The 9-year-old girl runs for her life. She and her family are fleeing from soldiers driving them and fellow villagers from their homes.
At the top of a hill, soldiers kill her father and grandmother and shoot her in the stomach. She survives but must hide in the jungle with her mother and siblings.
A scene from a movie? No, a real event in Myanmar — formerly known as Burma — and a chillingly common one.
“It happens all the time,” writes Oddny Gumaer in “Displaced Reflections,” a photo chronicle of Burmese refugees. “I wonder why it keeps happening and the story never gets told.”
After hearing her and her husband, Steve, describe the horrors of Myanmar, I wonder, too.
They tell of a medieval dictatorship systematically slaughtering the country’s ethnic minorities and selling their children into the military.
“They are brutal,” Steve told me some time ago on a stop in Grand Rapids. “The people we work with get killed all the time. If you don’t play along with the will of the regime, you are dead — and your wife is raped.”
He and Oddny, along with a few dozen indigenous staff, wage a David-versus-Goliath battle to help a people routinely raped, routed from their homes, tortured and killed. This is the norm in Burma, which its military dictators renamed Myanmar in 1989. Many refuse to recognize the name, including the Gumaers.
Their Christian nonprofit, Partners Relief and Development, works with thousands of the estimated 1 million internally displaced Burmese as well as refugees in neighboring Thailand.
They have support in West Michigan but could use more. Discovery Church, a Christian Reformed congregation in Cutlerville, lends financial and prayer support. Church member Sid Jansma Jr., chairman of Wolverine Oil and Gas, and his wife, Sharin, are strong supporters, taking their cue from the biblical call to lay down their lives for others as Jesus did for them.
“They’re the only group I know of putting themselves at risk to help their brothers for a Christian reason,” Jansma says of Partners Relief. “We felt convicted by the Holy Spirit to do the same thing.”
Jansma went to Burma last year, crossing the border at night and hiking into jungle camps for displaced people. A Burmese guide cared for him after he dislocated his shoulder on a mountain. He was impressed with the schools, food supplies, medical facilities and the gospel teachings that Partners provided, and with the resilience of the Burmese people.“I was touched by their smiles, their optimism. This is a group of people that does not give up.”
A lesser people would have given up long ago. Pro-democracy forces have been under assault since 1990, when the military refused to recognize a democratically elected party and its leader, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. The government brutally put down 2007 protests led by Buddhist monks and since has raided homes and monasteries to arrest activists. Kyi remains under house arrest.
Surrounded by India, China and Thailand, Burma came to the world’s attention in 2008 when Cyclone Nargis killed more than 80,000 people. The government made things worse by hindering international groups from providing aid.
But the headlines are nothing compared to what goes on in the villages and jungles. More than 3,500 villages have been destroyed, according to Partners. Soldiers plant land mines to prevent villagers from returning and use rape as a weapon. Steve Gumaer calls it “the most corrupt country on Earth,” rich in resources but reduced to poverty by its military rulers.
“Their pure and simple ideology is greed,” says Steve, who lives in Norway and Thailand. “They are fantastically rich and they’re not going to let go.”
But neither are the Gumaers and other aid groups, such as Free Burma Rangers. Partners provides schooling for more than 65,000 children and health clinics and agricultural training for people on the run. They also lobby for international political action against human-rights violations.
“God is in hot pursuit of these people,” Steve Gumaer says. “He wants to show them he’s alive.”
God could use some help from people showing the Burmese that they care.
E-mail Charles Honey: honeycharlesm@gmail.com
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