By the standards of her village in Burma’s swampy Irrawaddy Delta, Than Shin was a prosperous woman. She had 20 acres of farmland on which her family grew rice.
But her fortunes changed in 2000 when the military government informed her it was taking possession of her land. Over the next year, Than Shin watched as the fields that for decades had provided her family with a living were cleared to make way for fish farms.
Today, Than Shin and her family live in a thatched shack along the main road leading to Burma’s commercial capital Yangon. Her 67-year-old husband goes door to door on his bicycle selling soybeans. “We depended on that land our whole lives. When they grabbed it, we had nothing, no income. We had to eat curry made from leaves,” she told Reuters. (Courtesy of irrawaddy.com)
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