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History is repeating itself in Burma. The recent coup has been fiercely resisted, as previous power grabs had not. Sadly, this escalating conflict will result in another humanitarian crisis along Burma’s eastern border, this to accompany the crisis along the country’s western border with Bangladesh resulting in the establishment of the world’s largest refugee camp which has crowded together over 700,000 Rohingya muslims who had been driven from their land by the Burmese army’s atrocities.

In the Karen State of eastern Burma , conflicts between the Burmese troops and local militias are increasing in frequency with hundreds of Karen villagers being driven from their homes at gunpoint with many being killed.

We’ve seen this all before when over 800 Karen villages were destroyed by Burmese troops late in the 20th century, resulting in 500,000 IDPs and over 140,000 Karen being forced into 9 refugees camps in Thailand.

In response to that crisis, Burma Border Projects was founded as a US-based non-profit in 1999. Our first task consisted of training indigenous medics to identify the psychological trauma from which so many of these displaced people were suffering, and to treat it in culturally appropriate ways. Our program was headed by widely-recognised authorities in the field of refugee trauma. This work along with other psychosocial efforts such as child protection projects continued until about 4 years ago when the usual sources of funding for projects along the Thai-Burma border began to re-focus their efforts to working inside the country of Burma which was pretending to be establishing a new democracy and many funders wanted to be part of this exciting development. As the funding for our various psychosocial efforts moved inside, our vital support for schools for the children of Burmese migrant workers living in Thailand continues to today.

We have been asked to reestablish our counseling/counseling training programs and we need a person who knows how to develop sources of funding to help us to do that. Although it would not be possible to pay such a person at the present time, we would hope to be able to do that in the near future. This would be an outstanding opportunity for someone wanting to establish themselves in development work to become affiliated with an organization with a rock-solid reputation drawn from more than 20 years of helping refugees from Burma live reasonable lives in Thailand.