Going nowhere

I dedicate this post to Poe Reh in whom I confided on this issue and his advice was to write it up in my blog.  So here I am.  I went to him to share on my experience of helping urban refugees in Bangkok as he knows the life of camp refugees through being a Karenni from Myanmar.  My challenges are with a similar but different population - urban refugees, living in the community in Greater Bangkok.   

I have been helping these people for so long that I am hitting a new wall.  What is the wall?  It is dependency and much more.  I would say it is senseless dependency.  You help people, they become dependent on you and then the next step arrives, I discover.  It is blowing me apart as ones I have helped so long are getting angry with me because I am not helping them as they want.  Of course, this is not every urban refugee.  There are others you help who stand on their own feet and act for themselves.  In doing a simple comparison between the two samples of the population, I am seeing a pattern.

Simply put, it is that if you are a victim back home, you will remain a victim as a refugee in your host country.  If you are a success story back home, you will be a success story in your host country.  Being a victim is not determined then by your level of suffering - in this case by being a refugee - or any other difficulty or barrier, nor by location, but by who one is in life.  Wherever one is or whatever situation one finds oneself in, victim status appears as being the domain not of outside dilemmas and disasters but of who one is and their ability to rise above the mess and meet the challenges of the moment.  Carpe diem!