The pickup bounced over the rough dirt road, driving deep into the lush green Thai countryside before coming to a stop at some marshy pond. The team transferred bundles of relief goods into long, narrow wooden boats and then motored the rest of the way to Gong Mong Tha—otherwise known as “Elephant Village.” About 16 Karen and Mon families live here in isolated poverty. Some earn a small amount caring for the elephants tourists use for trekking expeditions. Others are employed in gathering liquid rubber tapped from the surrounding plantation.

This area has about twenty similar villages. Many dozens more lie further along the Thai/Burma border. All are in desperate condition. Back in 1988, Burma’s brutal military regime killed over six thousand pro-democracy demonstrators and began targeting hill tribes people in the east for particular persecution. The Karen—about 40% of whom are Christian--have since endured forced labor, relocation and execution. Over the years thousands of the 1.5 million displaced peoples have made their way through the jungle and over the mountains to Thailand.

“We lost everything,” said a Karen refugee. “They burned our houses and we had to live long years in the forest. We don’t have a country or a nationality. We have nothing.”

In 2004 Mercy Teams International (MTI), established a base on the Thai-Burmese border. Nelson and Bea Young, who lead the work, say their town actually has more Burmese than Thai residents.

Elephant Village was MTI’s first project. On previous visits they had brought fruit, hygiene packs and other supplies. It was now the “cold” season and the people needed warmer clothing and blankets. Their diet had been reduced to rice and whatever fish they could catch, since recent flooding had destroyed the village’s vegetable garden. And supplies were needed for the little school being held in one of the bamboo houses for 21 small children.

“Thai schools would accept them,” explains Nelson, “but even if parents could afford to buy school uniforms, the children live too far away to attend.”

Burmese children who are born in Thailand and have a birth certificate can receive Thai citizenship. Many do not, however. On weekends Nelson uses four donated computers at the MTI office to teach Karen teenagers, some of them orphans, with the hope of giving them an educational advantage. MTI has also helped equip a centre in Sanklaburi to run a school for the children in a lakeside Laoshen village.

“We want to provide physical help as well as spiritual help,” Nelson asserts. “We have total freedom.

MTI’s small team is supplemented by volunteers and short-term teams from Singapore. Last year a medical team treated 700 patients in several different locations, within a week. Another group of medics crossed 23 streams and travelled hours of dirt tracks and sharp inclines to care for 500 destitute tribal people. The place was so remote the people normally had to walk three days for medical help. A Thai helicopter airlifted in the team’s medical supplies.

In 1995, a Karen widow named Daisy Dwe began a weaving business to generate income for other women who needed to support their families. They spun their own yarn using a homemade bicycle wheel and bicycle parts, and colored the fabric with natural dyes. “Women for Weaving” now employs 12 workers who make their own designs for blouses, scarves, handbags, and other items, weave them on huge shuttle looms and sell them in their own little shop. MTI has contributed three looms to this worthwhile enterprise.

As long as Burma’s border continues to bleed human beings, those who can give practical ministry to both body and spirit are urgently needed. MTI is grateful for three volunteer groups—one with doctors and a dentist—who are expected to help this December.

The extent of what Mercy Teams will do in the future is limited only by the participation by Christians worldwide. As Director David Greenfield recently noted: “We have been invited to plant churches in two or three places by the village chiefs. We don’t have enough people.--But this is an open door we need to be walking through!”

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