What Transition Looks Like from Outside

Mae Sot, Thailand
November, 2012 

The anxiety in this town is palpable.  We all get sucked into it, all of us working in the NGO community.  It doesn’t matter what field – health, education, livelihoods, law.  Everyone lives one day to the next, never knowing what will happen next week, next month.  This is what transition looks like from outside.

For some, it comes in the form of offices slowly thinning out, of getting to work in the morning to hear of more people who have left for Burma since last night, not knowing if or when they will return. It’s not getting any warning.  It’s not getting to say goodbye.  It’s sitting in an increasingly-empty office, waiting for someone to give you work to do, or wondering if the project you’re working on will survive the transition.

For others, it’s watching your funding get cut, donor meeting after donor meeting, below the point of sustainability.  It’s going from conversations about how to be more efficient with your spending to choosing between cutting food rations or medical supplies. It’s being told by your funders to shift attention to livelihoods training, so that you are forced to train refugees how to farm when they can’t leave the overcrowded camps, while meanwhile they have no food.  For when they go back. They don’t want to go back.

It’s begging for funding from donors setting up shop in Burma, who tell you that they don’t fund projects on the border anymore, even though nothing has actually changed on the border.  Sharply reduced funding for the camps to fund projects for returnees, even though no one has returned.  No more funding for migrant schools, even though there are still migrants.  No funding for civil society, that’s all gone to buy office space in Yangon. 

But for others, for the Burmese, it’s worse. It’s living in a camp knowing one day, with no warning, you will be packed up and shipped back across the border into a jungle full of landmines and burned villages.  If living in the camps you were helpless, at least you had chosen to be there. 

It’s watching your organization, which you built for twenty years in exile, become increasingly irrelevant and ignored. It’s wondering if you should ‘go back.’ If it’s safe. If you can do your work there. If you can afford it.

It’s watching all your colleagues get off the blacklist and wondering, ‘why not me?’ It’s getting off the blacklist and wondering if the government can be trusted, or if it’s just a trap.  If exile forced you from the national life of your country, at least you were accompanied by hundreds of other exiles.  Supported by the international community.  Legitimized.  Now, you may be sitting on the border in an emptying office as your former supporters clamor to meet with the same people you have fought for decades. 

Transition is hard, it’s messy, and it involves asking existential questions for all involved.  But here on the border, it’s amplified by a feeling of being out of control, of losing all relevance, influence, and capacity to act.  And yes, ultimately, when things settle, it may turn out for the best for everyone. No one wants to stay in refugee camps, in exile, forever.  But during the transition, all there is is uncertainty and change.

[For more about the process of returning refugees, from the perspective of refugees and camp-based civil society organizations, see Burma Partnership’s short documentary Nothing About Us Without Us].