November 10th marks another BlogersUnite day.  There are thousands of bloggers out there and the blogosphere is a great place to help inform and influence popular opinion.  Previously they have chosen to focus on other important issues such as human rights, encouraging acts of kindness, mobilizing against abuse & promoting organ donation.  This time they chose to discuss refugees, and challenged bloggers to learn about refugee issues, post an image/link back to the BloggersUnite page and to help raise awareness about the millions of displaced people around the world. 

A friend of mine is in Thailand now for Inter Pares working on this issue, so I thought I would try to spend a bit of time talking about what little I know about refugees in this area.  I've also been aware of what is happening in Burma for a while and have previously blogged about the red shirt campaign and efforts to organize opposition online. October 4th, 2007 there was also an international campaign to get bloggers to raise awareness about Burma.

Going to Inter Pares site would be a good place to learn a bit more about what they are doing in this region of the world.  There is a good photo essay from earlier this year that they have posted on their site. They work with a number of organizations based largely in Thailand. 

It is difficult for me to go through this and get a real sense of what it is like to lead the life of a refugee.  One can search for organizations like the Backpack Health Workers Team and the Mae Tao Clinic, to get a feel of who these people are working on these issues, however for those working on the border of Thailand & Burma there are risks to being identified. 

I could pull down images like the one here to the left from Flickr (this one is licensed under a creative commons license which makes it particularly useful to help propagate it to people interested in this issue). 

Looking at other refugee organizations working in this area I noticed that Refugees International is using Drupal.  They seem to have a pretty active blog.

Although you can read quite a lot of reports on the situation in Burma, a picture is worth a 1000 words they say, and you can get a river of Flickr pictures on Burmese Refugees using the Flickr River site.  It's a bit overwhelming to scroll through the images, but you certainly get a sense of living conditions of these people. 

It is encouraging to hear about campaigns to give people a cause, a structure, and a network to extend beyond their regular knitting, model railroad, or tech blog to inform their community about larger issues. If you've got a blog, consider joining up to Blogger's Unite!