For 15 years now ICRA has been helping Karen refugees on the Burma-Thai border by supporting educational and health programs, in particular by funding the teacher’s wages, installing water filters, and providing meals to the children.
The Karens and Karennis have been fighting against the military junta in the eastern regions of Burma, near the Thai border, for the past forty years. In the last 15 years, nearly 120,000 Karens have fled Burmese repression and found refuge in Thai camps along the border. NGOs provide them with food, health care, school supplies, etc.
GoalsSeveral initiatives have been taken by Burmese and Karen refugees from the Mae Scot area, in the fields of education and health.These last years ICRA has refocused its priorities, particularly by supporting Karen schools in Thailand (funding teachers’ wages, school supplies and pupils’ meals) and bringing health assistance (water filters) to the most disadvantaged schools and households.
Practical assistance
• Support to schools: ICRA pays the wages of a dozen teachers in several schools in Thailand and one school in Burma.
• Nutritional support: ICRA provides lunches, and sometimes evening meals, to several schools, particularly two schools which accommodate orphans or children whose parents have stayed in Burma and send their children to the Thai side for their education.
• Courses in the Karen language: ICRA pays the salary of a Karen teacher in a Thai school attended by Karen children, but where lessons are in the Thai language.
• Water filters: ICRA has been providing several schools with water filters for the children to have access to water of good quality while they attend the school. Besides, more than a hundred families have received water filters, particularly in villages of illegal refugees situated outside the refugee camps. • School construction projects: ICRA has taken an active part in the complete or partial construction of several schools in Burma (temporary schools made of bamboo) and in Thailand, especially after the large-scale arrival of new refugees in 2011.
• Supply of clothing: ICRA financed the purchase of clothes for the more destitute children of a boarding school for refugee children from Burma.
• Planned: setting up a garden on the grounds of an orphanage, tended by children, with the help of a teacher and a vegetable farmer, to produce fruit and vegs for better meals.
Twelve sponsors and the Swiss section of ICRA are funding all these programs.
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