November 14 - Lady

The Lady is free.
Her latest term of house arrest has come to an end.
This is good news, but unfortunately I don't think it's that much to get excited about.
The election is already over, the bad guys won, and in any event her party--which had won in the last election which was held 20 years ago but was never given power--had chosen to sit this election out because it (correctly) claimed that the election would be unfair and illegitimate.
Sorry if I'm being vague.
The election I'm referring to took place in Burma (also known as Myanmar), and the Lady is Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burma's main opposition party, the National League for Democracy.
Aung San Suu Kyi has spent most the past 20 years under house arrest, having been placed there by the military junta that controls Burma--the same junta that controlled every aspect of the recent sham election that it predictably won.
But this is all stuff you can find out anywhere, so I won't go into details now.
Instead I'll just say that I'm glad the world's eyes are on Burma now, and I hope they stay that way for a long time, but I know they won't.
I'll also say that I'm glad that Aung San Suu Kyi exists and that she is free. She is the face of Burmese resistance, a living icon, and a symbol of hope, and her freedom is cause for celebration. But she's not the only story in Burma.
Tens of thousands of Burmese live in refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Burma. Hundreds of thousands more live in Thailand as illegal immigrants. And hundreds of thousands more are internally displaced persons living in Burma.
This situation has been going on for decades, as has the civil war that is central to this humanitarian crisis.
I don't think it is a situation that is likely to change any time soon, even though the Lady--as her vast number of supporters call her--is free.
However, it is a situation that many are working to improve. And I would like to give one such organization a plug.
They're called Room to Grow, and their mission is to support children, many of them orphans, who live in school dormitories in the refugee camps on the Thai/Burmese borders. And when I say dormitories, I'm talking very rustic quarters: bamboo floors, thatched roofs, and extremely limited resources.
Room to Grow helps provide the children who live in these dormitories with blankets, food, fuel, mosquito nets, and other necessary items that they wouldn't otherwise get.
I have worked with the women who founded Room to Grow, and I can assure you that the work they do is good and worthwhile. A little goes a long way, and any donations you can give them will be put to very good use.
For more information, please visit http://www.roomtogrowfoundation.org/
Thank you for reading this. And may there be peace in Burma in our lifetime.