A for­mer res­i­dent of Ash­land, Ore­gon spends his days help­ing the refugees of the Thai­land–Myan­mar bor­der. Fred Stock­well is a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher and once took pho­tos of the refugee camp for a non-governmental orga­ni­za­tion. Stock­well was so touched by the people’s predica­ment that he left Amer­ica to spend time help­ing them.

From the Ash­land Daily Tid­ings, writer Chris Hon­oré tells Stockell’s story.

It was in 2007 that Stock­well sold every­thing, left Ash­land, and returned to Mae Sot, a city he had dis­cov­ered by chance while on a pho­to­graphic assign­ment for a non-governmental orga­ni­za­tion years ear­lier. And it was on that ini­tial trip that he dis­cov­ered the peo­ple of the Mae Sot dump. He vowed to return and do what he could.

But where and how to begin? He knew he was a stranger in a strange land, could not speak Thai or Burmese, and had only lim­ited resources. It was an impulse of gen­eros­ity, tem­pered by years of world travel.

“My first trips there (to the dump) were phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally over­whelm­ing,” Stock­well wrote in an e-mail. “The stench, poverty, and gen­eral liv­ing con­di­tions had more impact on me than any­thing I had pre­vi­ously experienced.

“I wanted to do some­thing, but didn’t know what to do. I was faced with the com­mon dilemma: Do I give a fish so they can eat for a day? Or do I teach them to fish, so they can live forever?”

Stock­well soon noticed that the chil­dren were walk­ing bare­footed among rats and snakes and shards of glass and metal, their feet cut, the wounds infected, open sores weeping.

“They know how to fish,” he real­ized. “They just don’t have the right equipment.”

And so he decided that what the chil­dren needed were shoes, more specif­i­cally rub­ber boots which he found at a local store. He began mak­ing fre­quent trips to the dump with as many boots as he could carry. He real­ized he needed help and found peo­ple will­ing to assist, some from as far away as Ashland.

Rub­ber boots evolved into health care. Not only was the dump haz­ardous — a petri dish of hepati­tis, cholera, typhoid fever, skin dis­eases and asthma — but the peo­ple there also suf­fered from malaria and dengue fever and intesti­nal par­a­sites, all caus­ing chronic ill­nesses and death. Malaria can be pre­vented by some­thing as sim­ple and effec­tive as mos­quito net­ting. Stock­well found the nets and as the weather turned cool, he located blan­kets as well.

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