Other people's stories: The plight of a stateless British Overseas Citizen

Pictures taken on the 13th of June, with a Canon EOS 10D

ေပ်ာ္စရာ မပါပါဘူး..
မေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထားပဲနဲ႔ တစိမ္းတစ္ေယာက္ရဲ႕ ဘဝကုိ အေသးစိပ္နီးပါးျမင္ခြင့္လုိက္ရတဲ့ အေတြ႔အႀကဳံက
အေတြးေတြတသီႀကီး ေပၚလာေစလုိ႔ ခ်ေရးျဖစ္လုိက္တာ

Other people's stories ..
They are just like mine
But for one thing, I did what they plan
Other people's stories by Kari Rueslatten

I'd never heard of british overseas citizens
but Thiha got me interested when he asked me if I wanted to tag along
for a project that he was working on
I'd been in London for a conference and didn't think i'd need my camera
so when he asked, I instantly regretted that i didn't have it with me

But as it turned out, he needed to video the conversation
so I turned assistant, using his camera
It's a lot heavier than mine.. and quite a lot more professional looking
-_-

The "journalist", while we were waiting for the interviewee at Victoria

He got interested in this "issue" when he attended a rally in London
This man that he was meeting was a contact he got through an interview with someone else in a similar plight

Since Thiha is still editing the interview,
I don't think it's proper to use a full on photo of the man
But this was something i took while he was being interviewed

For an hour, he talked about how an agent convinced him to take up BOC
how, he is now stateless, because he had to give up his malaysian citizenship
and he is nowhere near getting a British citizenship
how solicitors milk money from people like him
how he has almost no rights in this country
how he is surviving on a meagre income through interpreting for the sick
how.. he wishes he could go home to see his 80-something mother-in-law whom he is very close to

What stuck in my head was when this man sobbed:
"Home is 8 hours away. But I can't go home."

It hit me hard
and made me tear in public
It also reminded me of many other pple from Burma
who might be missing home just as badly, unable to see their loved ones

ေယာက္်ားရင့္မာႀကီးတစ္ေယာက္က ကုိယ့္ေရွ႔မ်က္ရည္က်ေနတာကုိ လုိက္မက်ပဲ မေနနုိင္ဘူး
ဓာတ္ပုံလဲ ဆက္မရုိက္ေတာ့ပဲ မ်က္နွာလႊဲေနမိတယ္ .. အရမ္း အားနာလုိ႔

But Thiha chided me and pointed out that that was the point
He was right of course
Emotions are what drives a documentary, and that would be what helps these people
Publicity might be a push factor which might resolve the problem
or at the very least, fewer people will fall into the same trap

at the end of the 2 hours, I was feeling rather exhausted
သူမ်ားအပူကုိ ဝင္မခံစားမိေအာင္ မေနတတ္ေသးဘူး
အေရထူၿပီး ကုိယ္ခ်င္းမစာတတ္တဲ့လူတစ္ေယာက္ ျဖစ္မွာလဲ အျဖစ္မခံနုိင္ဘူး

I'd always been curious about other people's stories
and i know I won't forget this one for a long time