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We met with the Pastor from the Thai Bible League the next day when he delivered our Bibles. He told us that they had just finished a revival meeting in Mae Rah Moo camp and had baptized 444 people and given many of them Bibles. With so many Buddhists in Thailand, he has a tough mission field and we are very happy to have met him and to be able to cover him in prayer as he continues evangelizing in Thailand. The Lord continues to bring wonderful people into our lives wherever He leads us. We will definitely meet with him on our next trip to Thailand.
Rudy offered to drive to Chiang Mae to pick us up since we now had four heavy boxes of Bibles that would be very difficult to transport on the bus. He and Tay had changed their schedule so they could drive us to Mae Sot as soon as things cooled down on the border. In a few days we felt things had settled down enough and the majority of the new refugees had returned to their villages in Burma. The Thai had made it very clear that they would be given temporary refuge only. None of them could stay or seek shelter in the established refugee camps as the established camps are already way too full. Mae La Refugee Camp, the camp near Mae Sot, has over 40,000 people. The camps are overseen by the Thai government with limited input from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). The camps were initially established as a "temporary shelter" when fierce fighting was forcing millions from their villages in Burma.
In 1995, the Burmese troops over ran the Karen headquarters, Mannerplaw, and attacked all the settlements on both sides of the border. I was in Mae Sot when this happened, waiting to get to my friends home in Htoo Wah Loo village. I had lived with a General and his family for two months the previous year and had made plans to stay with them again. I had my nephew Steve, who was a pastor and Dr. Jim Borden, a general surgeon from Alaska with me. We finally made it to the village, only to find it had been attacked. We were stopped outside the village and only after fervent prayers and relating why we were there, were we allowed to make our way through the jungle to the next village. We stayed there 2 weeks, helping in any way we could.
The next year, l stayed with a group of 150 people who had built a little settlement in the jungle and were sleeping on the ground. In 1997, through a series of events that I can't relate here, a number of families were tricked into going back into Burma. They were promised they could go back to their homes and villages. This didn't happen and they were kept against their will. Over the next several years, many families and older children made it through the jungle back into Thailand and the refugee camps. I lost track of most of the families who went back to Burma.
Last year I received a phone call from one of my closest Karen friends. For his safety, I will call him "Sam". He and his family had finally made it back across the border and we talked regularly over the next year. He would call me whenever he could get out of camp to a phone. We made plans to meet when Rick and I got to the refugee camp where he was staying. I was so excited at the prospect of seeing them. I had thought we would never see each other again. We always talked about how we'd see each other in Heaven if God didn't work it out for us to meet on earth. Sam was going to be in Mae La camp for a short time so we made arrangements to travel to the camp while he was still there. He was going to make arrangements for a car to take us to the next camp, Mae Rah Moo, and he planned to travel with us. His wife and 5 of his children were waiting in Mae Rah Moo for us. A few days before we got to the camp, he told us that all travel passes had been cancelled and he could not get a pass to meet us in Mae La. I was so disappointed and didn't understand why God hadn't intervened and made it possible for us to meet.