No Man's Land

Well, hello world.

It is raining.

Again.

Or should I say

Still.

Or maybe I should just express how I really feel

THE RAIN HASN’T STOPPED IN OVER SEVEN DAYS AND I WANT TO KICK SOMEONE IN THE BALLS.



Indeed, the constant pound of drops, dirt-caked shoes, muddy shower water, and not an ounce of sunlight has made this past week notable if not for its threat of flooding, than for its incessant dreariness.

Oh please lord, dry up the skies.

I have dealt with the DELUGE in the following ways: increasing my sarcasm tenfold, mercilessly killing all the insects that have migrated from the ground to the confines of my house (this pursuit delayed my bedtime by one hour last night), eating a lot of muesli left by a foreign visitor to the office, and trying out the Mon way of dealing with armpit hair, which consists of the painstaking process of plucking each individual friend from the region. I don’t know yet if I recommend it. I’m still recovering from the unnatural craning of my neck.

In other, less minutia-focused news, I have spent the time forced indoors reading up on Burma, making it my objective to try to wrap my mind around what is truly going on in this crazy place called the border. To complicate matters, Tuesday morning was filled with a journey unlike any other I’ve yet to experience, in which I ventured into a place that didn’t even seem to really exist… a no man’s land, if you will.

Now, when I was little, each summer would be marked by the nightly roundup of neighborhood kids in order to play a massive and disruptive game of capture the flag. The game would take place between the suburban lawns of my house and that of the Kryder’s (the family who lived directly across the street). The road in between our houses was no man’s land. I remember that place as one marked by a torrent of insults shouted from one team to another, a place of boredom involving the less stealthy team members (ahem me) forced to keep guard while skilled team members snuck off to recover the glorious flag, and often a place where, at times, quiet, illicit trades would occur between members of opposite. That was a play no man’s land.

This one was real.

In celebration of Mon Revolution Day, which was celebrated this year on the same day of the famous national uprising in Burma (August 8, 1988: a time during which the people saw hope and joined together to protest the Burmese military junta, eventually ending in the death of around 3,000 civilians, the exile of innumerable families and individuals, and the magnification of fear in uncountable ways) myself and 6 others woke up early Tuesday morning, piled into the back of a pick-up truck and headed off on a slippery concrete road. All of this occurred amid, you guessed it, a deluge.

When initially invited to the “Japanese Well” town, I was informed that it was neither Thailand nor Burma, but an area controlled by the New Mon State Party, the Mon ethnicity’s main political entity which reached a cease-fire agreement with the military junta in 1995. I heard various reports from Western friends stating, on the one hand, that it was completely safe to go, and on the other, that there would be Burmese military spies all over the place and they would notice both me and those individuals with which I was traveling. I must say, to hear a phrase like “there will be spies everywhere” initially made me chuckle in disbelief and curiosity at my friend’s seeming paranoia. As I let this thought seep in, however, I realized how, in all likelihood, this was true. I also realized how the weight of evaluating my safety felt like an utter infringement of rights, and how, unlike this one time I had to question my security, my students have to do this every day, whether they are inside Burma, or here in Sangkhla balancing on a feeble agreement between the Thai and Burmese authorities that permits them to be on Thai soil.

With a few nerves building in my stomach we drove. I watched the kilometer measurements on the side of the road decrease in number, a countdown to the Thai-Burma border: 14… the white markers looked like a mixture of gravestones and elaborate sandcastles… 11… we passed the usual sites: monks out for early morning food donations, dogs shagging roadside, cows being led by their owners, rice paddies, rubber tree forests, more… 4… before we reached zero we veered to the left, departing from the concrete and welcoming a road of mud, holes and water below our tires. We passed a few motorbikes and other trucks and I noticed our transition from the usual Thai-passing-on-the-left to passing other cars on the right (as they do in Burma). I realized that we had arrived. We were neither in Thailand nor Burma. We were in a wet jungle, a no man’s land.

After a few more minutes of a bumpy ride, and my realization why the roads to get from inside Burma to Sangkhla are often closed and necessitate embarking on a boat trip instead, we arrived at town.

There really wasn’t much to see. We had arrived in a small town with bamboo houses and thatched roofs. We wandered into the houses of friends, who were introduced as such-and-such a general in the New Mon State Party, and who all seemed to be related to my students and each other in some fashion. We drank Burmese tea which felt incredibly good on my drenched soul and ate over-sweetened jelly-cookies. I didn’t see any James Bond Burmese militia or anyone who I suspected to be such. I didn’t feel unsafe.

We wandered out in the rain for a procession in which Mon was spoken and a crowd of maybe 300 stood, umbrella clad, to watch the New Mon State Party soldiers discharge a series of bullets into the air. All the guns fired—a sign of good luck because normally each year at least one gun gets jammed. My students swelled with a pride I couldn’t really understand and took pictures as the ceremony ended, posing with their regular, unsmiling camera faces. I felt happy and strange and like a nomad in this place without an identity that belongs to a group without rights and then I realized the poverty of it all. I watched the soldiers, dressed in their official uniforms of green converse running shoes and dark green cotton sweatshirts. I saw my students, happy but plagued by worries of food expenses, hospital visit expenses, ways to provide financially for their families. I looked at the food stand where inexpensive rice balls stuffed with pork fat exuded delicious smells into the air. I saw the gray of the sky and the rain and broken umbrellas. I felt happy for the opportunity for my students to celebrate in peace and also heartbroken at the lack of human rights, at the disparity of the world, at the inequity of all things.

As we loaded back up into our truck, sitting in the open-air flatbed of the back, I felt so many things—anger, confusion, fear, happiness and pride—but mostly, really, I felt the rain.