans.  

Hussain becomes sad when he thinks about his five-year-old son, Baqir. Every day, the boy with big brown eyes waits behind the wooden door to receive a banana from his father as usual. He waits for hours and hours until the sunlight dies over the window, the streets, and the Baghdad International Airport nearby. His mother is cooking in the kitchen. But Baqir wants to wait and eat with Hussain. Whenever his father calls, Baqir asks why he hasn’t come home for a long time even though he still talks to him on the phone like he is in his office. Hussain has not told his son where he is.

“If he knew, he would tell everybody that I am in America,” Hussain says with a sad voice, horrified to remember how his children were often asked in kindergarten if their parents ever said anything bad about Saddam Hussein. “The terrorists consider anyone who goes to America a traitor or a secret agent. They cannot wait for me to come home. They will kidnap my child and kill him.”  

Although he misses his family very much, Hussain has a single entry visa, and cannot leave the U.S. until he finishes the two-year program. He was stunned when he found out that all Fulbrighters could bring family with them to the U.S. except Iraqis. Like most Iraqi Fulbrighters, Hussain prays at home and avoids Muslim mosques in America or events where he may be recognized by other Iraqis.

Although the Fulbright is often considered one of the most competitive and prestigious scholarships in many countries, only the Iraqi Minister where Hussain worked knows Hussain received it. He told his neighbors and colleagues that he would be studying in Canada “because Canada doesn’t send army to Iraq.” His friend, Mohamed, has told people he studies in Germany.  

Now, as the situation at home deteriorates, Hussain tells family members to build a big steel gate to protect the house. He intends to cut short his studies to return to Iraq early, even though it may be dangerous if his status as a Fulbrighter is revealed.

The first five Iraqi Fulbrighters went home recently. “There is lots of reluctance to leave,” Hussain says, “Half of the Iraqi Fulbrighters may face death when they go home. Nobody likes to die. But we have to go back to change our country.”

For Dr. Fadhil, who plans to return to Iraq to continue filming after finishing his studies, death is not beyond his everyday expectation. He says he can imagine dying in the street in Iraq, because “holding a camera there is like holding a gun.”

At a Fulbright event in February in New York, two Iraqi scholars seemed happy to meet each other. But after a passionate conversation, one woman in traditional black dress, who is studying at Columbia University, left without giving her contact information to the other Iraqi woman from Baghdad. The fear is so deep that some Iraqis have kept strict anonymity, even among fellow scholars.

Hussain, for his part, cannot stop thinking about terrorism. “Terrorism could not be fought by arms, but by mind. We should convince the mind of people about love, peace, respect for all sects, religions through culture and education,” he said, “Iraqi people should be treated with love, not hostility.”

In The Fray Contributor

Young Karen women head back to their homes in the camps.

The sun shines down fiercely in Tak province. I’m on a rented bicycle peddling hard and trying to keep from going blind from the afternoon brightness and blowing dust. The world is dry and hot, with rice fields and tree-covered hills in the horizon — a far cry from the images of beaches and jungle cliffs that Thailand usually invokes.

At last I reach the soi I’m supposed to turn down. It’s a quiet road in a no-name neighborhood of faded teak houses. I look around for the office I’m supposed to be visiting, but all the buildings look alike and there isn’t a sign to point me in the right direction. Children and adults mill around, peering curiously at me — I’m a stranger, and they have reason to be suspicious. We’re in Mae Sot, a Thai border town and outpost of illegal gems, timber, and drug trade, and — because of its proximity to Burma — a mixing bowl of Burmese spies, undocumented migrants, and illegally roaming refugees. During the dry season, the Burmese military clashes with the ethnic Karen people, causing waves of Karen to flee their land and cross the river into Thailand. This is where the good, the bad, and the in-between fight their battles, out of sight and underground.

A lifetime of waiting

I first learned about the Karen Women’s Organization (KWO) when I started interning last fall as a production assistant for Outer Voices, a U.S.-based radio documentary group that tells the stories of women working towards non-violent social change throughout the Pacific Islands and the Asian Pacific Rim. The KWO and their work supporting their communities in the refugee camps were to be the main subjects for our piece on the conflict in Burma.

Raku Mae was at the office of the KWO with four other young women that day. She and her friends giggled nervously in anticipation of our meeting. Since refugees are not supposed to be outside the barbed wire fences of any of the nine camps scattered along the border, if the police decided to visit the office that day on one of their “routine checks,” it would cost the equivalent of $25 or more per person to keep from being arrested. This regular charge is no small fee in a country where the United Nations Population Fund estimates that 30 percent of people live on $2 a day. Yet their biggest concern wasn’t the fact that they had snuck out of the refugee camps they live in to work in this office, but that they would have to conduct the interview with me in English (usually a second or third language after Karen, Burmese, or Thai).

Founded in 1949, the KWO was established at first as a welfare organization to support the Karen people as civil war smoldered in Burma between the Burmese military, the Tatmadaw, and the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). After the first wave of refugees arrived in Thailand in 1984, the KWO expanded their work to address problems that had arisen from 22 years of living in camps. As part of their efforts, the KWO established the Karen Young Women’s Leadership School to develop women’s professional skills.

Raku Mae, one of the school’s graduates, is the friendliest and by far the loudest of the bunch. She sprinkles laughter throughout her conversation and nudges others to overcome their shyness and talk. When that doesn’t work, she fills in the details for them. Raku Mae has been in Thailand the longest, having lived in camps since her family fled Karen State in 1984 during the first major exodus of the Karen from Burma. At the age of four, she fled her home with her mother and father when the Burmese military attacked their remote village. Homes, schools, churches, and rice paddies were burned to punish the community for their ties with the Karen National Union (KNU), the Karen’s governing body and the group seen as threatening the stability of Burma. After weeks of trudging through the jungle, threatened by bullets and malaria, they crossed the border into Thailand.

At 26, Raku Mae has spent nearly her entire life in the camps. Now the assistant accountant at the office in Mae Sot, where the KWO provides her with a room in exchange for her work, she first joined the KWO two years ago, learned to speak Thai and Burmese, and was trained on human rights, the environment, management, accounting, leadership, and government. Although Raku Mae has managed to develop and hone new skills, for one of the longest running refugee settlements in the world, there has been little development. She describes the endemic stagnation of life there, joking that the only thing that’s changed over all this time is her weight.

Karen women gather together for company and discussion.

A permanent state of temporary

Though the first wave of refugees did not enter Thailand until 1984, the battle that persists today began over 50 years ago, when Burma was granted independence from Britain in 1948. Despite an earlier promise from Britain of sovereignty in return for their aid in fighting the Japanese occupation during and after World War II, the Karen’s dream of their own state dissolved with the formation of the new Burmese government. Since then, Burma has been wracked by ethnic unrest and civil war, and by a military government that is unwilling to either tolerate or negotiate with those it labels insurgents.

Well-documented, systematic destruction of villages, detention, torture, rape, and forced labor by the Tatmadaw created hundreds of thousands of Karen internally displaced persons (IDPs). By the early 1980s, the Tatmadaw had edged out the Karen in battle and gained control of more of their lands. Kawthoolei, the Karen homeland that once covered the eastern mountain border by Thailand and the central delta area of Burma, has eroded, the majority of it now under the rule of the junta. Those Karen unlucky enough to be in captured areas faced persecution and worse. Many left for Thailand.

When the Karen first arrived, they were not officially placed into refugee camps. “Refugees were allowed to cross over into Thailand to set up their own village-like encampments and they were encouraged to be as self-reliant as possible,” recalls Sally Thompson, Deputy Executive Director of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, an organization that has been working on the border for the past 14 years. Because the Thai government expected the situation to be temporary, the Karen were neither allowed to plant rice nor build permanent housing, resulting in villages of bamboo shelters that had no ability to grow their staple food. International non-governmental organizations such as the Thailand Burma Border Consortium began providing basic rations, health care, and school materials. As time passed, more refugees crossed into Thailand until 30 camps were spread along the border.

After attacks on the border areas by the Burmese army between 1995 and 1998, including incidents where entire camps were burned down, the Thai authorities consolidated camps to provide better security. “We went from a situation where the largest camp was 6,000 people. Within three months it had been consolidated into 25,000, and now the largest camp has 44,000 people,” remembers Thompson. Today, over 110,000 Karen live in the nine refugee camps along the Thailand-Burma border, with the number growing as fighting continues. The situation can no longer be regarded as temporary.

Because Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, supporting the refugees is a complicated matter. Refugees are designated “persons of concern” or “persons fleeing from fighting” by the Royal Thai Government.

“What it meant was the UNHCR [United Nations Refugee Agency] … was not actually present in the border area from the Thailand-Burma border, and it only got a mandate from the Thai authorities in 1998. And whereas elsewhere in the world UNHCR usually provides asylum to refugees, here in Thailand, it was only given a mandate for protection because the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] were already working here,” explains Thompson.

The late involvement of the UNHCR and the policy of the Royal Thai Government have affected the way that this long-standing refugee situation has been handled. Usually, under UNHCR supervision, refugees would be given temporary asylum in a second country (in this case Thailand). If the situation in their home country did not improve over time and did not have the potential to change in the near future, rendering repatriation too dangerous, the next plan would be to consider the refugees for either formal integration into the asylum society or resettlement in a third country. While there are no set time limits for how long refugee camps can or should exist under the U.N. Convention, camps under UNHCR supervision have never held refugees as long as the ones living along the Thailand-Burma border have been held, without the options of integration or resettlement. It is an open secret that the plight of the refugees has been highly influenced by the desire to maintain political and economic relations between Burma’s governing body, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), and the Royal Thai Government, the latter quietly tolerating the presence of the refugees for over two decades with the hope that they could be repatriated.

“It was always thought the refugees would go back to Burma. Whereas now, the situation in Burma continues to look bleak and it is unlikely that there will be any large-scale [repatriation] in the near future,” says Thompson.

It has only been since 2004 that Thailand has changed its policies to allow resettlement.

A chance for a new home

Life in the camps is an uncertain monotony. Guards and barbed wire are only the physical barriers to the Karen’s self-determined future. Inside the camps, education is available only through the tenth grade, with no prospect for formal higher education. While young children attend school, often teenagers stay at home and help around the house. With few concrete possibilities open to them, many get married and start families at an early age. Boredom and depression are inevitable. The lucky ones who are able to finish school can try to find jobs within the camps, usually as teachers or health workers. But the environment is invariably the same.

Some risk their security for a taste of freedom, sneaking out to work as day laborers on nearby farms. Others join local non-governmental organizations, like the KWO, where there are more opportunities to obtain an education. But there remains the risk of being arrested or deported. Involuntary repatriation to Burma could mean prison or even a death sentence at the hands of the SPDC for those who have been involved with political organizations while in exile.

Within the camp, income generation projects such as weaving and making handicrafts have been employed to a degree of success by the KWO. The products are then “exported” out of the camps to be sold on the outside. Nonetheless, with over 110,000 Karen refugees and the ability to include only a small percentage of the people in these projects, the majority face inactivity and insecurity.

Voluntary resettlement has been urged by many countries as a long-term solution. However, according to Thompson, it was refused for a number of reasons until 2004, when the Thai government finally agreed to a trial resettlement to the United States of a small population of refugees who had been illegally living and working in Bangkok. As a result of its success and the stalemate on the border, Thailand has been encouraged to see resettlement as a way to deal with both the large population of refugees and the constant stream of new asylees. Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada, and the U.S. are the seven countries thus far interviewing applicants for entrance into their countries, where they will be given residency, jobs, and aid to start a new life. Ultimately, citizenship will be offered if they decide to stay.

Still, resettlement is not as simple a solution as it seems. Typically, a “brain drain” occurs in the camps, where the most well-trained people — leaders, teachers, and health workers — are often the ones accepted to be resettled due to their transferable skills. Those that remain are left with the task of training replacements to administer the camps. In addition, the decision to apply for resettlement is a difficult one in and of itself, trading one uncertain and difficult situation for another despite the promise of relative freedom and citizenship in the end.

“I can completely understand why people want to leave this situation, the future is so uncertain …  I understand but I think it’s really tough, they know it’s not the promised land,” observes Anna DeGuzman, an American aid worker for the Burmese Medical Association in Mae Sot. “They have very meaningful work here, but in the U.S. they end up working in Wal-Mart or something, starting life all over again, no records to prove they finished university.  There, they end up making sushi … whereas here they are designing training for traditional birth attendance.”

Saw Hte Hte fled Burma 14 years ago. A grandfatherly older man, he acts as the Secretary of the Karen Refugee Committee, the group of Karen refugees that oversees their fellow refugees and is in charge of administering the distribution of aid provided by the international NGOs.  I ask him what he thinks about the new resettlement program and he replies, “[The Karen refugees are] quite unsure what is their future, so resettlement may be some kind of a future for them, that’s what most of them feel. Maybe it is the straw that they would like to grasp for their future.”

“Some young people born in the camps as refugees, they didn’t even know where they came from, which country, which place, they don’t know — they have never been there. They are born in the camps, and as [far as] most people are concerned, it is their future, and let’s say the military government in Burma disowned these people, these refugees, these people in the camps,” he continues.

“Let’s say they are people without any identity … As a refugee, what would be your choice for your future?”

Children in the camp are excited to see someone new.

A future in the works

For Raku Mae, who does not have authorization to leave her home at Noh Po Camp, the knowledge that she lives in a different reality is permanent. “For security, [it’s] very strict for us, because we are here illegal, not legal, so we have to pay a lot,” she sighs. To travel from the camp to the office, it costs her between 15 to 20 times the fare paid by Thais to ride the same route because of the unofficial fees she must pay to get through the military checkpoints along the road. “It is very difficult to travel … We don’t have money.” Later, she recalls a Thai police raid on the KWO office when a group of students and their English teacher, an American volunteer, were taken across the border into Burma in an unofficial expulsion from the country. Though they were allowed to return after one day, incidents like this further underline the unpredictability of their situation.

Despite everything, Raku Mae and her friends cannot fathom leaving their work in the border area. Cho Cho, 24, is a trainer for the KWO who is learning about subjects like democracy, federalism, constitutional law, and human rights, and then transferring the knowledge to other Karen. Her hopes are still high that her work may bring about improvements in her country. “I hope to change [the] government inside Burma, because I want to come back inside Burma.” She sees herself as indispensable to her people. Resettling would be equal to deserting her people and their plight, even though her own future would be much brighter if she left.

Young and intelligent, Cho Cho would have a good chance of attending university if she left, and likely would be able to pursue her dream of being a lawyer. If she stays, biding her time for freedom in Burma, she loses this opportunity forever. Even if Burma someday becomes the democratic country she longs for, her whole life will be devoted to reconstructing the country — with no time to pursue the sacrificed desires for her own future. Yet her idealism runs strong. “I want to learn,” she says, “so that when the time comes, I will be here to help my people know their rights and to know what they should ask for themselves … If they know their rights, they can do anything.”

Catherine