burmese days

Random fires spotted the mountainous landscape, natural seasonal occurrences resulting from the dry summer heat. I could see the smoke wafting through the bamboo forests as colorfully dressed tribe people carrying babies on their backs & raw materials in their arms made their way up & down the hills from the highway & disappeared into the thickness. It was a 5-hour westward drive to Mae Sot, made longer by the frequent Thai government/border police checkpoints, inspecting all cars for drugs & refugees.

Mae Sot is a town that straddles the Thailand-Burma border, resulting in a cultural collision of Thai, Burmese, foreign NGO peoples, and various hill tribe ethnic minorities such as Karen, Shan & Kachin. It hosts the largest refugee camp in all of Thailand, Mae La, home to 40,000 Burmese refugees.

I wasn’t sure what to expect going into the camp. I had a movie-type vision of everyone living in tents, rampant disease & abuse & an air of desperation. I didn’t know how to mentally prepare (as usual).

There were children everywhere running free & laughing. That was my first clue that this was a real community of families & not necessarily the hopeless prison ground I thought it might be. The few I was lucky enough to interact with were all smiles & manners & curiosity, & some even spoke English. As we walked past rows of bamboo huts, an occasional high-pitched “hello!” would ring out from a corner, obviously for the visiting foreigners’ benefit. And then shortly afterwards, a “bye-bye!” So many children. I can’t imagine what their parents must’ve been through to get them there, but to the naked eye, there aren’t any scars, for which I’m so glad.

The U.S. takes in the most refugees from this camp each year. In the beginning they took all at once, but every year the camp would grow & grow & grow, possibly because more Burmese flooded the camps hoping to be exiled to the U.S. as well. There are “America Training” sessions & bulletin boards posted for the refugees to familiarize themselves with American customs & such before they depart.

Funny, some of the pictures were of obese people eating McDonalds. No joke. Oh the shame. And did you know that the majority of Burmese refugees end up in Missouri??? Oh the shame! (I kid I kid) But seriously, weird.

This is BiBi, our Mae La host for the day. He works with educational systems & curricula for the camp. He is the only reason we were able to get into the camp, as I don’t think they normally allow tourists. He is awesome.

More disheartening was the Burmese migrant clinic, Mae Tao. It’s a wonderful health service & training center specifically designed to provide quality care to displaced Burmese migrants & ethnic peoples along the border. It was established by Dr. Cynthia Maung, who has won a host of awards for her work there, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (go Pilipinas!). They do wonderful caring work for a population that desperately needs it, but it was difficult & emotional to witness the cases they deal with, & what few resources they have to work with. They didn’t have a proper blood pressure machine to use when one of my housemates donated blood. They ran out of beds for surgery patients. They also ran out of rooms, so patients were strewn about on mats in what used to be a conference room. There is no separation for patients with airborne contagious illnesses, making spreading possible. And this really broke my heart.

It’s times like this that make me feel the smallest and most helpless. I gave my card to the administrator if they could ever use me (after all, I do work in healthcare), a tiny gesture but I just couldn’t walk away doing nothing at all. For more information about the clinic, check out the links at the end of this post.

Although this health poster there made me laugh out loud. I’m not quite sure what message they are trying to send… any guesses?

Our beautiful host while we were in Mae Sot was Moon, who opened her modest home to 6 strangers (my housemates & I), plus our driver & our mutual friend Wad, who was her classmate in university. She speaks several languages (English, Thai, Burmese, Karen & a few other hill tribe dialects). Amazing woman she is, & she’s only 25!

She moved to Mae Sot to establish the Karen Student Leadership Network, which trains young adults from refugee camps in leadership skills, which they can then impart to others within the camps. Once every few months they hold a 3-day meeting in her office, & for that she has to first go collect the 30 students from 5 different refugee camps—a grueling process that involves much paperwork including official permission from the Thai government & referral letters from NGOs. Two of the students even came from across the Burmese border (illegally?), risking the lives to come to the meetings. Day 1 of the meetings is usually spent getting them basic things like toothbrushes that they may have left behind in their rush to get out of the camps. Our visit happened to coincide with one of these meetings. We were ushered into the office for what I thought was a casual viewing (as usual), but there were 8 chairs prepared for us at the front of the room, while the group of about 30 young adults sat of the floor facing up at us with wide eyes & snapping pictures. Like… huh?? I thought they were so much more interesting than we were & snapped pictures back. Odd sight we must have been, snapping each other.

We exchanged questions & answers, with Moon translating back & forth between 4 different languages. We heard stories of how they got to that meeting that night, got into the camps in the first place, got arrested on several occasions—all these crazy harrowing stories told with a smile. They had equal interest in the work we all did. I had to field so many questions about sex workers, which showed where their concerns really lie. Many migrants fleeing into Thailand, having no official identification, no useful training, & no local language skills, end up turning to sex work for their most viable income. We asked them what made them want to be at that meeting that night, some risking their own lives to be there, & they all answered it was worth it, because they would be able to help their communities empower themselves & better their lives. I felt humbled. Really really really humbled.

Bought a bunch of stuff at Borderline the next day, “A Creative Space for Expression in Exile.” It boasts handmade products from women’s groups in Thailand & Burma & in doing so, enables them to have access to fair trade income generation opportunities. 80% of proceeds go towards various related causes. Shopping for a good cause! I loved it.

Support support support.

• Mae Tao Clinic
• Borderline Collective
  
• Free Burma Coalition Homepage, an umbrella group of organizations around the world working for freedom and democracy in Burma.
• Free Burma Home , a web site devoted to disseminating information on Burma.
• FreeBurma.org, a comprehensive set of links to Free Burma resources.
• Open Society Institute's Burma Project, dedicated to increasing international awareness of conditions in Burma and to helping the country make the transition from a closed to an open society.
• A Land of War, a Journey of the Heart, an article by Seattle Times writer Paula Bock about Dr. Cynthia and two little girls from Chogali village. Photographs by Tom Reese and website production by Betsy Aoki of the Seattle Times.
• The U.S. Committee for Refugees Burma Report, an excellent overview of the current health and political situation on the Thai-Burma border.