Thompson Citizen: Nurse’s journey to Thompson began in a refugee camp in Thailand

As the Thompson Citizen reports on nursing student Moolaw Eh:

Every person has a story to tell, everyone around you. Not the stories of celebrities or of the rich and famous, but stories of your neighbours, your coworkers and even your friends.  Stories of the lives they’ve led, the challenges they’ve faced and sometimes the mistakes they’ve made. 

One such example of a so called “ordinary” person with an extraordinary story is a young woman named Moolaw Eh who lives here in Thompson.  

Moolaw is a licensed practical nurse (LPN), a student (currently working towards her bachelor of nursing degree) and, most importantly, a mother to her five-year-old daughter Hyacinth.   

Moolaw was born in a refugee camp in northern Thailand in 1990 to Karen parents. (Karen is an ethnic minority in what was formerly Burma, now known as Myanmar.) She spent her entire childhood and most of her teenage years in different refugee camps along the Myanmar/Thailand border. 

When Moolaw was born there wasn’t the usual fanfare of bringing baby home from the hospital, or a baby shower; there wasn’t actually a crib for baby Moolaw to sleep in. Moolaw’s family “home” was pretty much the same as everyone else’s in the refugee camp. A bamboo hut, mats for beds on a bamboo floor. No bedrooms, no beds. No running water and no electricity.  Baby Moolaw slept on a plastic mat on the floor, protected from mosquitoes (and malaria) by the highly coveted mosquito net. She was one of the lucky ones. Food for the kids and adults were rations supplied by one of the humanitarian groups and consisted of beans, rice, fish paste and oil. 

Her family, along with hundreds of thousands of others, were displaced and forced to move into these refugee camps for safety. What they were fleeing from was and still is, one of the longest running civil wars in history.

Read the full Thompson Citizen story online.