"These children work from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. Afterward, they gather to gamble with their earnings from the day"
"By the most common count, there are 15 million stateless people in the world, but by its nature, this is a number nobody can know for certain.
The stateless include some 200,000 Urdu-speaking Bihari in scores of refugee settlements in Bangladesh. Also, there are members of the Rohingya, an oppressed Muslim ethnic minority from western Myanmar. More than 100,000 have fled in recent decades to Bangladesh, where they live in camps or on the streets.
They also include tens of thousands of Filipino and Indonesian children in the Malaysian state of Sabah, victims of laws that, in effect, deny them birth certificates.
In Thailand, the government has embarked on an unusual and ambitious program to determine the citizenship rights of its stateless people, checking documents and interviewing witnesses and local elders."
The only documentation Boon Phonma, 43, could offer was a birth date she said was scribbled on a palm leaf by her mother. She said she was turned away by officials.
She then presented officials with the results of a DNA test that she said was accepted as proof of her right to Thai citizenship. “I found out I have a whole big family here, 335 people,” she said. “I am a Thai confirmed, a Thai since birth.”
-Stateless, With Borders All Around
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