Today is World Refugee Day, a day to pay tribute to the courage and resilience of people forced to flee their homes because of war and persecution.
According to global figures just released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 45.2 million people were in situations of displacement by the end of 2012. This includes 15.4 million refugees, 937,000 asylum seekers and 28.8 million people forced to flee within the borders of their own countries. About 55% of all refugees come from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Sudan and 46% of refugees are children younger than 18.
Every 4.1 seconds, someone new is displaced from his or her home. That's six new refugees or internally displaced people since the time you started reading this.
These staggering numbers reflect individual suffering on a huge scale. And it's happening right in our backyard. A year ago, inter-communal violence erupted in Myanmar's Rakhine state. Homes were burnt and many families fled with only the clothes on their backs. Many sought refuge in local villages, in tents and makeshift shelters.
Today, as many as 140,000 people remain displaced in Rakhine state. Many are now living in temporary bamboo shelters built by the Myanmar government, UNHCR and other aid agencies. But it's not enough to have a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. When I visited recently, parents were worrying about basic livelihoods and the fact that their children have missed a year of school. No one knew when they could go home to rebuild from the ashes.
Amid this uncertainty, thousands of people are believed to have fled Rakhine state on rickety smugglers' boats to seek safety and stability in countries in the region. An estimated 2,000 Rohingya are currently in Thailand, having been granted an initial six months of temporary protection by the government here, which the UNHCR is hopeful will be extended soon.
In the past three decades, Thailand has hosted more than 1 million refugees from the region, including those fleeing conflicts in Indochina and Myanmar. In western Thailand's nine border camps, more than 80,000 Myanmar refugees have been resettled to other countries since 2005, leaving an estimated 128,000 refugees in the camps.
Over the years, the people here have shown overwhelming hospitality, most recently providing food and donations to victims of a fire in Ban Mae Surin camp, and to the Rohingya arrivals in the South. I get calls from people who visit the women and children in the shelters regularly while their husbands and brothers are held in immigration detention centres. For some of the Rohingya, the strain of being separated from their loved ones is starting to show.
"One family torn apart by war is too many" is the slogan for this year's World Refugee Day campaign. It seeks to show the impact of conflicts on families, the difficult choices they have to make to flee and survive. When families are forced to flee they may have only a minute to gather what they need to escape the violence.
American photojournalist Brian Sokol has captured this split-second decision in a stark and heart-breaking photo series called "The Most Important Thing". He asked refugees from Sudan and Syria to show him the most prized possession they brought into exile. The treasures are surprising _ pots, pets, photos, keys, musical instruments and a wheelchair.
In one photo essay, May, an eight-year-old Syrian refugee in Iraq's Domiz camp, modelled the bangles she managed to salvage before fleeing, but mourned the prized doll she left behind. Thousands of kilometres away in Bangkok, a five-year-old British girl named Mimi saw the photo online and decided to dig into her piggy bank to buy a doll for May. The first obstacle was choosing the right doll. At the store, Mimi's mother almost was horrified at the thought of sending a scantily-clad Barbie to the Middle East. Eventually they found a culturally appropriate doll. The second obstacle was getting it to May. They contacted the UNHCR and we managed to hand deliver it from Bangkok to Geneva to Jordan to Iraq.
When May finally received the doll last week, she was surprised and delighted. She's named the doll Mimi after her benefactor, and hopes that one day they can play together. The girls are living proof that with a little help, small acts of kindness can make a big difference.
The scale of global displacement may seem daunting, but if one doll can break barriers and connect people across borders, there is hope for us yet.
Vivian Tan is the Bangkok-based senior regional communications officer for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. To find out how you can help, visit UNHCR's website in Thailand at https://www.unhcr.or.th/