Combat Health Disparities for Kachin Women (2)

Dear Donors, 

I hope this update finds you all well and enjoying your summer. I’m fortunate enough to be spending mine in Thailand, working as an intern for the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT). For a month now, we have been helping the phenomenal women at KWAT update their website, edit their activity reports, and work on their conversational English.

The project you have helped us to fund is nearly complete. KWAT now has a laboratory where they can test patients on the Burma-China border, without referring them to a hospital that may be far away and dangerous to reach. Even though the laboratory is just about ready for patients, there will always be financial need to keep it stocked and pay its staff, so recurrent donations are appreciated!

This project falls under KWAT’s Health Program, but with this report, I’d like to tell you a little bit more about what I have seen at KWAT, which has more to do with some of their other programs. 

The office, at first glance, is pretty boring. Each staff member is parked in front of her own computer, the monotony occasionally broken by conversations in rapid Kachin that I have no hope of following. 

It gets more interesting when you realize that on every computer screen are stories of rape and murder, spelled out without emotion and without bias. 

“She was shot and wounded when the Burmese soldiers attacked at a temporary jungle IDP camp. There were 34 villagers taking refuge in the jungle…Her granddaughter …was captured along with her four-year-old daughter and another woman…who has 23-day-old baby. [That woman] was killed within a night and [her granddaughter] was taken with the Burmese military offensive mission troop along the way. Her body was found by her family later.” 

KWAT collects these stories because the world does not listen to Kachin people—it listens to the Burmese government.

Even in everyday tasks, there are jolting reminders of the fact that everyone here has lost something. We are practicing conversational English with four KWAT staff members. The prompt was simple: write a letter to a friend back home, describing what is going on in your life. We were expecting the typical; “I’m very busy at work, I just got a new cat, the mangoes are in season.”

What we got:

“Have you seen my family members, are they okay?”

“I wish I can go home someday and see you.”

“How is the situation there? I think it is still bad.”

The war in Burma is not ending. Many more families will be separated, more women and children forced to flee their homes. There will be a need for KWAT and its programs for a very long time. 

Thank you for being a part of our team as we do what we can to combat some of the disparities that Kachin people face. 

With gratitude,

Lisa Carson