A PRAYER FOR LAND Lost in the tempests out on the open seas our small boats drift we seek for land during endless days and endless nights we are the foam floating on the vast ocean we are the dust wandering in endless space our cries are lost in the howling wind without food, without water, our children lie exhausted until they cry no more we thirst for land but are turned back from every shore our distress signals rise and rise again but the passing ships do not stop how many boats have perished how many families lie beneath the waves Lord Jesus, do you hear the prayer of our flesh? Lord Buddha, do you hear our voice? O fellow humans, do you hear our voice from the abyss of death? o solid shore we long for you! We pray for Mankind to be present today! We pray for Land to stretch its arms to us! We pray that Hope be given us TODAY, from any Land! Thuyền Nhân Events resulting from the Vietnam War led many people in Cambodia, Laos, and especially Vietnam to become refugees in the late 1970s and 1980s, after the fall of Saigon. In Vietnam, the new communist government sent many people who supported the old government in the South to "re-education camps", and others to "new economic zones." An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials. According to published academic studies in the United States and Europe, 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps. Thousands were abused or tortured. These factors, coupled with poverty, caused hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee the country. In 1979, Vietnam was at war (Sino-Vietnamese War) with the People's Republic of China (PRC). Many ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, who felt that the government's policies directly targeted them, also became "boat people." On the open seas, the boat people had to confront forces of nature, and elude pirates. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge regime murdered millions of people in the "Killing Fields" massacres. Many people attempted to escape. Escape route There were many different ways people used to leave the country. Most were secret; some involved the bribing of officials. Some people bought places in large boats that held 400 passengers. Others organized smaller groups. Many families were split up during this period because they could only afford to send off one or a few members of the family. One method saw would-be middle-class refugees from Saigon, armed with forged identity documents, travel 1,100 km to Danang by road. On arrival, they would take refuge for up to two days in safe houses while waiting for fishing junks and trawlers to take small groups into international waters.[citation needed] Planning for such a trip took many months, even years. Although these attempts often depleted resources, people often had several false starts before they managed to escape. The boats, most not intended for navigating open waters, would typically head for busy international shipping lanes some 240 km to the east. The lucky ones would succeed in being rescued by freighters and taken to Hong Kong, some 2,200 km away. Others landed on the shores of Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. The unlucky ones would face a two-week long or even 6-month perilous journey in rickety craft; stopping every now and again in Chinese shores, suffering hunger and thirst. Refugee camps The plight of the boat people became an international humanitarian crisis. There were untold miseries, rapes and murders on the South China Sea committed by Thai pirates who preyed on the refugees who had sold all their possessions and carried gold with them on the trips. The UNHCR, under the auspices of the United Nations, set up refugee camps in neighbouring countries to process the "boat people". They received the 1981 Nobel Peace Prize for this. Camps were set up in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. According to stories told by the Vietnamese refugees, the conditions at the camps were poor. Very little of the aid money donated primarily by the United States actually got to the refugees. Refugees at Thai camps were maltreated and many were brutally bullied by the Thai guards. Some 863 Vietnamese were known to be raped, 763 people physically attacked and killed, and 489 people abducted, some 77% of refugee boats leaving in 1981 were attacked by Thais. Most of the refugees came from the former South Vietnam. However, soon after the first wave between 1975-1978, North Vietnamese from seaside cities such as Haiphong started to escape and land in Hong Kong. Among them were genuine ethnically Chinese Vietnamese refugees who escaped from Vietnam and headed to China and Hong Kong. One forgotten group of Vietnamese boat people were those who escaped by land across the Cambodian and Thailand border. They did not travel by boat, but they ended up at the same camps just like those who braved the seas. The Orderly Departure Progra