The Eldest Refugee

Our day began dark and early with a lovely anniversary breakfast thrown by our team!

After breakfast we immediately headed out to the refugee camp. Since it was over an hour further south, we left about an hour earlier than normal and still arrived a half hour late due to a wrong turn! By the time we had arrived, there were already more than fifty patients waiting! Talk about pressure!

Quickly setting up, we began seeing patients at a speed we had not achieved until this point! It was a madhouse — so many patients and new translators which added to the chaos, but as we always do, we found our rhythm.

My translator was about my age, which was fun! And it was her first time translating and she did amazing!!! She is a refugee in this camp and has been here for quite a while. She is learning English because she hopes it will open up more job opportunities for her if she is ever able to leave the camp.

Whatever English classes she was taking didn’t cover some medical terms like “dizzy” so we also had to have a bit of miming and asking other translators for specific words, but it was way better than when they went to lunch and me and one of my teammates tried to get a patient history through charades! (That little show endured some crowd laughter from the waiting room on accident ;))

One of the patients we saw today was a 99 year old woman who Simon said was the oldest refugee! We were blessed to get to serve her and offer her some relief from the pain she had been experiencing. All of the refugees who were assisting us at the clinic seemed to hold extremely high regard for this woman and were very happy to see her there. She was a chatterbox!! No idea what she was saying but she was very adamant in telling anyone who would listen what she had to say! From the translators reactions, my guess is a bunch of “back when I was your age” types of stories, but it could have been anything — just not related to why she was at the clinic, that much was clear ;)

Since this camp has close to 15,000 people, the UN had done some pre-screening and brought us the sickest 300 people today to serve and they all received tokens, so after we had finished with those patients (and it seemed like we finished earlier than expected), they took us through a tour of the camp.

It really didn’t feel much like what you would expect a refugee camp to feel like, there were houses and yards and livestock and gardens and a big soccer field on the edge of the camp where a game of pretty legitimate soccer was happening: jerseys, nets, referees. Simon said (yes, we have to keep ourselves from snickering every time we say that, but he says a lot of interesting and important stuff!!) that this soccer game was commemorating the 50 year anniversary of this camp.

We were followed around by a  bunch of little kids, as often happens, and they were fascinated by Jadon’s percussion-hands :)

One of our stops was a pool table and all the kids dragged us inside to play pool. One teen walked up to us and started speaking in English! So we got to have a nice little conversation :) her name is Modusa and she’s 15. She asked if we were doctors and told us that her dream was to become a doctor in Thailand. We took some pictures together, obviously, before heading to the next stop.

We passed by a graveyard, which stretched for quite a few blocks, and just drove the point home that this place is often not a short-term home. I asked one of our translators, who was a Karen refugee, how many of these people are trying to get visas for Thailand and Australia and America and the like, and he said that most don’t want that, they want to be here temporarily until the fighting stops and then they want to go back home, back to Myanmar. But it has been fifty years for some, and people have been born, raised, and died inside this refugee camp.

It’s so overwhelming to be in a space like this where you know that people feel like strangers in a strange land and that they are not truly home, even if they spend their whole lives here. It’s hard to understand why they are living this life. But again I am reminded of Christ. He came to live as a stranger in a strange land, knowing He would live a full life not fully belonging, not calling this place home. And yet, He decided to step out of His home to be with us. To make a way for Him to take us home with Him. What a wonderful gift. And how much more powerful it feels after experiencing what we did today.