A Childhood Behind Barbed Wire

The air in the Ubon Refugee Camp was always thick—thick with heat, with dust, with the smell of cooking fires and unwashed clothes. I grew up in that heaviness, in a place where the horizon was broken not by trees or rooftops, but by strands of rusted barbed wire.

Our home was a small bamboo hut with a dirt floor. The roof leaked in the rainy season, and in the dry season, fine red dust coated everything—our blankets, our hair, even the rice we ate. Privacy didn’t exist. The walls were thin, and life was lived in full view of neighbors, family, and strangers.

I never went to school. My classroom was the camp itself: learning how to carry water in heavy metal pails without spilling, how to cook rice over a wood fire, how to wait—always wait—for food rations, for aid workers, for news that might change our lives.

We waited years.

Some days, the waiting felt like suffocation. As a child, I didn’t have words for politics or displacement. All I knew was that my world was small and closed, and that the life I saw in my parents’ eyes—the life they had before—was gone.

There were no birthday parties, no books to read, no dreams of the future. My teenage years passed without dances or crushes or the possibility of choosing my own path. My ambition was survival. That was all.

And yet, even there, I learned certain truths.

I learned that humans adapt to anything—whether it’s freedom or confinement. I learned that a community can be both your safety net and your prison. I learned that hope is like a weed—it grows in the smallest cracks, even in hard, dry earth.

But I also learned what it means to be trapped.

When I see someone today—whether it’s a young man at a meditation center, or a student struggling under the weight of life—I recognize that look in their eyes. The look of someone who can’t see a way out. I know it because I wore it.

And perhaps that is why the Dhamma struck me so deeply years later—because it wasn’t just a practice for me. It was a door I had never known existed.