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How refugees from Myanmar live in northern Thailand

Photojournalism
How refugees live in the north of Thailand
Confucius once said - Choose a job to your liking and you won't have to work a single day in your life.
Not everyone is lucky enough to find a dream job and they continue to go to a job they don't like day in and day out. What if I told you that there are jobs much worse than you can imagine. One of them is sorting rubbish at a landfill site in northern Thailand. Refugees from Myanmar are involved in this job and it is the only way for them to feed their families.
The landfill site is located near Mae Sot town in northern Thailand. It's a border town with Myanmar. And Myanmar is not the most prosperous country. There is rampant human trafficking, kidnapping and other crime, so a huge number of people are fleeing to Thailand. As you can see, Myanmar refugees are the ones who work at the dump. To support themselves, they sort the rubbish.
Nauseating odour, which is literally palpable, hordes of flies and worms - that's what a person sees for the first time when he gets to this place, but go deep inside and you see a completely different picture - ordinary life. Here is a boy of about 4 years old playing with a car (and let it not have half of the wheels and the body is broken off), and here are children riding down a slide (and let it be a mountain of rubbish, not a slide in a water park), and here is Spider-Man, 6 years old. And looking at their happy faces and the light in their eyes - it is impossible to believe that such a thing is still possible in such a place!
Several times an hour a rubbish truck comes to the dump. People quickly take all the rubbish and then take it to the camp, where it is carefully sorted - glass separately, plastic separately.
All members of the family and even small children are involved in the work process. They receive $15 a week, which is barely enough to feed the family. Not far from the dump, volunteers have set up a school for children, but not every family can afford to let their children go to school, because then their productivity will drop.
Many children don't even have shoes and run barefoot in the dump.
How refugees from Myanmar live in northern Thailand
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How refugees from Myanmar live in northern Thailand

Published: