UPDATE: PSRB is now part of the newly-formed Hands of Friendship ASBL. The new ASBL also incorporates projects in Zimbabwe; although funds for the Burmese refugees and for school children in Zimbabwe are in separate bank accounts. All funds donated go directly to the projects without any money for administration or expenses being deducted apart from bank charges on transfers.

Projects to Support Refugees from Burma projects are non-political, mainly educational or long-term support for self-help groups. PSRB is a registered charity in Belgium. All expenses, including travel, are covered from private funds.

Admiration and compassion for the many thousands of Karen and Karenni Burmese refugees on the Thai Burma border inspired a first visit to SE Asia, and the foundation of PSRB in 1996. Since then we have undertaken 11 visits to the border, and given talks at numerous schools and churches. Projects are specific, carefully thought-through, and involve people we have come to know well; as the years have passed PSRB has received increasingly generous support from all over the world.

PSRB's decade-long engagement with Burma has, lightened a few areas of darkness. But the situation remains bleak. The predominantly ethnic-Burman military junta in Rangoon, the "State Peace and Development Council", has for several decades conducted one of most brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns anywhere in the world.

Despite regular expressions of outrage by everyone, from the US president downwards, the war of attrition continues. The huge, predatory standing army inflicts forced labour on children as young as five; it is sustained in large part by the SPDC poisoning the region, and much of the rest of the world, with heroin and amphetamines. The results of such narco-dictatorship are predictable: an Aids epidemic is seeping into southern China.

According to the Thai-Burma Border Consortium figures for April 2008, there are officially 113,190 refugees in camps up and down the border, and roughly 1m "migrant workers" in Thailand, at the bottom of the social heap, and just able to scratch a living. In a sense they are the lucky ones. Life among the c. 1m "Internally Displaced Persons" (IDPs) across the border in Burma is often close to unbearable, with unmarked minefields and constant attacks and looting of villages. A Human Rights Watch report estimates that over 3,000 Karen and Karenni villages have been burned down in eastern Burma since 1996; fields are then landmined and unworkable. Over one million people are said to be living in hiding as IDPs.

The choice for the villagers is stark: either to live like animals in the forests or to accept, a bleak, state-controlled existence in "relocation centres" with no rights or land. Those who have managed to reach Thailand are relatively fortunate. However, Thai policy is not to accept that they are officially refugees (for fear of encouraging more of them), to send them back whenever possible, and to make life in the camps uncomfortable and restrictive, without access to mains electricity or phones. Visits are also severely restricted, as is aid in the form of food, education, and health-care. Now many UNHCR registered camp inmates are being resettled in Australia, the US and Europe. However those who leave are often the most educated leaving Community Based Organisations in the camps in disarray.

One of PSRB's basic principles is to spend time with the people we are trying to help, to know in detail what really matters to them. On our most recent visit, for example, this was often anxiety on the part of those were being resettled about the fate of those left behind, as well as anxiety about the fate of young people confronted by (they had heard) the wild, immoral life in the free world of Chicago, Melbourne, or Helsinki. This concern for people's actual lives has shaped the kind of projects PSRB supports, and its particular emphasis on educating and encouraging young people. A few old soldiers who fought against the Japanese in WW II have waited for the day when they can return home for 20 years and more. Recently it seems the small grant of around 60€ a year given to them annually by the Burma Forces Welfare Association is to be withdrawn. PSRB is working to ensure that this does not happen, or that if it does PSRB will fill this need.

Things are as they are, and PSRB plays its small part to sustain morale by improving people's chances of education, health-care, and making a living for themselves. Despite the new restrictions on visiting the camps, and inside them, PSRB has managed during 2008 to get new projects off the ground in the main Karen Camp Mae La, and at Karenni Camps 1 and 2, notably a shop selling woven goods in Mae La Camp run by the Karen Womens Organisation. Efforts have concentrated on self-help schemes, in supporting small student organisations, and on education and medical help.

Between January and December 2007 PSRB received over 26,448 € from individuals and organisations. Of this, 40% was spent on education e.g paying IDP school teachers a small wage, buying school supplies, and repairing school buildings; 14% to student organisations working to encourage long term young refugees through publications, radio broadcasts, meetings, training and events, and to provide orphan students with such basics as soap and toothpaste. 10% to the Karen Women’s Organisation who support the most vulnerable in the camps; 10% to IDPs for food and medical supplies; 9% for support to landmine victims, and 8% to the individual promising students 6% to war orphans and 3% to Chin refugees in Burma in Delhi. All contributions to PSRB go straight to these projects, as soon as possible.

Special thanks to PSRB's faithful regular donors, among them the following churches: Holy Trinity, Brussels, All Saints Waterloo, St Paul's Tervuren, Tokyo Union Church, Femmes d'Europe, and SOS Birma, Koekelare, and many generous individuals and schools in Belgium, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom.