Saw Naing Lin | Fires

Saw Naing Lin was born in 1977 in a mixed Buddhist/Christian household in Karenni State, an ethnic-minority region in Burma/Myanmar. 

In Burma the central government has been at war with the ethnic periphery since 1962. In the early 2000s he and his family fled to a UN refugee camp in Thailand. When he heard that other family members were ready to flee, he walked back around army units and over landmined paths to his home village and carried a child relative for three weeks on his shoulders back to Thailand.

In 2010 he was resettled to the United States, and in 2011 moved to Cedar Rapids, where he now lives with his family.

Since 2016 he has been a citizen of the United States, the first country to grant him citizenship.