Thai-Burma Border Region- Clear Path International is expanding its assistance to landmine accident survivors on the Thai-Burma border. This year and next, Clear Path International has budgeted more than $55,000 for its survivor assistance work at three locations along the border between the two Southeast Asian countries. The work will result in physical mobility for hundreds of displaced and disadvantaged landmine survivors in the area.

Since the mid 1990s, fighting has intensified between troops from the central government in the Burmese capital Rangoon and secessionist rebels in several ethnic states on the Thai border, sending more than 2 million refugees into Thailand. Several thousand have lost limbs to landmine explosions, but many more victims remain in parts of Burma where health services are nearly nonexistent.

Clear Path’s largest border project, at the Mae Tao clinic in Mae Sot about 360 miles northwest of Bangkok, is designed to introduce technology that makes it easier for ethnic Karen mine survivors inside Burma to get more durable and more affordable prosthetics.

The technology project at the Mae Tao clinic is conducted in partnership with the Seattle nonprofit Prosthetics Research Study and has a $40,000 budget. Fundraising is now also underway for the second phase, which will introduce the technology to three prosthetics shops on the border and provide 200 artificial below-the-knee limbs for mine amputees.

Clear Path International is also funding the creation of a new prosthetics workshop for Shan refugees from Burma in the Chiang Dao region north of Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-largest city. That project, a partnership with the Shan Health Committee, has a first-year budget of $11,000.

Finally, Clear Path is considering a request from the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People for the $4,000 prosthetics materials budget at a workshop just inside Burma near Papun, located roughly halfway between the other two project locations.

Funding for the projects comes from the Rotary Club of Bainbridge Island, Rotary District 5020, Susila Dharma Britain, Johnson & Widdifield Charitable Trust and many individual contributions.

Since its founding nearly three years ago, Clear Path International has assisted more than 800 mine survivors in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, cleared unexploded ordnance from 110 acres of land and sent medical equipment to more than a dozen hospitals in five mine-affected countries.