MEDIA RELEASE

Media Alert
June 19, 2009
For Immediate Release / Coverage Request

Time: First showing: 11:30, Second showing: 12:30
Venue: Benson High School 5120 Maple Street
Sponsored by: Lutheran Family Services and the BeCause Foundation

Lutheran Family Services and BeCause Foundation to Highlight Refugees from Burma at Omaha World Refugee Day Event June 20, 2009

More than 46,000 refugees from Burma (Myanmar) have been resettled to the United States since 2003, a number of them to Omaha. Members of our community have shown great compassion by helping to receive and integrate refugees in their new homes.

A new 30 minute documentary film, Crossing Midnight, offers insights into the difficult conditions these refugees endured in their country and then in camps along the Thailand-Burma border.

Produced by the BeCause Foundation, an organization founded to spotlight the work of social innovators around the world, Crossing Midnight depicts the health crisis in eastern Burma. It features the work of the Mae Tao Clinic, founded by Dr. Cynthia, an ethnic Karen doctor who was forced to flee Burma in 1988. She is well-known among all Karen people.

"When I learned of the efforts of those on the Border helping their own in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, I knew this was a story that had to be told - and now, that the people of Burma are part of the fastest growing refugee population in the U.S., this story is more relevant than ever" -Kim Snyder, filmmaker

Burma's regime spends about 30-50 percent of its annual budget on the military, yet only 2.2 percent is spent on health, making Burma's health system the second worst in the world, next to Sierra Leone.

Dr. Cynthia, along with her community of fellow refugees, created a health center on the Thailand-Burma border serving hundreds of people each day. Out of the clinic emerged the Backpack Health Worker Team, medics from Burma who bundle as many medicines as they can carry and walk through Eastern Burma providing life saving medicines and treatment to everyone they can reach.

Background:
Burma (Myanmar's) military regime brutally suppresses dissent. Because of their efforts for respect and a measure of ethnic autonomy within their country, hundreds of thousands of Karen, Chin, Karenni and other ethnic people have been forcibly displaced within Burma and to neighboring countries.

More than 100,000 refugees are confined to camps along the Thailand-Burma border, unable to seek work opportunities, education or health services in the country at large. They have no hope of returning to conflict-torn Burma anytime soon. Some have been in the camps for 25 years. Many were born in the camps. It is out of this context that many refugees from Burma are resettled to the United States.

For more information about Crossing Midnight, contact Kristen Beifus, Crossing Midnight Outreach Coordinator, BeCause Foundation, 206.437.5599, or Kristen@becauseproductions.net.