How much does it cost to provide a decent meal to a pre-school child along the Thai-Burmese border?

It's anumber you can't possibly imagine; a sum much less than one-quarter the cost of a pineapple bun in Taipei, the cost of which in fact would provide a child here with almost seven meals.

"NT$3 … that's all it takes to provide one day's nutritious lunch," Sam Lai, chief of the Thailand task force of the Taiwan Overseas Peace Service (TOPS), says ruefully.

Lai has been providing refugee services in the Thai border town of Mae Sot along the Burmese frontier for the past six years.

The Meager Wishes of 4,000 Children

With the international price of rice continuing to skyrocket along with surging global energy and commodity prices, international relief organizations are feeling the heat, one by one being forced to curtail or suspend relief services. The result is that TOPS may be unable to continue providing nutritious lunches for the 4,000 children living in the Burmese refugee camp inside Thai territory.

"A day's lunch of meat and vegetables for each 3-5 year-old refugee child costs just NT$3, but we need the urgent assistance of all sectors of society to achieve this," Lai wrote on his blog "Border Drifting," in a vociferous and heart-rending appeal to those of conscience to donate generously.

Mae Sot is located in far northwest Thailand along a major land transit route between Burma and Thailand about 600 km from Bangkok. The Burmese border itself, defined by the Moei River, is less than five kilometers from central Mae Sot.

The population of the frontier town is a polyglot mixture of Thais, Burmese, various hill tribe minorities, Bengalis and Chinese, along with swarms of backpackers and relief workers from around the world.

Ethnic persecution by the military dictatorship in Yangon has forced huge numbers of Burmese from their home villages and into Thailand to seek refuge. Beginning in 1984, tens of thousands of members of the Karen minority group crossed into Thailand seeking refuge. Burmese of all stripes, forced from their homes, soon followed in even greater numbers. Today, there is a Burmese exile population of 150,000 living in 10 refugee camps scattered along the border inside Thai territory, with more than a million others hiding in the surrounding mountains or drifting among neighboring towns and villages, living lives of despair.

Even though he originally arrived in Mae Sot to work on providing pre-school education, Lai was still crestfallen when he first saw the refugee camps.

Huts with thatched roofs, made of woven bamboo and built on stilts, stand closely together as far as the eye can see in the camp that stretches four kilometers along the roadside and all across the mountainside at the edge of the jungle. Upon entering the camp, one is hard-pressed to find any patch of open recreation space, or even enough room to simply catch one's breath.

The Shock of the Refugee Camps

"If you haven't experienced it for yourself, it's really impossible to imagine the so-called ‘life' the refugees lead, having been robbed of their liberty," Lai says.

Barbed wire fences have tightly segregated these refugees from the outside world now for 20 years. Some who escaped Burma in their early teens have gotten married and had children in the camps, children who have never seen the outside world.

Outside the camps, the plight of Burmese illegal immigrants has come to be another sad story. Hundreds of thousands of Burmese illegal immigrants live in the shadows along the Thai-Burmese frontier, mostly working in factories in the Mae Sot area (many of them financed with ethnic Chinese capital), where they work 12-hour days for just NT$60 after meals and transportation are deducted, half the mandatory minimum wage under Thai law.

After six years working along the frontier, Lai found that there were just too many people in need of assistance; the more he wanted to help, the more powerless he felt to do so.

"Confronted with the conflict between my internal expectations and the external circumstances, I felt incredibly hesitant and fainthearted. So many mornings I just wanted to hide beneath the bedcovers and try to escape what seemed my unending powerlessness," Lai sighs.

From an early age Lai cared little for schoolwork and hoped he could one day work in the mountains as a park ranger or perhaps a primary school teacher in remote areas.

After graduating from university, while those around him were busily preparing for certification examinations or graduate school, Lai gravitated toward a different kind of experience and headed for Europe for study and solo travel.

His sojourning at the end of the 1990s broadened his horizons, and he resolved to pursue a graduate degree in social development in Britain. While there, he was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of numerous promising classmates from a variety of national and ethnic backgrounds and forge friendships with Europeans and Americans with extensive work and travel experience in Asia. Sharing experiences and worldviews with these new friends and acquaintances and the impressions he gleaned from books stirred in him an irrepressible curiosity and concern for his world.

Seeing His Own Pride and Weaknesses

People sometimes ask Lai: "Does doing humanitarian relief work overseas give you a sense of accomplishment?" His answer is invariably that when he sees progress made through his work, there is of course a sense of accomplishment. More importantly, however, is that his work gives him a deeper understanding of himself, showing him his own pride and weaknesses, as the utterly destitute teach him what strength and happiness are all about.

Once, a refugee friend, sensing Lai's weakening resolve, patted him softly on the shoulder and said: "Hey, it's okay, there's always a way. After all, you're just one man. Just do the best you can. Don't worry, we're there for you."

"In fact, the one who was fragile was myself, who had grown up in a situation of ease," Lai admits.

His life along the Thai-Burmese border has made it abundantly clear that it's not so much a question of how much the people here need him or whether he can actually change anything here, but: "my own need for this group of the truest of associates, my own need for this exotic land in my continuing quest and exploration of the attitudes and rhythms of my own life."

Lai has now been vexed for more than two months over how to continue to provide lunches to the kindergarten kids in the refugee camps, an anxiety that has intensified over the past several weeks and now causes him to lose sleep.

Finding an organization or agency to provide food staples is hard, as things like building schools can actually be easier and provide more tangible results, while "filling a million bellies a year just becomes another line item." When Lai is joined in a discussion with Gouta Ono, director of the Myanmar Refugee Project Office of Japan's Shanti Volunteer Association, the two readily assert the difficulties and vagaries of gathering food donations.

"With such a huge gap in funding, what are we to do if we can't come up with it?" asks Lai's Japanese colleague.

"Prepare for the worst-case scenario while always holding out hope for the best possible outcome," Lai optimistically replies without a second's hesitation, revealing an outlook of steely determination he learned from the refugees themselves.

Translated from the Chinese by Brian Kennedy