(June 20 is World Refugee Day)
By Madhulika Sonkar, IANS,
New Delhi : Lodged in a matchbox-sized room with her parents and three siblings, 17-year-old Lalpek Sung constantly looks at the stained bathroom where her mother is chopping vegetables as she explains what it’s like to be a Myanmarese refugee in the Indian capital.
Sung’s younger brother is suffering from diarrhoea, while the whole family is recovering from scabies, a contagious skin disease.
For more than 8,000 Myanmarese refugees living in the capital, survival has become a battle amid unhygienic conditions, poverty, lack of access to health facilities, stifling language barriers, and the worst problem in the form of discrimination.
“Life has been like this only. Where will our complaints go… knowing the fact that we do not belong to this place?” Sung, with moist eyes, told IANS.
Her family came here in 2009 and settled in semi-urban Budella village in Vikaspuri, west Delhi. After a lot of hardships, her father got a job in a factory at a meagre sum of Rs.4,000 a month.
Sung can’t even work as a domestic help as her collarbone broke when a car hit her while she was in a rickshaw.
“A complaint was registered, but the driver got away after paying Rs.10,000 as compensation,” Sung told IANS, alleging that her family was “asked to buy alcohol for the police to get the compensation”.
She says her only source of support, a monthly subsistence allowance, has also been stopped by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the ground that there are more needy people around.
The ethnic Myanmarese population includes the Chin, Arakanese, Kachin and Shan communities. They have been living in Vikaspuri, Uttam Nagar, Asalatpur and Janakpuri areas of the capital.
As most of the people come here without any formal education and can’t communicate in English, a free health clinic in the bylanes of Budella takes care of the healthcare needs of the community.
“The Yamonena clinic helps people as it is run by a Burmese doctor, and reaches out to people for medicines, maternal help and other basic needs. But how much can one clinic do when it is open just three days a week?” asks Saumte, a refugee living here for the last four years.
He also talks about the everyday discrimination faced by them.
“Our different physical features are just one reason that makes the locals pass remarks. Refugees here are poor and go to the vegetable market late night to collect the leftovers. The vendors make sure even the leftovers are trampled, so that the refugees do not come,” said Saumte.
“Little things like the behaviour of landlords, employers and the locals makes you feel alienated.”
According to the UNHCR, around 3,700 refugees were given identity cards as asylum-seekers in 2010, while over 4,500 refugees are still in the waiting list.
Around 1.3 million people have left Myanmar in the last four decades. That country has been under military rule for years.
Sung and others are living in the constant hope that the political situation in their country will some day get better and then people won’t have to “escape the tyrannous military rule”.
“But till then, we can’t think of going back unless the situation gets better,” says Sung while staring at the picture of Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in her room.
(Madhulika Sonkar can be contacted at [email protected])