After surviving 60 years of war, Mu Haw is close to giving up. "I'm too old to keep on running for my life," she says. "If no one helps us, I will die here."
"Here" is a refugee camp on a barren hilltop in western Thailand. From her hut, with its raised floor of split bamboo and thatch of leaves, she can look back over the Moei river to the thickly forested mountains of Burma's Karen state, where separatists are fighting the world's longestrunning insurgency.
For people like Mu Haw, the danger has ebbed and flowed over the years, but the stakes have been raised recently as Burma's military government has pushed hard to defeat the Karen before elections due later this year.
The local pro-government militia, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, or DKBA, has widened its offensive against Karen guerrillas and villagers, pushing thousands over the border with Thailand into camps such as Nong Bua, where they live unwanted and in misery.
Burma's ethnic minorities, who make up 30 per cent of the country's 58m people, have never been comfortable with the rule of the ethnic Burman majority. Karen guerrillas have been battling for a separate homeland since 1949, the year Mu Haw was born. Some of her earliest memories are of watching her family's cows in their fields while keeping an eye on the rim of the jungle in case the army attacked.
The human cost of the war has been horrific. There are no accurate estimates of how many have died, but there are 103,000 UN-recognised Burmese refugees in Thailand, and aid groups say hundreds of thousands more are not registered, including Mu Haw and the other residents of the Nong Bua camp.
By some estimates there are 2m Burmese in Thailand, some driven out of Burma by the constant fighting, others by the catastrophic economic mismanagement of the ruling generals.
For Mu Haw, this has meant a life of constant upheaval. She lists the villages she has been forced to leave, sometimes because they were caught in the middle of the fighting but often because militias used their inhabitants as porters or forced labour.
For years, the Thai authorities allowed the Karen to operate across the border with little interference, using them as a foil against the erratic generals who govern Burma, but there are signs that Thailand's strategic interests are shifting. "They have been moving away from their buffer policy and they tend to crack down more on the Karen," said one European diplomat.
The Thai government says it has maintained a consistent policy of supporting reconciliation between the Burmese government and the country's ethnicminority groups and that this has not changed.
The Burmese government and its militia proxies have become more active as the country prepares for the elections. Even if the ballot is conducted freely, it is likely to yield only limited democratic dividends - a constitution passed by the generals two years ago guarantees the military 25 per cent of the seats in parliament.
But it has given new impetus to the Burmese authorities to try to extend their control over the country's fractious borderlands.
The 550 or so residents of Nong Bua fled the village of Ler Ber Her, just across the river that forms the border, last June after government forces attacked, but the Thai authorities want them to go back. An attempt to repatriate the refugees last month was stopped after an international outcry. The Thai authorities said the Karen were moving back of their own volition, but it is clear that the residents of Nong Bua have no desire to return.
"There are landmines there, and we are afraid of the DKBA," says Kyep Sie, a maths teacher. A woman who was eight months pregnant returned to the village of her own volition in January and immediately had part of her foot blown off by a landmine.
But camp residents say the Thai authorities are keeping up the pressure. "They tell us 'you can't stay here, you have to go back'," says Naw Paw Lay, a 40-year-old mother of eight.
She earns Bt10 ($0.31, €0.22, £0.20) to Bt15 a week selling betel nuts in the camp, but it is tightly guarded and its residents are not allowed to leave to work in the surrounding villages. The UN refugee agency has restricted access, and even the Thai government's Human Rights Commission has been forced to carry out interviews in the presence of soldiers.
Mu Haw says there were originally 225 families at Nong Bua, but about half have melted away into the surrounding countryside because of the pressure and uncertainty. "All our life is fear," she says.