Tag: Myanmar

On Tuesday, at least four Rohingya refugees drowned off the coast of Bangladesh. The rough waters tipped the boat, capsizing it and tossing its occupants into the water. According to UNHCR (the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) and the survivors, there were a total of 42 people packed into the small boat […]

Yangon (formerly known as Rangoon) is the largest city in Myanmar (Burma). Over 2,000 locals have flooded the streets in support of the Army’s recent actions against the Rohingya people in the western areas of the country. Many are Buddhist nationalists and some are even Buddhist monks. They have expressed a desire to strengthen the […]

The UN has called the atrocities committed in Rakhine State, Burma (Myanmar) “textbook ethnic cleansing.” It has since been responsible for the deaths of over 2,000 people and sent approximately 600,000 people fleeing for their lives to the neighboring country of Bangladesh. The country’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has recently spoken toward […]

What happened here???: WASHINGTON — Navy criminal authorities are investigating whether two members of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 strangled to death an Army Green Beret on assignment in Mali in June, military officials say. Staff Sgt. Logan J. Melgar, a 34-year-old veteran of two deployments to Afghanistan, was found dead on June 4 […]

Imagine carrying a struggling pregnant woman through the bowels of the jungle, pushing your body and straining your spirit just to get her somewhere where she might have a shot at surviving. This kind of thing happens every day. The jungles of Burma (Myanmar) have suffered through a devastating civil war for over 70 years. While […]

“It’s a lot of make it up as you go.” Dr. Jack Chamberlain has been practicing medicine in rural areas around the world since 1993.  A U. S. based physician turned humanitarian aid worker, he has practiced medicine everywhere from the ER of Detroit to the war-torn jungles of Burma. “Marginalized medicine” is a term […]

Fighting between the Karen people and the Burmese (Myanmar) government dates back to World War II.  I went for a trip into the jungles of Burma to meet with the Karen people back in 2015, and it was quite the profound experience. The conflict between the Burmese and its surrounding ethnic minorities has been described […]

“The Rohingya have gone out of the frying pan and into the fire,” one aid worker said as they headed into the refugee camps on Wednesday.  He said that back in 2015, and they were driving toward a camp with a translator, having gone through multiple security checkpoints, when two men on a motorcycle cut […]

The Rohingya crisis in the east rages on.  The number of Syrian refugees is still absolutely staggering.  Afghani displacement remains commonplace as the war with the Taliban continues. What do these crises have in common?  Stateless people. It’s true, they may or may not be generally recognized as citizens by their governments, but in a world […]

Burma and Myanmar are often referred to together, words used interchangeably to describe what sounds like the same country.  And that’s just it–it is the same country.  So why the two names? The government of Myanmar is known for the ongoing conflicts within its borders, dating all the way back to World War II.  It […]

State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi has been the center of controversy in southeast Asia as the crisis with the Rohingya rages on.  While human rights abuses have increased in the jungles of eastern Burma, the world has begun to condemn the government for allowing their military to persecute the Rohingya, driving them from Rakhine State […]

The sudden arrival of half a million Rohingya Muslims has upended life in this humble village, which is now overshadowed by one of the largest concentrations of refugees in the world. The village’s rundown school and a smattering of rice paddies sit across the road from thousands of acres of bamboo huts covered by black […]