Tah Ray, Mae La Refugee Camp
Tah Ray, Mae La Refugee Camp
Tah Ray is 66 years old. He has lived in Mae La since it was established in 1984, and in the area since 1962, when he fled Burma having been forced to work as a porter for the SPDC. He says that the camp was quieter in the beginning; there were fewer people and food was easy to find. Now it's more crowded (the population has grown from just over a thousand inhabitants in 1984 to 46,000 in 2007), and he can't go outside to find food any more. He lives with his daughter, and has no desire to leave the camp while the SPDC are in power in Burma, nor to be relocated to a third country. Tah Ray has made the Mae La refugee camp his home, for better (food, healthcare, education, relative safety) or for worse (he will probably never be able to go beyond it's gates).
"It doesn't feel good to think you would be buried here. This is not our native place. We would like to go home to be buried. But you cannot go back to die. Before you could die you would be killed."