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[CRICKETS CHIRPING] [ROOSTER CROWING]

TOM MEERSMAN: Dawn is breaking in Aranyaprathet, a small village in Eastern Thailand just five miles from the border of Kampuchea. The sounds of the night overlap with the noises of a new day. The pink glow on the horizon is mirrored and fractured in dozens of rectangular rice paddy pools on the outskirts of town.

To the north and south of Aranyaprathet lies a series of refugee camps, stretched along the border in haphazard fashion. A quarter of a million people are beginning another day here. They are refugees who have fled terrorism and invading troops from Vietnam in what used to be called Cambodia.

[? YAPANI CHHIT: ?] [SPEAKING KHMER]

TOM MEERSMAN: One of the refugees is [? Yapani ?] [? Chhit. ?] She and her husband have been living near the border since 1980. Now, in a bamboo hut called house number 519 in block C8, section 17 of a camp called Khao-I-Dang, she stands on a clean dirt floor between her thatched bed and a smoldering cooking fire in the center of the room.

[? YAPANI CHHIT: ?] [SPEAKING KHMER]

SPEAKER 1: Her concern is that she really want to resettle and to meet Yanat Chhit in the United States, in Minnesota.

TOM MEERSMAN: [? Yapani ?] Chhit wants to join her older brother Yanat in the Twin Cities, but she says her application for admission was denied on July 23. US regulations require that refugees seeking resettlement must first attempt to join their closest relatives abroad. [? Yapani's ?] mother lives in France, so the US has refused to consider her application at this time.

YANAT CHHIT: I keep hoping that I can bring her over here because I feel that I will be in a better position to help her.

TOM MEERSMAN: [? Yapani's ?] brother, Yanat Chhit, lives with his wife and children in Bloomington, 11,000 miles away from Khao-I-Dang. Since arriving in the US in 1974, Yanat Chhit has completed graduate studies in economics. He has become a US citizen. He works as a research assistant at the Ninth District Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis.

Yanat has been pleading his sister's case for several years. He has appealed to President Reagan, to Secretary of State Shultz, to congressmen, and to several top officials at the US Embassy in Bangkok. He has explained to them that his 67-year-old mother in France is not working and is struggling to survive with three of his brothers and their families.

Yanat also knows that France has not interviewed many Cambodian refugees in the camps recently and that time is running out. The government of Thailand is expected to close Khao-I-Dang by the end of this year.

YANAT CHHIT: The situation now is very crucial, and nobody can predict the Thai government attitude. It takes just one decision to close the whole camp and take all the refugees to the border, maybe push them back in Cambodia. And you know all the risks they have to go through because they have to cross the minefields. And also, that many people. Who are going to take care of their safety, their food, their shelter?

TOM MEERSMAN: In Bangkok, a three-hour drive from Khao-I-Dang, Yapani Chhit's case is on file in a computer at the US Embassy. 14,000 other refugees in Khao-I-Dang have also been rejected by American officials for a wide variety of reasons. US State Department policymakers here acknowledged that few, if any, of the cases will be reconsidered because immigration workers have a backlog of refugees in other camps who still haven't been interviewed for a first time.

Uncertainty about the future of Khao-I-Dang is producing ripples of concern. Some United Nations officials fear that closing the camp may be the first step in dismantling the entire international resettlement effort in Southeast Asia. Refugees in the camps have also heard this and suspect that the US and other Western nations are growing weary of receiving additional refugees each year.

Dr. Roland Sutter is the medical director in Bangkok for the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration.

ROLAND SUTTER: I think we are going to have more and more problems, more mental health problems in the refugee population, I think. It seems that resettlement is getting more difficult. Maybe some people are still able to cover or to cope. But as soon as, maybe, that the option is gone, I think a lot of them probably will lose their holds. And I think the problem will get bigger.

TOM MEERSMAN: The prospect of less refugee resettlement may also intensify the emotional lives of refugees who now live in the US. Most do not express their concerns publicly, but the private anguish is deep and is shared by many.

21-year-old Lang Hong of Minneapolis learned recently that her 12-year-old brother had just crossed the border from Kampuchea into Thailand.

LANG HONG: All the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, they got fighting all the time. That's what I heard. I don't want him to be die because I lost my parent already. [SOBBING]

And I wish all the government, the United States help him to bring him here as soon as possible.

TOM MEERSMAN: The emotional burdens of divided families are perhaps even heavier in the US than they are in Thailand. Refugees in camps can do almost nothing to influence their futures, but their relatives in the US bear full responsibility for helping and supporting them. Many refugees who have come to America, especially those who have been successful, often feel embarrassed, frustrated, and guilty about their good fortune. Yanat Chhit.

YANAT CHHIT: Everybody here, even though we are here, we are safe. We have jobs. We live. We have a comfortable life. But deep inside ourselves, we are not happy because there are problem there.

TOM MEERSMAN: And so they wait, thousands of divided families. They hope for an international settlement that will allow them to return to their homeland, or they hope for the Thai government to accept refugees as permanent citizens. Or they hope to be reunited with what remains of their families in the US, Canada, France, Australia, and other countries. They hope for all of these changes or any of them. But on both sides of the world, the only thing they can expect from tomorrow with any kind of certainty is that another day will bring another dawn.

I'm Tom Meersman.

[CRICKETS CHIRPING]

[CROWD CHATTER IN KHMER]

It is almost noon in Ban Vinai, a refugee camp in a picturesque valley in Northern Thailand. Hundreds of people have converged at the center of camp. They stand in the reddish-colored dust near their wooden carts. They hold baskets and buckets. They have come, as they do every week at this time, to pick up United Nations-supplied rations of fish and meat.

Teams of workers are hacking away at the sides of pork that lie on a dirty concrete slab. They use immense cleavers to divide the meat and to break up huge, frozen blocks of fish.

[CROWD CHATTER IN KHMER]

Across a dirt road and halfway up a small hill, United Nations High Commission for Refugees senior field officer Hitoshi Misei sits in his office.

HITOSHI MISEI: So far, we have some 10,000 people who have expressed their willingness to go to the United States, and I think the number of these people will increase this year.

TOM MEERSMAN: Misei says this sudden interest in resettlement is a major change in Ban Vinai. During the past decade, US immigration officials visited the camp regularly, interviewed thousands of Hmong refugees, and offered most of them the chance to resettle in America. But when the buses came every so often to pick up the Hmong, as many as 50% of them did not show up. Others got aboard the buses just to experience a ride to the other side of camp.

But during the past nine months, says Misei, that attitude of indifference has changed dramatically.

HITOSHI MISEI: Many, many refugees have been waiting for their return to their home country. And I think refugee leaders have been encouraging these people here to wait. But I must say that now, after several years wait, the longest stay is 10 years here. And now I think they have realized that it's not possible for them to go back.

TOM MEERSMAN: In addition to a widespread feeling that they may never be able to return peacefully to Laos, Hmong refugees are also worried that they won't be allowed to stay in Thailand either. The Thai government has agreed to host refugees only as long as other countries provide food and offer resettlement. Now, after more than a decade of such assistance, the Western commitment to refugees seems to be lessening. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, facing budget constraints, has cut back food rations in Ban Vinai by 20% and has also announced plans to reduce teachers' salaries.

[METAL POUNDING]

In spite of these concerns about the future, daily life in the present seems regular and routine. On the surface, Ban Vinai resembles a large village more than a refugee camp. Craftsmen forge knives in a blacksmith shop. Women embroider quilts, and handbags, and wall hangings. Young adults in vocational training programs learn the basics of nursing, mechanics, silkscreening, sewing, and typing.

It is those who are motivated and young enough to make new lives for themselves in other countries who feel trapped in Ban Vinai. Charlie Soon is 26 years old and has been living in the camp since 1980.

CHARLIE SOON: Only some, about 30% or 40%, they would think that in camp is good life because we have rice, or we have food, or everything from the United Nation or from the American governor. So they think it's a good life. But in fact, it's not so good for us. Today is good, but tomorrow we don't know. The refugee life is like that.

TOM MEERSMAN: The refugees' increased frustration, their sense of no meaningful future may explain in part the rise in opium addiction that the camp's Thai commander considers as Ban Vinai's number one problem. He is also concerned about the camp's high birth rate. 11,000 children, almost one-fourth of the entire population, are below the age of six years, and 200 more are born each month.

Dr. Marty Martins is a pediatrician from Fresno, California. He has taken two months leave each year for the past five years to volunteer his services in the camp's hospital. Here in the pediatrics ward, one of the most dangerous diseases is tetanus. Most Hmong adults do not accept the practice of immunization, and they often infect their newborn babies by using dirty knives to cut umbilical cords or by following the traditional method of smearing cow dung or mud on the open ends. By the time parents are desperate enough to come to the hospital, their infants are terribly ill, and half of them will die in this small room.

MARTY MARTINS: There is a neonatal intensive care nurse from the US that came through visiting a few days ago, and she was completely taken aback at the differences between a bright, modern, American intensive care unit and a room that's filled with families, and children running around on the floor, and ants crawling up the IV poles and sometimes actually making their way into the IV bottles.

TOM MEERSMAN: I don't want to be discourteous since you work here and do the best you can, but it really looks pretty filthy in here by Western standards.

MARTY MARTINS: Yeah, you're right. It is. After a while, you don't even notice it anymore.

TOM MEERSMAN: Martin says new medical gear would not help Ban Vinai very much and that foreigners run into serious trouble with the authorities whenever they provide better medical care in camps than is available to local Thai citizens in the surrounding countryside. If any additional money becomes available for Ban Vinai, Martin says it should be spent on family planning, health education, and sanitation programs.

[CHILD WHINING]

The most disturbing aspect of Ban Vinai is not its struggling health care system, or its limited schools, or its declining food rations. As one of the oldest refugee camps in Southeast Asia, it is also a symbol of what happens when a culture tries to maintain itself over time in an artificial setting. United Nations High Commission for Refugees deputy representative Eric Morris.

ERIC MORRIS: For the most part, it's a depressing future because there's a great deal of inactivity. The cultural system is not in a natural habitat. These are people who are used to being on tops of mountains in Laos and moving about as they want. And I think one can see that a price has been paid in this refugee camp in terms of the well-being of the Hmong.

TOM MEERSMAN: For a few years, a proud people can sustain itself with the hope of returning home. But after a longer period of time, the dream fades, the hope sours, the culture withers, and everyone wants out. That's happening now in Ban Vinai, and it may happen in other refugee camps as they too grow older.

[CROWD CHATTER IN KHMER]

A new generation is coming of age here that cannot remember life before the camp or that food comes from planting, and growth, and harvest, not from a weekly pickup of rations at some shack or concrete slab.

I'm Tom Meersman.

[CROWD CHATTER IN KHMER]

[DRUM BEATS]

[ETHNIC MUSIC PLAYING]

Renée Pan of Minneapolis received an official welcome, including a classical dance performance in her honor when she arrived at the Cambodian refugee camp called Site Two. As a former Cambodian who fled her country in 1975, she is one of the few Khmer people from the West who has been allowed to return to visit refugee camps, first in 1983 and now again in 1986.

[ETHNIC MUSIC PLAYING]

[VOCALIZING]

Pan said she was overwhelmed with emotion three years ago to see her people living on rations and in a confined camp. She spent much of her time then weeping as she visited old friends whom she had known in the capital city of Phnom Penh. This year, Pan was able to put most of her feelings aside so she could talk with more people to learn how to improve life in the camps. Pan also brought a message of hope for the refugees, many of whom have lived in a succession of border camps during the past six years.

RENEE PAN: We need a permanent solution, which is trying to regain our country, work it hard, encourage them to work toward that. While they cannot do anything, just only to purify themselves. Be a good citizen. That's enough already for them being in the camp.

TOM MEERSMAN: Pan delivered a packet of letters and a few packages from refugees' relatives in Minnesota. She learned that youngsters in Site Two have virtually no education beyond primary school, so she plans to work with other Cambodians in the US to write curricula and develop classes for the older children in the camp.

[TRAIN RUMBLING]

Saint Paul resident Tong Vang returned to Ban Vinai, a Hmong refugee camp near the Laotian border in Northern Thailand. 10 years ago, he lived here for six months before leaving to resettle in America. Now, beneath a corrugated tin roof during a midday rainstorm, he remembered those days. He looked at the camp through older eyes and realized how much he has changed over the years.

TONG VANG: I feel very badly. I see the people in there. And the area that they divide food or whatever, a very dirty place. And the food look like not for human being to eat and shouldn't be like an animal to eat that. So I didn't feel that-- I felt sick when I saw everything like that.

TOM MEERSMAN: Vang was invited to spend the night at Ban Vinai and was the guest of honor at a large feast. Then, in the evening, the questions began.

"Are you still Hmong?" the people asked, "Or are you American?" Do you teach your children the Hmong language? Is life good in America?

Can we get jobs there? Can our children go to school? Can we practice our religious beliefs? And the most frequent question of all, asked dozens of times into the early hours of the morning--

TONG VANG: Can you tell us, we stay here better or go there better? Or you want us to go, or you want us to stay? And mostly, I told them that I can't make your own judgment. Oh, I cannot make decision. You make your own judgment.

SPEAKER 2: [SPEAKING KHMER]

[? KHUOTONG VISAI VANG: ?] For the refugee who has not any eligibility to go, what happen to them if the Thai government close the camp?

TOM MEERSMAN: [? Khuotong ?] Visai Vang of Minneapolis was another former refugee who visited the camps and interpreted for the rest of the group. [? Khuotong ?] is a lowland Laotian, an ethnic group distinct from the Hmong hill tribes. The lowlanders were also instrumental in helping the US military during the Vietnam War.

They continue to cross the Mekong River to flee their country's Vietnamese-backed government. They are brought to a camp called Ban Napho. Originally built to accommodate 15,000 refugees, Napho now contains between 35,000 and 40,000 people. [? Khuotong ?] learned that the crowded conditions and limited space mean that only one-third of the camp's children may attend primary school.

[? KHUOTONG VISAI VANG: ?] The challenge is how to get the student to have some education in the camp, even if they don't have any hope to resettle in a third country. Many of them already five years over there. That interrupted the education for the children.

TOM MEERSMAN: As he walked past a special English class for refugees' teachers, [? Khuotong ?] realized that Ban Napho has fewer services than other camps, and that of all the refugee groups in Southeast Asia, the lowland Laotians have been the last to be considered for resettlement in the US.

An even less-noticed group of people in some refugee camps is the Vietnamese. Former Vietnamese refugee Josie Kuong of Saint Paul discovered that several hundred of her people are scattered through camps dominated by Cambodian and Laotian refugees.

JOSIE KUONG: I did meet people that are Vietnamese who have pretend to get into the camp by assuming other nationality.

TOM MEERSMAN: Kuong said most Laotian and Cambodian refugees hate the Vietnamese for invading and controlling their countries. Vietnamese who flee their nation and seek safety in the camps must therefore change their names and hide their true identities to avoid persecution.

JOSIE KUONG: They are feeling threatened. They do not dare to speak up, and they live in fear.

TOM MEERSMAN: As members of the governor's council on refugees, Kuong and the others who visited the camps will present information to their own ethnic communities in the Twin Cities during the next few weeks. Beyond that, the former refugees will remember their return to Southeast Asia with mixed emotions, their joy upon hearing familiar music, tasting favorite foods and fruits, and viewing their homeland across the broad expanse of the Mekong River. Their difficult moments in hospitals, at ration centers, and with individuals, and their enhanced recognition that they are divided within themselves, between a past and a present on opposite sides of the globe.

I'm Tom Meersman.

[ETHNIC MUSIC PLAYING]

PATTY ANDERSON: Well, this is the ARC Hospital in Site Two South. It's a 200-bed hospital--

TOM MEERSMAN: Patty Anderson is medical coordinator for the American Refugee Committee at a camp that is 1 and 1/2 miles from the Thai-Cambodian border. She supervises a staff of 24 medical professionals who run a hospital, two outpatient clinics, a tuberculosis treatment program, and several health care training courses for refugees.

PATTY ANDERSON: The care is delivered by the Khmers. The ARC personnel are teachers and their supporters and facilitators, but the Khmer staff, the medics, nurses, and health workers do the actual delivery of care in this hospital.

TOM MEERSMAN: Most ARC medical volunteers work six days a week. They must commute to camp from nearby villages and pass through several military checkpoints along the way. Thai and United Nations security regulations permit foreigners to work in Site Two only during daylight hours, and they must carry radios in case of emergencies. Vietnamese troops battle Khmer resistance fighters just across the border, and it's not unusual for the camp to be placed on alert or for refugees to hear shelling during the night.

One of the busier places in the hospital is the obstetrics ward. More than one-fourth of the refugees in Site Two are children under the age of six. ARC's Bernadette Glisse, a midwife from Belgium, has been working with Cambodian women and infants during the past five years.

BERNADETTE GLISSE: We have five, six deliveries per day in the hospital. The other deliveries are done in the camp. When they have complications, they come to the hospital. I'm teaching 14 students every year, so we have a big group now. We have 30 midwives now, and they take over their teaching also. So it's doing well--

TOM MEERSMAN: Well, you're working yourself out of a job, huh?

BERNADETTE GLISSE: Yeah, right. Exactly. [CHUCKLES] But these babies are all born at night, or most of them. So it's good they do it.

TOM MEERSMAN: Just across the room, Dr. Louis Braile supervises the pediatrics ward. A retired family practitioner from Seattle, Braile has worked in Southeast Asia seven different times since the Vietnam War. He says the work is satisfying, challenging, and difficult.

LOUIS BRAILE: This is the type of job where you never feel that you have completed your day's work. It's endless, and that can bother you sometimes.

[BABY CRYING]

You have the feeling that the people that you work with are really unfortunate and that you would like to give them more than you can possibly give.

[BABY CRYING]

And then there are practical difficulties in just rendering medical care. We all have a concept of medical care as it is practiced in the States at a very high level, and that high level is not really possible here.

TOM MEERSMAN: Braile is concerned that the world is forgetting the Cambodians. It has been years now, he says, since their early days of starvation along the border and since the United Nations formally recognized the population in the border camps as the official nation of the Khmer people. And Braile knows how most of these refugees still cling to their hopes that they will one day be able to return to their homeland.

Compared to Braile and Glisse, registered nurse Jeff Nelson is a newcomer to refugee camps. Nelson came to Site Two nine months ago from St. Paul-Ramsey Hospital. Sitting at a table full of patients' records and with his emergency radio squawking nearby, Nelson describes his time with the Cambodians as an eye-opening experience that has inspired him.

JEFF NELSON: I think there's definitely an underlying depression throughout the whole camp, although most of these people or all these people are survivors. They went through some really hard times in Cambodia. So even though there is that element of depression, they still have a good time, and there still is a lot of joy, and laughter, and happiness in these people.

SPEAKER 3: [SPEAKING KHMER] [LAUGHING]

[LAUGHTER]

TOM MEERSMAN: Half a dozen Khmer children have found some large, empty rice bags made out of burlap. Within seconds, they have stepped into them and begin hopping across a section of the hospital compound. The race delights other children and their parents, and for a couple of minutes, takes their minds off the more pressing health concerns that brought them to the hospital.

This incident typifies life in Site Two, not only for the refugees but also for the foreigners who work with them. Each day brings its own surprises and unpredictable moments that break up the tedium of daily routines. But beneath the passing of events and beyond today's joys and disappointments lies the solid block of uncertainty about tomorrow, about the future of the Khmer people.

It only requires a few weeks for most humanitarian workers to adjust to their life and work in Thailand. Once the novelty wears off, they begin to realize that although they are efficient in meeting the refugees' immediate needs, they are helpless when it comes to permanent solutions. ARC hospital administrator Suzanne [? Lorditch ?] says that she and her colleagues talk about this frequently and strive to maintain a mental balance in order to continue their work.

[? SUZANNE LORDITCH: ?] In some level, you have to. And I don't-- this doesn't sound right, but you almost have to accept this as being normal for the time being, acceptable for the time being given the circumstances.

TOM MEERSMAN: [? Lorditch ?] and others know that it's not normal or acceptable for a quarter of a million people to be living through this decade in a series of camps along a hostile border. They also know that when the problem was first defined seven years ago when Cambodians were fleeing their homeland from invading troops, aid for the refugees was clearly the best response. But if the problem has changed and is now that governments of the world have come to accept, or at least to tolerate, this Cambodian exile, then humanitarian assistance may only make the situation worse by prolonging it.

ARC workers are raising these questions among themselves but have no answers. All they know is that the Cambodians are still here and still need people to help them.

I'm Tom Meersman.

[CHILDREN GIGGLING]

[CAR ENGINE RUMBLING]

The US Embassy in Bangkok is located just a few blocks away from Sukhumvit Road, one of the city's busier thoroughfares. Many embassies line the streets in this section of town, and it is here where budgets are devised and policies are implemented.

Lacy Wright is the US State Department counselor in Thailand for refugee and migration affairs.

LACY WRIGHT: The reality of the matter out here is that people are continuing to come. They are continuing to come in fewer numbers than before, but they are continuing.

TOM MEERSMAN: Last year, US Secretary of State George Shultz commissioned a group of Americans to review the Indochinese refugee situation and to suggest possible changes for future US policy. The panel, chaired by former Iowa Governor Robert Ray, concluded in April that the current US refugee programs should be adjusted to place greater emphasis on immigrant visas. Lacy Wright.

LACY WRIGHT: They distinguished various reasons why people flee their countries, and one of the strong ones in this area was to rejoin their relatives in the United States and in other countries but primarily in the United States. It was felt-- we certainly feel, and the panel felt, that for people who are coming out primarily for that kind of reason, the proper channel for them is to come out as an immigrant.

TOM MEERSMAN: Shifting the emphasis from refugees to immigrants represents a substantial change. Refugees and immigrants are governed by separate sets of US laws, classifications, and procedures. In general, it is considerably more difficult and time-consuming to come to the US as an immigrant than as a refugee.

United Nations High Commission for Refugees deputy representative Eric Morris says that it's a complex matter to analyze why refugees have left their homelands, much less to try to assign primary motives for those actions. Refugees may want to join their families in the US or in other countries, he says, but they also have other reasons to leave.

ERIC MORRIS: You can call them what you want, displaced persons. Still, they are victims of political events. And therefore, the departure of many of them is for quite legitimate reasons.

TOM MEERSMAN: Morris and others are concerned that changes in US policy may mean longer waits for refugees in the camps and perhaps less chance for many of them to be resettled at all. That would exacerbate one of the more serious problems that already exists in refugee camps. What's going to happen to the people whom nobody seems to want?

The issue is coming to a focus at the Cambodian refugee camp of Khao-I-Dang. US officials have rejected, for a wide variety of reasons, 14,000 of the refugees there who want to resettle in America. Morris says the question of their future is now a very sensitive issue.

ERIC MORRIS: The Thai government is focusing on this and asking why are the resettlement governments not taking these people. And then the position seems to be that if the resettlement governments are not going to take them, what do you expect us to do with them? And this is the danger and the situation right now for Khao-I-Dang.

TOM MEERSMAN: The situation seems to be at an impasse. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service has already conducted what it calls an unprecedented formal review of the rejected cases at Khao-I-Dang and sees no need for additional evaluations.

The Thai government has said it will close the camp at the end of this year but has not announced what will happen to the refugees who have been living there. The uncertain future of Khao-I-Dang worries former refugees in Minnesota who still have relatives in the camp. They have asked US officials to continue interviewing Cambodians who want to resettle in America and to reconsider the rejected cases.

Joan Hill works with refugee advocacy programs for Lutheran Social Services in Minneapolis.

JOAN HILL: We really believe if the US closes this program, that the Thais will force all of those people back into Cambodia, and eventually, in the northern camps, the Lao and the Hmong back across the river into Laos. That is the great tragedy of this. And from my point of view, after everything these refugees have suffered, and the Cambodians suffered one of the worst genocides in this century, to refuse any possibility of legitimate claim to refugee status is the cruelest thing that I can imagine.

TOM MEERSMAN: The recommended shift in emphasis from refugees to immigrants will also affect how new arrivals are treated in Minnesota. Refugees now are eligible to receive cash assistance, medical aid, and various other social services for at least 18 months. The money comes to the state from the federal budget and amounts to nearly $13 million a year.

As immigrants, however, new arrivals would receive none of these benefits, and federal assistance channeled through the state would dry up. So the changes would force refugees in need to turn to local governments for help.

Hennepin County assistant director of employment services, John McLaughlin.

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: My guess is that local governments will back away. They have enough problems. They have to deal with the native populations that are there already, American-born, who are in trouble. They have to deal with picking up the trash, and keeping the potholes filled, and doing all the kinds of things that we come to expect in our daily life.

And refugees are peripheral. And they have been because the federal government has accepted the commitment. And I'm afraid that if that goes away, refugees are in trouble.

TOM MEERSMAN: The refugees who are in the most serious trouble are those who remain in Thailand, the 245,000 Cambodians encamped along a hostile border and more than 150,000 Vietnamese, Laotians, and Hmong who live in other camps. The years are passing for these people. And as many lose hope that they may ever return peacefully to their homelands, they begin to look more expectantly to the US for resettlement. In what fashion this country will continue to respond is still an open question.

I'm Tom Meersman.

SPEAKER 4: [SPEAKING KHMER]

ANNE DAMON: What about in this pediatric unit? What kinds of children do you see here? What sorts of illnesses do they have?

SPEAKER 5: A lot of pneumonia and malnutrition also.

TOM MEERSMAN: Anne Damon is a public health nurse from Minneapolis and a member of a special metropolitan task force on refugee health. Her special interest in visiting refugee camps in Thailand was medical services, nutrition, and health education.

ANNE DAMON: --pediatric ward--

TOM MEERSMAN: She questioned doctors, nurses, and medics in five different camps, including one called Site Two near the Thai-Cambodian border.

ANNE DAMON: --to see a physician or a midwife for prenatal care?

SPEAKER 5: Yeah.

ANNE DAMON: Mhm.

TOM MEERSMAN: Damon learned that the quality of health care and the availability of medical supplies varies widely from camp to camp, and she became fascinated by the non-Western traditional methods of healing that refugees usually prefer. Several of the camps contain Traditional Medical Centers or TMCs quiet places housed in spacious bamboo buildings. In one section of the TMC, mixtures of herbs would boil and simmer in a dozen or more huge kettles. Pharmacists prepared teas, lotions, and powders.

In another section, healers would sit with their registration books. Individuals would sign in, present their complaints, discuss their medical histories, and receive advice or remedies.

ANNE DAMON: They may go to a steam bath. They may have a massage. Some TMCs also have acupuncturists.

At the TMC in Phanat Nikhom, they combine the traditional healers of all the different types of ethnic groups in the same building. So there was a Kru Khmer. There was a Lao doctor. There was a Hmong traditional healer, a masseuse, and a steam bath, and all of the different types of services are in the same place.

TOM MEERSMAN: Damon would like to establish a similar center for traditional healers in the Twin Cities that would complement the kinds of treatment available in hospitals. She also wants to train more refugees as nurses so that Laotians, Hmong, and Cambodians will lose some of their fears about Western medicine.

[MACHINERY WHIRRING]

SPEAKER 6: [SPEAKING KHMER]

SPEAKER 7: Can she do it?

TOM MEERSMAN: Another facet of refugee camp life is vocational training. In many places, the equipment is primitive by Western standards and the instruction is limited. Phanat Nikhom is an exception. It is a special transit camp for refugees on their way to the US and other countries. Here, adults receive 20 weeks of cultural and work orientation.

The goals are basic, to teach people who are unfamiliar with electricity how to use appliances, in this case, saber saws. Refugees learn how to turn switches on and off, to wear goggles, and to follow other safety procedures.

SPEAKER 7: Use two hands.

TOM MEERSMAN: Hennepin County assistant director of training and employment, John McLaughlin, observed the vocational programs at Phanat Nikhom and at other camps. He picked up copies of workbooks and manuals so that employment counselors in Minnesota will have a clearer idea of what courses the refugees have taken before they arrive in the US.

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: We did talk with some of the people in Phanat about our documentation system for refugees coming over to indicate to workers in the US what had already been provided, what services, to use an overworked word, what competencies do these people have attained.

Do they know how to make change? Do they know what a resume is? Do they know what an employment application looks like? Do they know what might be expected of them in a certain type of work environment?

[CROWD CHATTER IN KHMER]

TOM MEERSMAN: Perhaps a greater concern than vocational training in the camps is the limited amount of schooling available for children. Youngsters may attend classes but only for a few years. That leaves most teenagers with very little to occupy their time.

Sister Rosemary Scheunemann teaches English as a second language to refugees in Saint Paul. She believes the hunger for education is the most serious problem in the refugee camps, especially among the Laotians and Hmong.

ROSEMARY SCHEUNEMANN: It's very true that if they should ever happen to get their country back, a whole generation is going to be uneducated. They won't have leaders. The leaders now will have died, I'm sure, by the time things get settled, if they ever do. That whole generation is going to be lost. That's a concern of mine, the children.

TOM MEERSMAN: Scheunemann and others who visited the camps intend to write a full report of their trip and to list some specific recommendations for changes that will improve refugee services in Minnesota. Those ideas will be sent to the governor for review and will be discussed within the refugee community during the coming weeks.

I'm Tom Meersman.

[CROWD CHATTER IN KHMER]