Many children are being forced to work under unduly harsh conditions in Mongton Township, opposite Chiangmai, according to a report emanating from the border.

Five of them fled across the border to Thailand last month only to be sent back by local authorities, according to Schools of Hope, a humanitarian organization that has been planning to set up a boarding school in the border village of Arunothai in Chiangmai's Chiangdao district.
 
The five, two girls and three boys, none of them seemingly over 14, were directed to the Shan monastery just outside the village by a kindly ethnic Chinese woman on arrival on June 21, "looking famished and worn out," according to the abbot Phra Virote.
 
After being treated to dinner, the children told the monks that they had been working in their neighbours' houses and farms since their parents died. All of them were ethnic Wa and two of them were orphans of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) fighters.
 
"We had to wake up early in the morning and cook," said one. "After that we had to go to work in the farm all day. Neighbours took pity on us and gave us shoes and clothes, but the families we were with didn't like it and punished us."
 
These children met at a village festival and became friends. They later decided to come to Thailand and "seek better lives," according to them.
 
"They were pleasantly surprised when we told them we would take care of them and send them to school to study," said a member of the Schools of Hope, "because previous experience had taught them that in order to live, they had to eat. And in order to eat, they had to work. They therefore happily accepted our offer."
 
However, the next morning, the village aw saw (militia) came in a truck and took them away to be sent back across the border. "The temple prepared a meal for them before they left," said the source, who wish to remain anonymous. "But the children were so distraught, they had lost their appetite."
 
The Schools of Hope believe there are many children like them across the border. During the joint Burma Army-UWSA offensive in 2005 against the Shan State Army, there were more than 700 casualties on the UWSA side, half of them killed in action, according to UWSA sources.

Also, unused to the new surroundings, an estimated 4,000 people died of malaria and other diseases, in the year 2000 alone, during the 1999-2001 forced relocations of Wa villagers from the Sino-Burma border in the north to the Thai-Burma border in the south, according to border-based Lahu National Development Organization (LNDO).