Life in Mae La Refugee Camp.
Suicides, teen pregnancies and ration cuts are surging in Thailand’s refugee camps along its Myanmar border following foreign aid withdrawals.
Sixty-six kilometres north of Mae Sot, Mae La refugee camp lies.
Mae La is the size of a small town. The largest of nine camps that sit along the Thai-Burma border, it spans 180 hectares — about a quarter of Thirroul, or roughly the size of Redfern. For reference, the entire Thirroul area has a population of around 6,500. Redfern, 14,000. Mae La is home to as many as 45,000 refugees.
It is overcrowded, and the bamboo huts resemble a shantytown, but the will to survive with dignity among the people overrides everything else they have to battle. The hospitality shown to strangers is humbling. Plates are borrowed; rice is cooked and water boiled; eggs, coffee, beans, and vegetables are offered. The refugees try to live normal lives despite the conditions — working as labourers if they can, weaving for extra cash, making music, socialising, and sharing what little they have. The people I met in the camps had pride. Not because they're proud of where they are, but because of who they are.
In many ways, it feels like a town that has simply taken on a life of its own. Its roots are deeply set into the ground after 42 years of existence. Shops, mosques, churches, educational centres, even a hair salon — all within the camp. This is not a temporary refuge, as much as the word implies. This is a permanent home. People are born here, will give birth here, and will die here. Until the world stops turning its head and pretending not to see, that will not change. Until doors open to people just as deserving of a quality life as the rest of us.
Camps like Mae La become what large-scale NGOs call "fact-finding visits." But assessing the complexity of life as a refugee is impossible from two days on the ground. I was told of a foreign embassy staffer who visited Mae La and remarked that it looked better than some Thai-Karen villages he'd seen. What people fail to grasp when they see these camps is the reality of the restrictions placed on the people inside them. Refugees cannot leave to find work, to hunt or fish, to forage for vegetables, or even to travel to Mae Sot to post a letter or buy groceries. A travel application takes at least three days to be approved by camp officials. Without one, they risk arrest and deportation.
The emergency aid industry has grown into a giant, largely unregulated business worth billions of dollars a year, and its failures ripple outward in ways that rarely make headlines.
Suicides within Mae La have been rising. Aid workers attribute the spike in large part to the fallout from an Executive Order suspending the withdrawal of United States foreign aid — a decision that has torn through the humanitarian sector. Chronic funding shortages have led to a dramatic reduction in food support for the majority of camp-based refugees. Alongside the financial cuts, the United States Refugee Admissions Program — the largest third-country resettlement pathway available to camp refugees — was halted. Food ration cards, funded by foreign aid, are being nullified at the end of this month. The families and patients I spoke with were beyond anxious about how they would get by. Many had lost all hope for their futures. That hopelessness has a body count.
We arrived in the middle of a football tournament. The ground was a field of orange dirt, clouds of dust rising with every tackle and turn. The pitch lines were barely visible — more like grooves worn into the earth than painted markings. And towering above it all, looking down on the game like a silent spectator, were the mighty Dawna Ranges. Quite literally sitting on the camp's edge, the mountains climbed into the sky, enormous and indifferent.
The camp hospital was dim. Electricity and appropriate lighting were clearly a luxury.
We moved through homes and hospital wards, handing out food and basic household supplies — things many simply don't have access to. Something as ordinary as a toothbrush.
I met with patients throughout the day. Among them was a girl who had just turned sixteen. Her name was May. She was sweet, and she couldn't stop smiling at me, even as she told me her story. Limited schooling is available in the camp, but May had dropped out in grade three. Her family couldn't afford it — a reality shared by many. May was born in this camp, just as her parents were. And just as her child will be.
May had been referred to an NGO, Burma Children Medical Fund, for financial support with her pregnancy. She is just sixteen years old, carrying her first child, fathered by a man twenty-five years old. As I conducted the interview, I kept returning to who I was at her age — innocent, naive, unburdened.
Teen pregnancies within the camp have spiked. The causes are interconnected: a lack of sexual education, a lack of money to access contraception, a cost barrier so steep that even a pregnancy test is often a delayed purchase. It is a window into something systemic. Humanitarian aid, however well-intentioned, too often fails to find lasting solutions — slipping instead into a cycle that supplies resources without ever building the conditions for self-sufficiency. Food is delivered. Ration cards are issued. And when the funding dries up, as it has now, there is nothing underneath to catch people when they fall. No skills infrastructure, no economic pathways, no safety net of their own making. Just dependency, and then suddenly, nothing.
May smiled at me when I said goodbye. That same wide, unguarded smile she'd had from the moment I sat down with her. She is sixteen years old, about to give birth inside the only home she has ever known, in a camp her parents were also born into, in a country that has never formally acknowledged her existence. She has never left Mae La. She may never leave.
The camp has stood for 42 years. The mountains haven't moved. And the world, for the most part, is still looking the other way.
Story and Photos Evie Jones.